When we passed them, lugging our bulletproof vests and helmets, we made sure to grab some food for the road. Even the central bazaar was in darkness, though the vendors inside were still selling fresh fruit and cheese, pickles, and pork belly by the glow of electric lanterns. People out walking their dogs used their phones to light the sidewalks. Russian missiles have damaged or destroyed much of Ukraine’s power grid since the start of October, a concerted effort to make the winter as painful as possible for the civilian population. Our rendezvous point for the trip was outside a firehouse, in a part of central Kyiv that was without electricity when the photographer and I arrived the following evening. I don’t lull myself with such illusions.” Maybe it will give them enough of a boost to last a few more days. “As I see it, it’s my duty to go there and show them that Ukraine has returned, that it supports them.
“They are going to fall into a depression now, and it will be very hard,” Zelensky explained. But those two days are over.” Soon the long road to recovery would come into view, and many of his citizens would want a return to normality, much faster than the state can deliver it. Yes, they’ve had two days of euphoria over their return to Ukraine. “Nine months they’ve been under occupation, without light, without anything. “It’s the people,” he told me in a two-hour interview as his private train rolled through the country. Zelensky’s visit would deepen the embarrassment of the Russian retreat and strengthen the Ukrainian will to carry on through the winter.īut that was not the reason he gave for the trip. By rolling into the city that Vladimir Putin still claimed as his own, the leader of Ukraine would blow a hole through the stories of conquest and imperial glory that Russian propagandists had been using for months to justify the war. Why give them a chance to strike? The obvious reason had to do with the information war, which had become Zelensky’s specialty. Then why do it? The Russian goal at the start of the invasion had been to kill or capture Zelensky and decapitate his government.
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