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The attack on Vasylkiv is repelled. The Russian subversive group at the Beresteiska subway station is destroyed. An enemy tank, two trucks, and several lighter cars have been demolished.

Morning comes to Kyiv again.

That was indeed a dramatic night. Not only in the sense of a giant death army standing at the gate. But also in terms of the deadly mayhem within the city itself, especially after nightfall.

Kyiv had been overtaken with a contagion of spy fever. Rumors about Russian subversives dressed in Ukrainian fatigues spread rapidly, fueled by official statements. Heaven knows how many Ukrainian personnel were fired on and arrested, or even killed at checkpoints.

In that mess, reports of “Russian tanks breaking into Obolon” seemed credible, and they gave license to all sorts of hotheads. In numerous ill-fated episodes, the Ukrainian police, military, National Guard, and the local militia immediately opened fire on vehicles they couldn’t identify as friendly in the city.

The same was happening to countless ambulances and civilian cars that seemed suspicious.

What happened that night at the Beresteiska wasn’t a clash with a Russian combat group that had suddenly materialized out of nowhere deep in the city. As we now know, at least eight Ukrainian soldiers with the 101st Brigade were killed by friendly fire as they moved along the city avenue in the night.

We still do not have any clear evidence that Russians indeed managed to attack Vasylkiv. No evidence of any Russian airlifts downed were ever found. Just as there were no confirmed Russian fatalities.

The mayhem of the first days of the Battle of Kyiv caused a lot of grief.

But we’re moving on.
The sun rises again.
The grand war’s day three begins.

And it opens with the image of a twenty-six-story residential building on Lobanovskoho Avenue hit by a Russian missile. Russians were likely trying to hit the Zhulyany Airport, just a kilometer away.

Instead, a chunk of the building between the seventeenth and eighteenth floors is ripped off. The tattered remains of individual apartments yawn in the dust.

The mayor of Chernihiv posts a video address calling on fellow townspeople to get ready for urban combat. All are invited to come to Territorial Defense stations in the city to help prepare Molotovs

Natalia’s mother serves us a very rich breakfast again.

Ivan silently blows on his mug of hot coffee. And then, out of the blue, he goes: “I’ve been thinking here . . . we’re going home.”

For the love of god, for crying out loud . . .
Finally.
Of course, we are.

We came to Kyiv six years ago, and the city gave us a new life. We started by renting a crappy hovel in the distant suburbs, got low-paid jobs, and teased ourselves with inexpensive cheesecakes from the nearest grocery on Fridays.

This city had given us so much. It gave us opportunities, new friends, a chance to work hard and move forward in life. And we knew and loved every single corner of Kyiv. We had nowhere else to go, realistically.

If the story is coming to an end, we want to be with our city in its finest hour.

Thank you, Grandpa Winston, for this lesson in wisdom.

We’re going home because it’s the right thing to do. We’ll see how we can help in the battle for our capital. We’ll probably have a couple of days. And then it doesn’t matter.

Natalia’s dad is more taciturn and gloomier than ever. Again and again, he walks out to have a cigarette and comes back to look at us laughing behind the breakfast table. And he keeps binding up his weak arm with an elastic bandage, as if that relieves him of pain.

Of course, he can’t go. On the edge of the great unknown, with the nation going into an enormous battle, his daughter’s tears stop him.

Well, he’s not going to lie back idly. In the coming weeks, he’ll collect clothes and food for war refugees, and along with two other male teachers from his school, he’ll take on night watch duties and deliver humanitarian aid.

Finally, the last hugs goodbye.

“You take care over there, boys,” Natalia’s father says as he puts fuel canisters into Ivan’s trunk. “And come back as guests early and safe.”

Natalia’s mom makes the sign of the cross over us and puts more canned food into the car.  “Please go to Moldova,” I tell my mom. “Your daughter is ready to welcome you.”

“I will not,” she replies and puts something into my jacket’s pocket. It’s a small Christian icon. And a piece of paper with a handwritten prayer on it.

Goodbye, all.
We’re going home.

A bridge on the Zhytomyr Highway has been blown up. So we try to enter Kyiv from the south—the Odesa road.

Bila Tserkva, Vasylkiv . . . and finally, in the dark of the last day of February, the southern outskirts of Kyiv.
On the E95 Highway, a giant queue at an entry checkpoint.

But Ivan still knows how to do some magic with opposite lanes. And we slip away from the crowded highway onto a tiny suburban road in Hatne.

A Territorial Defense guy waves his hand in the darkness to invite us into his checkpoint. “Watch out,” the guard says, peeping into our car window. “We’ve been told missiles are incoming.”

Thanks, bud.

And here we are on the Kyiv Beltway.

We still have less than an hour to go until curfew.

“Look at this all,” Ivan says mournfully. “The city is empty.”

There’s no one else on the multilane motorway close to the Zhulyany Airport. Streetlights illuminate nothing but the mist and road markings. High-rises and giant malls are all lost in the shadows.

Somewhere far away in the east, a bright orange arrow of fire soars up into the sky from beyond the skyline.

“Holy shit, S-300s working.”

Another arrow bristling.

A heavy blast roars behind our backs. Russian missiles have reached their target.

“Go, go, go!”

No luck tonight.

We drive on toward our neighborhood.

There’s absolute silence. No cars in the streets. Almost no window lights. Barely any cars in parking lots, where one normally must fight for every space.

It’s a ghost city in the dark.

Just one more police checkpoint near our house: “Territorial Defense, the 6th company.”

Finally, some thirty minutes to curfew, we enter our apartment and put our food stocks into plastic bags at the front door.
We are back.

It’s only been several days, but it feels like we’re unsealing a long-forgotten vault many years after the apocalypse. In our building’s section of several dozen apartments, we are alone. There’s absolute, deathly quiet. As if we’re trapped in the middle of a space void, surrounded by millions of kilometers of empty cold and dark.

The first thing we do is cut up the huge cardboard box my bicycle was shipped in and cover all our windows.

And we dim all lights.

The less visible we are in the night, the better.

Welcome to living in a city under siege.

 

 

Illia Ponomarenko is a Ukrainian journalist, former defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Post, and co-founder of the Kyiv Independent. He has covered the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict’s earliest days, as well as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022. He has been deployed to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Ponomarenko won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today‘s guest reporter at the U.S. Department of Defense. He lives in Bucha outside Kyiv.

 

This excerpt was adapted from and published by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by Illia Ponomarenko.

 

Published on August 15, 2024.