Some members of Kyiv’s diplomatic corps have moved to the western city of Lviv, others have crossed the border and are working from neighbouring countries, while most havebeen evacuated back home.
But inside the Polish embassy compound in the centre of an eerily quiet Kyiv, the ambassador Bartosz Cichocki is still at work.
“It was rather 24/7,” he said, of his working week since the Russian attack on Ukraine began.
Dressed in chinos and a Shakhtar Donetsk football shirt, Cichocki offered whiskey and cigarettes to his visitors in a meeting room at the embassy, a Soviet modernist building in central Kyiv.
He is the only remaining EU ambassador in the capital and one of just a handful of western diplomats of any rank remaining in Kyiv, but answered questions about his continued presence with studied nonchalance.
In response to a question about whether he was sleeping underground, Cichocki said: “Why? People sleep in beds. Why should I sleep in a basement?” Hundreds of thousands of residents who remained in the capital are spending the night sleeping in metro stations or basements.
A large part of the city’s population has fled Kyiv on trains and in cars, towards the safer western part of the country or across the border to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania or Moldova.
Poland, in particular, has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and an enormous civil society effort has been launched to help get them settled in the country.
If the war continues and intensifies, many millions more may flee. Cichocki said that, while he does not make policy, he would be surprised if his country would start to reject entry to Ukrainians. “I don’t think there’s a limit. I cannot imagine that Poland closes the door,” he said.
Some have pointed out a troubling difference between the enormous effort by Poland and other central eastern European countries to welcome Ukrainians, and their actions towards refugees from the Middle East. In particular, Polish police violently pushed thousands of refugees back in Belarus last autumn, after the dictator Alexander Lukashenko had lured them to the country with a promise of free passage to Europe.
“This is a genuine refugee phenomenon while that was completely artificial,” Cichocki claimed. “It was refugee tourism.”
In the run-up to the invasion, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, criticised western countries for moving their diplomatic missions to Lviv, in the west of Ukraine. Cichocki said that while there were many tasks that could only be done by being physically in place, the most important reason to stay in Kyiv was symbolic.
“I believe that today what we can influence is the morale, the spirit,” he said. “They have arms, they have food, they have everything, but I think leaving them now would be something that could decrease their spirits.”
The US embassy left Kyiv for Lviv well before the Russian attack, and once the assault began, the Americans evacuated further, and the embassy team now works from across the border in Poland. Some missions are based in Lviv, while the vast majority of diplomats and almost all of their families have been evacuated back to their own capitals.
“They are not free to decide, their capitals decided. I don’t judge,” Cichocki said, of his long-departed colleagues in the diplomatic corps.
He was reluctant to talk about his own contingency plans, insisting that as long as a democratically elected Ukrainian government remained in place, he would be in Kyiv, describing the city as “uninvadable”.
He conceded he would leave if he was ordered to do so by his foreign ministry, but doubted such an order was imminent.
Outside the embassy, central Kyiv was deserted on Thursday, with few people in the streets save for the queues outside pharmacies and food shops. A missile strike on the television tower on Tuesday killed at least five people, but the city has been relatively quiet in the past two days, although the occasional boom can be heard from fighting to the west and there were several small explosions audible while the ambassador spoke.
There is a sense of dread in the air at what might be coming, particularly after Vladimir Putin made a public appearance on Thursday giving little sign he was ready to back down. Residents have seen footage of indiscriminate shelling in the second city of Kharkiv and fear the same fate may await them in Kyiv.
“I cannot imagine Russians taking this city by land, [but] they may destroy it, they may shell and bomb it,” said Cichocki.
