Panic began to appear as Putin approached war

Vladislav Davidzon, born in Brooklyn, author of “From Odessa with love”in Kiev he writes that the residents of the Ukrainian capital are beginning to worry.

While many Ukrainians have spent the previous months preparing for what is possible Widely The Russian escalation of the war, others happily ignored the obvious. The number of times I have been told “Nothing will happen” and “This war has lasted for 8 years and we have learned to live with it” is a beggar’s belief. Perhaps this is a self-defense mechanism and the only rational way to live in the face of this kind of existential danger.

On a few occasions I have not been able to resist the temptation to respond and to ask why they are more certain of their judgments than the generals, intelligence chiefs, journalists, diplomats, and think tank specialists who ponder this issue all day.

In the past few days Moscow Recognized the so-called Russian Agency republics of Donetsk and Luhansk And sent “peacekeepers” to reinforce the forces that were already stationed there. This came after a mischievous speech Russian President Putin to the world.

Earlier tonight, the Verkhovna Rada did what it had avoided during previous months of Western warnings about a possible Russian military incursion and… They voted to impose a state of emergency. This will continue for the next month. The Pentagon has indicated that it believes more Russian military forces are moving in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Russian TV tonight is full of frenetic and sloppy programming about “the imminent Ukrainian attack on LNR and DNR.” Correspondents claim that Ukrainian sabotage squads are operating in the Crimea.

The feeling in Kiev tonight is that the Russian army is definitely creating a pretext to launch a very dirty war in eastern Ukraine. It is not yet clear whether the Russian military intends to extend the borders of the newly recognized separatist states to the territorial boundaries of the Ukrainian regions in which they are located.

The warning about the potential large-scale targeting of Ukrainian cities, which had not previously felt real, seems ominously correct.

While the day began normally, the weather in the Ukrainian capital tonight as evening fell was ominous.

Upscale bars and restaurants in Kiev have seen a very slight decrease in business over the past few weeks. Some Ukrainians kept coming out as if it was a patriotic duty. Now they are all nervously looking around I wonder if we should leave.

As I sat down to dinner with one of the sources, a former American banker who had returned to Kiev for work, I began to receive phone calls from well-placed friends urging me to consider leaving the city. “Be careful tonight,” a well-known television journalist working for one of the largest networks wrote to me.

It is hard to say whether the fears of the US intelligence agencies in the past several weeks have finally exploded in the bridging of stoicism, courage and sheer ability to distance in Ukraine.