DISPATCHES FROM UKRAINE: Everyday Kyiv Life, Grannies Making Molotov Cocktails, Holocaust Survivors, Shooting Victims and the Plight of the Physically Disabled Who Cannot Leave
From the ground in Kyiv as the war goes on...
“I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.”
William M. Tweed
HOW LIFE IN KYIV CHANGED IN AN INSTANT: ‘I FEEL LIKE I AM IN A DREAM’
For those who remain in Kyiv, life has been reduced to the almost constant sound of artillery booming in the distance, the whirl of air-raid sirens compelling citizens to rush to the nearest bunker or parking lot below the earth. Indeed, the tension is palpable as Russian tanks inch closer. Almost everyone you know has lost someone, is missing someone, or cannot reach a loved one trapped in a Ukrainian town completely cut off from electricity, communication, food, medical supplies, running water, and heat amid the frozen temperatures.
Yet there is a profound pragmatism to Ukrainians, who have embraced their reality with determination, holding on to the serene lives they lived just over two weeks ago, while simultaneously letting the past go.
“In less than a week, I adapted to war. I changed my clothes and became a driver for the volunteers,” notes Oleksandr Klymenko, snaking through the empty Kyiv streets at sundown. “Our lives changed so quickly; I changed so quickly.”
The once vibrant capital city of 2.8 million has been entirely transformed into a frontline military zone. Streets are dotted with sandbagged checkpoints; vehicles must zigzag between concrete chunks and around World War II–style “steel hedgehogs” designed to puncture or belly-up encroaching enemies. Civilians tape large X’s to the window and leave them just a crack open despite the frigid temperatures, believing it will limit the splattering of glass shards should a blast strike.
Kyiv is consumed by war. Everyone plays a part somehow. There are the soldiers, the volunteer soldiers, the women who cook the meals for the soldiers, and the medics who leave their own families to live in cold basements — on call 24/7 and ready to run to the wounded at a moment’s notice. Famous chefs with shuttered restaurants now bake bread and concoct borscht for the fighters out in the bitter cold. Travel agents have transformed into communication vessels to find information about escape routes, convoys, and casualties.
Bright yellow school buses that once shuttled students across town on the edges of the city are now stuffed with exhausted, traumatized faces of evacuees pulled from broken towns after days of endless bombardment. There are buses whizzing down allegedly “green corridors” to “transition points,” where agonized faces are left with their suitcases, trying to wrap their heads around where to go next with no safe haven.
I see a teen boy, so young his gaunt face is still mottled by adolescent acne, standing by himself in the mud in an open field as evacuation buses from the outskirts of the city arrive. For hours, he watches each one intently, holding up a sign with his mother’s name — the kind of sign you see a driver holding at the airport baggage claim — waiting for that familiar face. The sky darkens, and the bombing grows louder, closer, and still he stays waiting. The boy does not know if his family has survived the wild thrashing of the Russians.
Nearby, the very young, disabled, elderly, and confused cross the blown-up Irpin bridge — reeling with pain and unable to fathom the nightmare that has become their broken, homeless lives. Some are so old, so pained that they are bent double and barely able to walk, oblivious to the haunting artillery booms that seem to be growing closer and closer.
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GRANNIES, WIDOWS AND RETIRED WOMEN BAND TOGETHER TO MAKE MOLOTOV COCKTAILS IN UKRAINE
Behind a nondescript apartment building in Kyiv, a group of women guide me to hidden stashes of what appear to be beer bottles. Only far more potent, foul-smelling substances gurgle inside.
“We keep them in secret places, near doors, in hidden compartments. They are everywhere right now,” Larissa, 60, says proudly. “If I see a Russian soldier, I won’t hesitate to hit them.”
Her neighbor, 67-year-old Natalya, concurs.
“On the very day of the invasion, we all started making the cocktails,” she says. “It was difficult to get all the ingredients, but we found a guy who could help us out.”
Fifteen families remain inside the faded, lovely building that the women tell me is protected by pelican statues in the backyard. Other apartments are filled by elderly, single women with grown children and grandchildren like Larissa and Natalya, who lost her husband just before the Maidan Revolution. One neighbor affectionately calls it “the place for grannies who make the Molotov.”
“We learned from the internet,” Larissa, a management theory teacher in a local university, boasts.
Known as a “poor man’s grenade” or a “bottle bomb,” the cocktail comes to life when the wick is lit and can be hurled at a tank – or person – smashing and igniting a fireball.
Molotov cocktails also possess a special significance inside the Eastern European country. The homemade explosives, typically made of flammable substances such as polystyrene and silver dust, stored in alcohol bottles, are named after Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, a Russian national and former foreign minister in the USSR. A close confidante of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, Molotov became a renowned name in his own right amid the 1939 “Winter War” when the Nazis invaded Poland, and the Soviets battled back from Finland, using the notorious cocktail concoction against their enemy at Molotov’s instruction.
However, the women assure me that this isn’t their first rodeo with the recipes. When the Maidan Revolution in the winter of 2014 turned violent, they took part in Molotov cocktail concocting sessions. They used them against the oppressive police force, which they believe largely hailed from Russia.
The storied Molotov might not prevent a Russian bombardment of their beloved capital, but the women view it as a small but critical part that they can play in fighting for the freedom of their nation.
When the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion on February 24, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs urged all Ukrainians to prepare the homemade explosives and ready themselves to throw them at any infiltrating Russian troops.
“During the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939, the Finnish army fought tanks with these bottles,” the Ukrainian government stated, along with instructions on what to do.
Since then, further tips and tricks have spawned Ukrainian social media, and groups have convened across various cities and oblast to make as many as possible for distribution. In addition to perfecting their bottle hurling skills, the women – who refuse to be victims – place pull-tasers near their door, have firmly barricaded their main apartment entrance with chunks of wood and steel and dabbled in a little hand-to-hand combat.
“Our best weapons are our hands,” says Larissa. “We will take anything we can get our hands on and throw it and hit the Russians however we can.”
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RUSSIAN TROOPS INSIST TO UKRAINIAN THAT REAL TARGET OF WAR IS ‘USA INSIDE UKRAINE’
Russian troops insisted that their real target is the US, not Ukraine, after they opened fire on a Ukrainian man trying to flee his war-torn town, the traumatized resident told The Post.
“We’re not at war with Ukraine and Ukrainians, but at war with the USA inside Ukraine,” 55-year-old Igor Sitalo said Russian soldiers told him after they shot at him.
Sitalo was fleeing his hometown of Hostomel, a city of 16,000, with his German shepherd, Ralph, on Sunday when a bullet struck his hand, grazed his head — and killed his canine companion.
“A doctor tried to save him,” Sitalo told The Post between sobs at a medical tent near Kyiv.
“But he passed. He would have been 8 years old this month.”
After the invading soldiers confronted Sitalo, an aviation engineer, at the scene and checked his identification documents, they apparently tried to console him by explaining their real enemy is the US.
Despite the close call, Sitalo — who had bloody bandages wrapped around his head and left arm — said his friends in Russia don’t believe that soldiers from their country are really committing such atrocities.
He sent them photos of his bullet wounds but “still, they do not believe me,” he said bitterly.
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UKRAINE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS RELIVE NIGHTMARE OF WAR
Jewish leaders are desperately struggling to get their elderly community to safety — an already excruciating task complicated by the fact that many are Holocaust survivors terrified of reliving the nightmares of their past amid the Russian invasion.
Outside the Brodsky Choral Synagogue, cars line the road with signs taped to their windshield that say “A child is inside” — a desperate attempt to keep their vehicles from being targeted by gunfire.
For Ukraine’s Jewish minority, it is a strange and surreal throwback to the wars fought in the early 20th century, and members worry they will be wiped from the map in what until a couple of weeks ago was a relatively comfortable place to live.
“I never thought this could happen in Ukraine,” says the chief rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Azman, who hails from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s native city of St. Petersburg, Russia. “I feel like I am in a bad dream, and we are back again in the center of the biggest crime against humanity.”
The 55-year-old rabbi has been working tirelessly in the past few weeks to assist his embattled Jewish community in evacuating, with families fleeing to neighboring nations.
The exodus gained momentum early in the invasion, when a Russian missile hit a TV tower in Kyiv, killing five people and damaging the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial. An estimated 34,000 people were slaughtered over 48 hours in 1941 at the site, one of the Nazi regime’s deadliest massacres.
The onslaught served as the ultimate tipping point for those unsure whether to go or stay since war broke out Feb. 24.
“All we can do is try to save people, to send them out to safe places,” Azman says of the Herculean evacuation task ahead of him and other community leaders. “We have organized buses all over Ukraine to take them, but this is not a simple process.”
The community knows full well that members may never return to Ukraine, leaving them with nothing but memories of the lives built there. For the older ones, there are more immediate concerns, too.
“In Kyiv, we have many old people, they are very scared and begging for food and medicine, and nobody can reach them. I am receiving calls every day,” Azman says. “We can’t even bury people. People die, and it is not safe enough to bury them, to hold a special service for them.”
As Russian troops draw closer to the city center, a group of jovial Jewish men join hands to belt out upbeat Hebrew songs on the synagogue’s steps, drawing smiles from some as they stand defiant against the looming evil.
But the moment of levity is short-lived.
“My husband is fighting, and I will take my children out from Ukraine,” says a distraught woman, who asks that her name not be used for security purposes. “I do not know if we will come back. If Putin can do this once, how do we know he or someone else will not do this again and again?”
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UKRAINIAN FILMMAKERS TAKE TO FRONT LINES TO FIGHT VLADIMIR PUTIN’S INVASION
I am crammed into a small, Soviet-style bunker in the nucleus of Kyiv city, air raid sirens and church bells blaring in the world above. Across from me in the cold confinement are two unfamiliar faces, who I quickly learned were budding filmmakers with a handheld camera documenting everyday moments of Russia’s searing invasion of its much smaller neighbor Ukraine.
“I guess this will be our graduation film,” Kyral Kurinsky, 38, tells me calmly. “If we ever graduate.”
Kyral and his Finnish classmate Lukas were just weeks away from completing their director’s course at the prestigious Ukrainian Film School when war ripped through their dreams in late February.
And while social media feeds have been flushed with wincing images of trauma-stricken faces fleeing across Ukraine’s borders, many physically cannot leave – no matter what the war brings in the coming days. Of course, Kyral must stay as per marital law prohibiting Ukrainian men aged 18-60 from exiting the country. Nevertheless, his wife Jen – paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair – has no choice but to endure whatever blitz and bombing campaign the Russians may ignite in the days, weeks or months to come.
But it’s a fate Jen, a 32-year-old IT and video software specialist who works on special projects for prominent video/audio technology company Avid.com, is more than prepared to take on.
The young couple was driving through western Ukraine’s mountainous terrain to go to her grandmother’s funeral in the summer of 2016 when a car overtook them at high speed, prompting Kyral to lightly brake. Summer rainfall on slippery tar sent the small car spiraling wildly, eventually landing upright in a trench on the side of the road.
“I knew straight away I had broken my neck. My chair was reclined, and it was because of that position my two vertebrae snapped,” Jen explains, eager to illuminate the silver lining. “But a rock landed right where my head would have been in if the chair had been upright, so that might have been a very different ending.”
And in a time like war, the couple concurs: those moments of entertainment and brevity matter.
“I am still developing software for live concerts, mixing sounds, and despite all this, I would really love to make a historical film, something that takes place in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains,” Kyrel explains optimistically. “A real visual escape.”
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