On the Train to Kyiv
Returning to Ukraine as the war reaches an inflection point
The last time I was in Kyiv, the war felt very far away.
It was early 2018 and I was here to try and understand the particularities of Russia’s disinformation campaign from those who had been most frequently subjected to it.
Fighting still raged in the Donbas, with promises of negotiated ceasefires having been long since abandoned. More than 10,000 had already been killed in the region, and more would die soon. It would be another year before President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election — promising an ambitious, doomed promise to find a lasting peace.
There were memorials, plaques, and tributes to the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who had lost their lives defending Ukraine in the east. There was a famous pizza joint, Veterano Pizza, staffed by those who had fought and returned. There were warnings that the fighting would not be contained to the east.
But no one knew what to do with this information. Ukraine was fighting a protracted war that it wouldn’t abandon but which it couldn’t win — at least not without risking a more severe response from its belligerent neighbor. All Ukraine could do is prepare, and hope to avoid disaster.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we go live from Kyiv at a focal moment for this war.
All is not lost. Morale remains high. But if Ukraine’s allies continue bickering, delaying, and equivocating, dark times may be on the horizon: And closer than we think.
I write this dispatch, sitting on the upper bunk of my — honestly, quite cozy — four-person berth, aboard the 6:20am Ukrainian Railways train from Lviv to Kyiv.
I landed in Warsaw yesterday afternoon, after a quick reporting trip to Vilnius. I stepped out of the Chopin Airport, hit with a miserable sleet, and into my awaiting chariot. Its driver, an affable Ukrainian, spoke next to no English — and I, embarrassingly, spoke next to no Ukrainian. (I later sat in my hotel, muttering to myself niceties had forgotten since my last trip: Dobryi den; pryvit; d’akuju) As such, our small talk was particularly tiny.
As we neared the Ukrainian border, protest signs in Polish faced the winding rural highway. The farmers are angry, I noted.
My driver nodded: Very angry.
About twenty minutes from the border, I understood just how angry. When I first saw the blue police lights in the distance, behind a line of parked vehicles, I assumed there had been an accident. I clutched the door as my driver drifted into the left lane without breaking speed. As we flew past the line of semi-trailer trucks, I spied yellow safety vests hanging from the driver’s side doors and mens’ faces illuminated by screens in their berth — these guys had been waiting awhile, and would be waiting awhile more.
We passed dozens of these trucks, tightly lined up along the highway. After a short break, the line began again. A break, another line. I gave up on trying to count the trucks pretty quickly.
“17 kilometres,” my driver told me. Shit, I replied. He nodded: “One truck every hour. Wait time, six, seven days.”
The backup, which has been imposed sporadically since last year, is being led by a group of irate Polish farmers. It is estimated that there are more than a thousand trucks sitting, waiting to enter Ukraine.
Polish farmers have been unhappy about this arrange since the start of the war, when the European Union waived tariffs on Ukrainian grain imports. The measures were necessary, as Russia’s naval blockade in the south frustrated Ukraine’s ability to move grain by sea. Even as Ukraine has managed to resume its naval exports, reducing how much goes through Poland, farmers have grown more disgruntled. Last month, they went so far as to dump grain from Ukrainian rail cars in protest.
Governments in the region have proved incapable of untangling the problem. They are only just now, just this week, taking the obvious move and slapping tariffs on Russian and Belarussian grain imports or banning them outright — which may make some progress in placating the farmers.
These queues, though, have had little impact on passenger travel, at least thus far. Our passports were quickly stamped at the Polish border control, and we rolled on to the Ukrainian checkpoint. There, we joined mostly small busses, each packed with passengers and luggage — probably, I surmised, a sign of the steady repatriation which has occurred in Ukraine over the past year. As of early last year, some 4.6 million Ukrainian refugees had returned from abroad, and there’s good reason to think that number has grown since.
We sat and waited for the border guards to complete their shift change and let us through. I scrolled through my phone and came across a bit of late breaking news, which I held up for my driver: “A big surprise,” I grinned. Vladimir Putin had, per Moscow’s count, been re-elected with 87% of the vote. “Wow,” he said, wryly.
An hour later, we continued towards Lviv.
This area grew to be a critical bridge between Ukraine and the West. Not far away was the Yavoriv base where 180 members of the Canadian Forces spent years training their Ukrainian counterparts to defend their homeland. It was that same base where, after the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the official NATO-approved soldiers left and were replaced with contingents of unofficial Western volunteers. These Canadians, Americans, Brits, and Europeans stepped up to put their lives on the line for their Ukrainian brothers. That’s why Russia unleashed a barrage of missiles on the Yavoriv base, almost exactly two years before I drove through the area, killing 35 Ukrainian soldiers and wounding more than a hundred others.
Today, a few bored-looking Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel stand behind low walls of sand bags on the highway and brandish assault rifles.
One thing I’ve heard described from many Ukrainians and fellow journalists is the odd tension between being tense and relaxed, nervous and optimistic, exhausted and on-edge, anxious and confident. I projected all of those emotions onto the first person I spoke to inside the country: A chipper-but-tired-looking gas station attendant, sporting a land defenders t-shirt, who smiled as she tried to upsell me on my bag of much-needed beef jerky: “Coffee? Pizza?”
We drove through a small town where the walls were emblazoned with victory murals, and a well-lit, swanky restaurant hummed with energy. The whole street outside, mostly deserted, felt like a party. As we crawled into the suburbs of Lviv, luxury apartment blocks stood nearly-finished, but seemingly abandoned.
My phone vibrated as we entered Lviv itself: An air raid alert. (“You’ll learn to ignore them,” one Ukrainian-Canadian contact grinned at me shortly before I departed.) I opened a Telegram channel which tracks Russian air attacks — a swarm of the reviled Iranian-made Shahed drones had been sent flying towards Ukraine. A minute later, the oomph-tince-oomph-tince of Lviv’s pop music station was interrupted by the noise of the siren and a man’s monotonous voice reading out the targeted cities: Khmelnytskyi, Volyn oblast, Lviv… As we drove, the air raid sirens on the radio matched up with the sirens emanating from an unseen tower somewhere nearby.
On the street, people milled about without much sense of urgency. Some uniformed soldiers smoked on the sidewalk. The air raid alert was still active, but Lviv had not been hit by Russian attack in months, and the city’s vibe showed it. A minute later, the radio went back to playing pop hits. As we approached my hotel, we crawled past a party at a nearby bar which spilled out onto the sidewalk. I parted ways with my driver and he wished me good luck.
In the basement of my hotel, a gaggle of stylish youth drank vodka and danced to techno music. They look younger than the mandatory enlistment age, 27, by a wide margin. There have been growing calls to send youth like these to fight. At the same time, resentment has bubbled in this country against those who have bribed or talked their way out of the draft. The children of the powerful and wealthy have mostly not had to fight this war. Ukraine needs more defenders. Lowering the enlistment age is unpopular, but it may come soon. In the meantime, soldiers are serving deployment-after-deployment without a break. It’s been a long two years, and parties like these have become both a symbol of Ukraine’s refusal to submit or despair, but also of how some refuse to sacrifice for the nation’s survival.
The kitchen closed, I ventured out to find something to eat, but to no avail — it was about an hour-and-a-half before curfew, and even the MacDonald’s was shut. Bar patrons were drinking their last hurrah and readying to run home before midnight.
Not wanting to venture too far, I doubled back to my hotel. I confess the hair on the back of neck stood up as I heard the tell-tale sign of a two-stroke motor fast approaching — Shahed drones are jokingly referred to as “the moped” here, because of the buzzing sound their gas-powered engines make. The Telegram account warning of the possible strikes included a helpful emoji: 🛵.
As an actual moped raced past, I unclenched my jaw.
Back at my seemingly-empty hotel, manned by an affable security guard who appeared as confused by the place as I did, I raided the minibar. I suspect you’ve never seen someone eat a bag of pistachios as fast as I ate that bag of pistachios. Any faster, I would have had to chew the shells.
I woke up this morning before dawn to make it to Lviv’s ornate, imposing train station, built when the city was the capital of Galicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Navigating the dark, narrow carriage corridors, I eventually found my bunk and hoisted myself up. Below, a woman returning to Kyiv embraced her camouflage-wearing partner, neither wanting to let go. Eventually he turned to leave — she followed him out, kissed him again and again, watched as he disembarked, returned to her bunk and sank onto the bed.
This uneasy balancing act between war and normalcy is different across the country — Sumy, Kharkiv, and Odesa have recently faced an onslaught of Russian air attacks. Locals, there, do not have the luxury of blithely ignoring air raid sirens. Children in Kharkiv only avoid having to rush to the bunker multiple times a day by attending their school underground, as
reported this week:
But the fact the fact that there is any balance at all, that soldiers can see their partners for a weekend visit or that 20-somethings can rave every night, is because Ukraine has had enough.
Not enough to win, as President Volodmyr Zelensky ruefully says, but enough to survive. A steady stream of Western kit — the critical 155mm shells, tanks, armor, money, anti-air missiles — has kept Ukraine strong enough to protect itself. But it has lacked the quantities of long-range missiles, fighter jets, advanced tanks, armored personnel carriers, and drones to push Russia back and dislodged its defensive positions. Ukrainian officials have been saying this publicly, and even more pointedly in private, for two years.
According to the Kiel Institute’s tracker of support to Ukraine, NATO has given Ukraine, on average, just 6% of its stock of tanks, howitzers and multiple launch rocket systems. There is a point on the horizon where Ukraine will not have enough to defend itself, and it is fast-approaching.
Ukrainian fighters on the front lines have already had to ration their 155mm artillery shells. Even more worryingly, munitions for some air defense systems may be used up by the end of March, American officials told The Washington Post last Friday. That’s two weeks of safety left.
To put this in perspective: Last night, Russia launched 22 attack drones. Ukrainian air defenses — which include anti-air missiles, small arms fire, and electronic warfare — shot down 17. That’s 17 flying bombs that did not connect with apartment buildings, power plants, hospitals, and so on.
If that critical line of defense evaporates, the results will be dire. U.S. officials, per the Post, are now talking in terms of “whether it ends in collapse or large casualties.”
Few outside of Ukraine, I think, understand just how precarious this country’s position. They mistake bravery for invincibility.
Some countries are taking this deadly seriously. Czechia has donated fully half of its own weapons stocks to Ukraine. Estonia has donated more than 4% of its GDP to Kyiv, in various forms.
But many others are not. Arriving on the platform in Kyiv less than an hour before me was Senator Lindsey Graham, once a hawkish supporter of Ukraine who did a feckless about-face last month to please his president. (We are, lest rumors start, not travelling together.) He is emblematic of the cowardly defeatniks who would happily sell out this entire country if it meant returning their wannabe tinpot dictator to the White House. The ideologues who are frustrating a massive aid package in Congress, quite possibly the last one America will ever send to Kyiv, are at least consistent and honest — leaders like Graham who enable them while professing to care about Ukraine’s plight are a special kind of cowards.
Scorn can not only be reserved for the Republicans. Canada remains under-committed as well. Ottawa has committed less in military aid than Poland, an economy less than half its size. In per-capita donations, Canada ranks near the bottom.
Berlin continues to refuse to give up its Taurus 2 missiles, opting to protect Crimea out of some invented optimism that it could engender peace talks. France is touting the possibility of NATO combat troops in Ukraine, an absurd prospect that no country will agree to, and it has distracted from the real pressing issues at play.
Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to pour time, energy, and money into innovating a solution to this war. There’s reasons to think they may yet be successful, if they just get more time. Their Seababy drones have done enormous damage to Russia’s naval fleet while an array of aerial drones have likely damaged every single A-50 radar planes — if it keeps this up, it may cripple Russia’s ability to launch massive missile attacks altogether. The introduction of Ukraine’s F-16s are likely to continue raising the cost for Russia to launch these assaults.
If Ukraine is not invincible, nor is Russia unstoppable. I wrote some months ago how missile shortages threatened to jeopardize Moscow’s ability to continue this war. (Dispatch #27) Since then, the Kremlin has juiced up its domestic production capabilities and tapped such venerable allies as North Korea to sell it missiles, prolonging its harassment of Ukraine for months to come. But the breakneck pace of production, which is necessary to keep up Russia’s war as it hits then bottom of its pre-war stockpiles, can’t continue forever. A lack of Western-made technology, continued inflation, and a critical labor shortage all make this industrial output unsustainable, per analysts.
This war will end. When it does, will we feel comfortable that we did everything we could to ensure the right outcome?
The last time I was in Kyiv, the war felt very far away. Pulling into Kyiv central station on Monday afternoon, it had clearly become so much closer. No sooner did I arrive in my hotel than another air raid siren echo through Independence Square.
That’s it for this first mini-dispatch from Ukraine.
After a quiet few weeks, I’ll be operating a faster schedule over the next little while. Expect a higher tempo of dispatches while I’m here, and when I get back.
While I’ll be doing lots of reporting for WIRED and Foreign Policy from this trip, I’ve organized and financed this whole thing myself. The more subscriptions I can generate from this reporting, the more I can declare this trip ‘worth it.’
Already a subscriber? You can donate a subscription to someone else. In the coming days, that’s going to be worth it!
Until next time.
Take care of Justin Ling first and foremost.
I just renewed my subscription here and I want to read more of your stuff for many years more.
I both look forward to and dread your upcoming reports. Take care please.