Last Monday, Oleh Synehubov was wearing a sharp suit with a neatly knotted mauve tie, sitting in an overfurnished room in the grand regional administration building in Kharkiv, and discussing his plans for his region’s next quarterly budget.
Five days later, he was giving a video address to citizens wearing combat fatigues, heralding the repulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine’s second-largest city, and announcing that anyone on the streets after 6pm would be “liquidated”, as the Ukrainian army attempted to weed out saboteur groups in the city.
It was a week of grim transformation for the lives of almost every Ukrainian, after Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a ruthless assault on the supposed “brotherly nation” of Ukraine, which began in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Hundreds of thousands have fled to the west of the country to avoid Putin’s advancing troops and missiles, with many spending long hours in queues at checkpoints on the way and at the borders with Poland and Hungary. Many more have stayed and made the decision to fight.
“I’ll be honest, I’m really scared. It’s the first time I’ve held a gun,” said 50-year-old Alexander, brandishing a shotgun at a barricade near a village outside Kyiv on Saturday. Behind him, an elderly man looked out across nearby fields through a pair of binoculars, while women were preparing crates of molotov cocktails, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
The speed and effectiveness with which so many Ukrainians have mobilised have been an impressive sight, particularly as so few people genuinely believed Putin could launch such an all-embracing attack on the country.
True, he had been massing troops around Ukraine’s borders for the past three months, and US and British intelligence released ever more apocalyptic warnings of the scale of what Putin was planning.
But for a whole range of reasons, many people in Ukraine – like many outside observers – found it hard to believe in the possibility of what transpired, partly because it did not seem to fit into any comprehensible scenario.
“Russia is bombing Kyiv. Russia is bombing Kyiv.” People muttered the sentence again and again this week, the intonation changing from confusion, to disbelief, to anger.
For those who have stayed behind in the capital, life is now filled with daily struggles they hardly imagined possible. A week ago, Kristina Berdynskykh, perhaps the best-connected political journalist in Ukraine, was sharing insider gossip with visiting correspondents over cocktails in Kyiv. By Sunday evening, Berdynskykh was preparing for her fourth consecutive night sleeping in one of suburban Kyiv’s metro stations, along with her 67-year-old mother.
There were about 200 people sleeping in the station, she said, with the prized places the benches on a metro train parked on one of the platforms with its doors open. Her family arrived too late for those, so are sleeping on blankets on the floor. Each station has a police guard, and the atmosphere is calm.
For Berdynskykh, as for most Ukrainians, the severity of the Russian attack came as a shock.
“I thought there was going to be Russian military action, but I expected it to be in the Donbas,” she said.
Some of the few Kyiv residents who genuinely feared this sort of war could be on the way were people who were displaced from Donbas after the conflict in 2014.
Anna, 35, fled Donetsk eight years ago, a few months after Russia-backed proxies took over the city. Two weeks ago, she admitted to feeling a sense of dread that history could repeat itself. “I’m worried about how calm everyone is, I have deja vu. Back in Donetsk, nobody thought war was possible either, until the last moment. And then it came,” she said.
On Sunday, Anna was just arriving in a city in western Ukraine, after an arduous two-day car journey across the country with her two cats in tow. She hopes her stay will be temporary and she will not have to start her life from scratch once more.
The first sign from Moscow that war was imminent came last Monday, when Putin appeared on television to host a startlingly bizarre sitting of Russia’s security council. It was less a discussion and more a forced swearing of loyalty to his aggressive new Ukraine policy by a court of pliant underlings. Some of them appeared to be enthusiastic cheerleaders while others looked like hostages to their leader’s increasingly whimsical autocratic ways.
This was quickly followed by a televised speech in which Putin ranted about Ukrainian history, grievances against the west and the need to protect the population in the Donbas, eastern Ukraine.
Many people expected a limited offensive in the Donbas, at least until a pretext could be found for more escalation. But the new Putin appears not to be particularly bothered with pretexts. Instead, he launched straight into a major assault on Ukraine, with tanks rolling across the borders, missiles aimed at Kyiv, and a series of increasingly alarming messages from the commander in chief.
By Sunday, these had culminated with the terrifying threat to put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, acceded to with an uneasy nod by defence minister Sergei Shoigu.
In Ukraine, people are still processing these twists. Many are still confused at how their world has been turned on its head in a matter of days. Amid the grim new reality, some people tried to cling on to the vestiges of past normality. In the only open petrol station close to the capital on the Kyiv-Odesa highway on Saturday, the cashier shouted exasperatedly at a throng of patrons trying to buy petrol.
“Have some respect and wear a facemask,” she shouted at the crowds trying to get access to the pumps. She was roundly ignored.
A few minutes later, an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “This petrol station is now closing. Petrol will be available only for members of the Ukrainian armed forces who present a special permit.”
Further along the highway, close to the Vasilkiv airbase where a Russian attempt to land paratroopers was reportedly fought off by the Ukrainian army on Saturday morning, a supermarket was open and felt almost normal, with a well-stocked exotic fruit section and gift-wrapped novelty chocolates for sale. Outside, there were several smashed up cars on the road, one that had been shot up, and makeshift roadblocks to stop Russia landing planes on the highway.
The vestiges of the pre-war life are likely to fade further if Russia’s assault grinds on or intensifies. Already, the fuel and food shortage is chronic in and around Kyiv. Most shops have no bread and the long weekend curfew left many people scrabbling to make do with whatever food they had at home.
The mood at the makeshift barricades set up along the roads outside the capital has become increasingly edgy as sleep-deprived and nervous civilians, many of them holding a weapon for the first time, keep a lookout for Russian sabotage groups.
For now, though, spirits mostly remain high, as Ukrainians share videos of destroyed Russian hardware, Ukrainian soldiers launching insulting tirades against Putin, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s inspiring amateur videos proving he has not fled.
Mykhailo, a volunteer manning a checkpoint in central Ukraine, summed up the mood among many during the heady first days of the fightback: “We didn’t want this. We didn’t expect this. But now it’s happened, we will battle with everything we have,” he said.
