Ukraine at War
Welcome to my blog. In May 2025, I had the honour of driving an ambulance from London to Lviv. I then stayed 3 days in Lviv and 2 weeks in Kyiv, of which I spent 4 nights in bomb shelters. The purpose of this blog is to answer the question I get over and over – what is it really like there? As a fluent Russian speaker, I had a better opportunity than many foreign visitors to try to get a handle on that.
If I can leave you with three fundamental takeaways here, they are:
Kyiv is still a beautiful, elegant city with a great vibe, where life still goes on, including a vibrant nightlife.
But civilian casualties will get horrifically worse when Ukraine’s supply of US Patriot intercept missiles runs out, unless Trump changes his mind and supplies more.
But no matter what the casualties, Ukraine will never surrender. This is a war of national survival. 103 years ago, a nascent Ukrainian state was forced to surrender to the Bolsheviks. Within 10 years, millions of Ukrainians had been deliberately starved to death in the Holodomor. Putin has shown every indication of having similar intentions. Stalin’s goal was to wipe out independent peasants who resisted collectivisation. Putin’s is to eradicate any concept of Ukrainian national identity.
I hope you find the blog useful. If you do, please leave a note in the “comments” section of any of the blog pages. And If you have been to Ukraine and you think any of my content is misleading, or that I’ve missed something important, please tell me! If you prefer to write to me privately you can do that at twelvestring@ntlworld.com.
The posts appear in reverse chronological order, so my earliest post (about driving in the ambulance, which I highly, highly recommend) appears at the bottom. The others cover a arrange of topics about life there. I will continue to add new posts from time to time.
Additional good sources for anyone wanting to learn more include The Kyiv Independent, the Moscow Times (now publishing from the Netherlands out of necessity), and both BBC.com and Aljazeera.com are good.