News18 in Ukraine | Most Kyivans Too Exhausted to be Afraid of the ‘Russian Roulette’

There comes a point when people become too exhausted to be afraid. Ukraine appears to have hit that point a few months into the Russian invasion. A year is a very long time now to have remained in panic, or to plunge into panic every time an air raid alert sounds. Or even to step into a shelter.

And so every time the siren goes off, most people continue to do more or less what they were doing before. More or less, but not exactly. That is alert enough to remind yourself of the nearest air raid shelter and be prepared to get into it when you hear a blast. That is the real alarm, when a bomb actually falls.

For the first it falls on, who did not take shelter earlier, it’s what the survivors now calmly call fate. Or to use an expression one would hesitate to in Ukraine today, a game of Russian roulette.

Deceptive

But the calm on the surface, in street behaviour, is deceptive. Stop a little to talk to people and the worry surfaces usually quite rapidly. Not least because most people know someone who is in the armed forces. Ukraine has conscription in place, and if some young male is not already deployed, he soon may be. Families know that, they know the dangers that go with that.

Yulia stops for a quick word by a metro station. “My husband is in the army, he is in the east. I pray day and night to keep him safe for him, for me, and for our little girl.”

Dealing with the little one was hardest, she says, on October 10 last year when missiles rained down on Kyiv. “How do you explain anything to children? This is such a struggle.”

At the home of a university professor, an eight-year-old points to his hideout – it’s the laundry attached to the house. “It’s not good enough, it could be better,” he says. “Because it’s not underground, it’s not a bunker.”

He points to a vent in the ceiling. “I’m afraid of that,” he says. “If there is a nuclear attack, the radiation will come in from there.”

Brave

The men put up a brave front. “There is no problem at all,” says a young bank manager. “Look how we beat away the Russians the last time. And we were not even well-prepared then. Now we are better trained, we have better weapons. We will beat the Russians back, and we will retake all our territory. It’s simple.”

But clearly, it’s not that simple. A meeting at a battalion centre was cancelled only a little ahead of time. “We are sorry, but there is a situation there that we are handling,” said the spokesperson for the commander. The meeting was not rescheduled. The battalion commander was not expecting to be free for a meeting such as this for several days.

Given the spring offensive that is underway already, it could be many, many days before military commanders are free to meet as in near normal times. Gung-ho words come easy. Fighting and surviving is another matter, winning, yet another.

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