Despite all the warning signs, as I sat down for dinner with friends in Kyiv on 23 February, war seemed unreal. Surely, Putin was bluffing?
It was the evening before everything changed. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov had invited me for dinner. A few friends, he said, and borshch. We had met earlier that winter – a pleasant meal in a Georgian restaurant in Podil, a neighbourhood in the lower part of Kyiv next to the Dnipro River. The date was now 23 February 2022. It was 8.15pm, and I was late. I stopped in a shop, bought a bottle of Kolonist port from a winery in Odesa, and hurried to Kurkov’s flat.
These meetings happened under the shadow of war. The news was alarming, terrible even. A week earlier, Russian-backed separatists had shelled a village in Ukrainian-controlled territory next to the pro-Russian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. The missile had landed in a school gym. Mercifully, no one was killed, but the eight-year conflict in the east was heating up.
