This week I had my first nightmare about war. In the dream, I woke up to find that Russia had attacked my home city of Kyiv: there was no internet connection, and no way of finding out what had happened.
I had this dream on Wednesday, the night on which – according to western intelligence – Russia was most likely to begin its attack on Ukraine. Over the last few months, we Ukrainians have of course considered various scenarios and contingency plans, but mainly we have kept calm. But when the US, the UK and dozens of other states evacuated their embassies from the capital, it felt different.
News headlines this week have said Russia’s advance will begin with an attack on Kyiv. That makes sense. If Moscow wants to gain control of our country, it will want to fracture the calm and resolve of a political, media and business elite which, for the last few years, has lived a perfectly normal European life without needing to think too much about the war miles away on our borders in the Donbas region.
Our president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, declared that Wednesday – the supposed day of attack – should be a national day of unity. TV channels (largely owned by oligarchs and the president’s opponents) showed live programmes featuring familiar faces from across the networks. Some people mocked the whole idea, but for me it worked. Ukraine’s predicted “dire day”, in fact, felt like a holiday: my Facebook feed was full of hearts in our national colours, wishing for peace.
But that was largely illusory. Already a reported 150,000 Russian troops have been deployed on our border – and another pontoon bridge for military vehicles has been built in Belarus, close to Ukraine, where military drills have been taking place. Two government banks and the defence ministry say they have experienced the most severe cyber-attacks of their kind and have put the blame on Russia for them. Thankfully, they managed to defend themselves.
Our army is on high alert, but for the rest of the population, everything connected to this possible incursion forms the backdrop to what is still a kind of ordinary life. This week, as well as filing a dispatch from the frontline, appearing on a TV station, participating in a briefing with US officials and calming down my own family, I have been discussing the launch of a project on public health and a translated Japanese poetry book on Chernobyl, scheduled for publication in the spring. It feels incongruous to be doing the work I would normally do, but it’s how everyone I know is coping. We are not cancelling anything. Fear is inevitable, but panic feels pointless.
This refusal to change our lives is not born out of stubbornness or carelessness, nor fatalism or distrust of western sources. We know that what is to come may be long-lasting, and we need to preserve normality and conserve our strength.
In a best-case scenario, the threat alerts could be moved each week. In the worst, a full-scale military incursion could occur and fighting could last for months or years. Ukraine is about two-and-a-half times larger than the UK. The terrain is difficult: even a formidable force like Russia can’t take it overnight. And 57% of Ukrainians say they are ready to resist – that number is growing, too.
My experience of reporting on the Donbas conflict in the south-east of our country tells me that the Russian strategy of accusing Ukraine of fictional crimes may well continue. Today, Denis Pushilin, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, announced a mass evacuation of its citizens to Russia as he believed Ukraine was planning an attack. Later, Russian media reported a major blast in the rebel-held city of Donetsk. Ukraine vehemently denies this.
At the start of the week, the Russian parliament called on Putin to recognise the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, widely seen as being governed by Kremlin proxies, which he has so far been reluctant to do formally. If Russia did go ahead, it would have dire consequences for the Minsk accords – the peace agreement signed in 2014-15. The full-scale military action would focus on the Donbas, but chaos would be triggered all over the country.
Yesterday, on the seventh anniversary of the Minsk accords and as the UN security council discussed the issue and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, challenged Russia to make an unequivocal statement that it would not invade, artillery shells reportedly hit at least 30 towns on the Ukrainian government-controlled side of the Donbas, damaging a nursery and wounding three people. Predictably, Russians at the UN accused Ukraine of the attack.
The west was quick to call the shelling a “false flag”, condemning an operation that seemed an attempt to provide some spurious basis for a Russian attack. But in future, since countries like the US and the UK have already pulled out their observers, there will be fewer eyes on the ground to provide verified data of any such aggression.
So what will happen now? That depends not just on Putin’s decision-making (and it’s worth remembering that although a tactician, he is no mean strategist), but also deterrence, and the scale of the response from Ukraine and the rest of the world. The lesson we can take from the occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 was that the perception of weakness only made things worse. To stop Russia, Ukrainians must show, for as long as possible, that we are unconquerable.
The start of a full-scale war might not be as obvious as a dramatic visual attack on Kyiv, or the advance of Russian tanks along the border.
Instead, as we are already seeing with mass evacuations, it is those millions of Ukrainians residing in the Donbas who suffer first and suffer most.
Compared with that, the uncertainty and fear we feel in Kyiv is something we just have to live with.
Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist specialising in foreign affairs and conflict reporting and author of Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea
