Three months into recovery from a shrapnel injury on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Serhii Dziubanovskyi took himself and the 10cm piece of metal still stuck in his forearm out to party in Kyiv.
I found the 41-year-old slouched on a couch at an underground techno club called Closer, caressing the bandage over the shrapnel he’s nicknamed Freddy, “because I got him on a Friday”.
In front of him, a DJ played some techno. Women danced in the mellow sunshine. Beers were passed around, and in the distance there was the light whiff of marijuana.
The war, he says, felt very far away all of a sudden. “The war was the worst thing that happened to me,” he tells me. “I don’t judge anyone for having fun, but this is hard too, you know — maybe it would be nice if someone said thank you to me.”
In Kyiv this summer, the war does feel far away. In the months since Ukrainians beat back the Russian convoy menacing their capital for all of March, the city slowly stumbled, and then rushed back into a surprising normality.
Now, six months on from the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, its citizens occupy an awkward grey zone, snatching moments of peace at a time of war, dancing “when we can, crying when we have to”, says Dima, a handsome young man, passing around a salad laced, he promised, with “just a little [psychedelic] mushrooms.”
Except for the occasional air raid siren, a strict 11pm curfew and lax checkpoints, there are few immediate reminders that this is the capital of a country locked in a conflict with Russia. More than half of those who fled when the war started have now returned, city officials estimate, including tens of thousands of young women, many of whom spent months separated from their partners when the government barred men between 18 and 60 from leaving.
Now, restaurants are full, bars are slammed, concert tickets sold out and romances are being rekindled. The Ukrainian military has pushed the war hundreds of miles away, to an artillery-scarred front line that cuts a jagged line through the country’s south and east.
But in Kyiv, few duck into shelters when the sirens go off — it has been weeks since it was last hit by a Russian missile.
Left unsaid is the growing realisation that the country must now prepare, “like Israel,” according to one adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the long war. With that comes the guilt from living near-normal lives in Kyiv while young men fight and die on the front.
“The war is here too — just 150km north is the border, and the air bases in Belarus,” says Dasha Zuckerman, who runs a small shop selling vintage clothing. “It’s pointless to search for stupid labels to describe what this feels like — it’s a distraction, from the air-raid sirens, from the war, from all this shit.”
As I wandered through Kyiv, the war echoed in unlikely refrains. At the bar, I saw a collection box for batteries from used vapes, to be refurbished into power sources for drones. At the DJ’s turntable, a song for the Sea of Azov, lost to Russia in 2014. And on Khreshchatyk Street, the city’s main boulevard, a macabre parade of the burnt out shells of Russian tanks, now the backdrop for selfies on Instagram.
In nearly every conversation I had, even the most carefree acknowledged a pang of guilt, and felt the need to justify these stolen moments of joy. “They fight there so we can do this here,” says Nika Kuznetsova, an artist and photo stylist, wearing Prada sunglasses and a “Russophobia” sticker on her designer handbag. “Maybe some of them think it’s inappropriate, but I live my life like I could die any day.
“All Ukrainians do,” she adds.
I followed the crowds to Keller, a sprawling club in Kyiv’s warehouse district. The queues started early, and the music was loud enough to be heard blocks away. Downstairs, in a small, sweaty basement, a crowd of shirtless men watched a DJ take over the turntables and unfurl a large Ukrainian flag.
“Glory to Ukraine” he screamed. “Glory to the heroes,” the crowd screamed back.
And then, the DJ dropped the beat.
mehul.srivastava@ft.com
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