The air raid sirens are sounding again but I’ve learned that sometimes it means Russian drones and missiles will rain from the sky for eight hours but most of the time it means play ping pong in the sunshine.
This is the first time I’ve had real-time translators for bilingual lectures and panel discussions. About 1/4 of attendees are listening in English and everyone else is Ukrainian, so the translators are working overtime translating in both directions.
Some of the very illustrious panelists at yesterday’s inaugural symposium of the new National University of Ukraine Kiev-Mohyla Research Center for Heritage Preservation and Recovery. These are real heavyweights. I’ll be chewing on these discussions for years.
I asked to take his picture because he is keeping it 100%. He obliged and we both had a good laugh because he knew exactly what I meant. #kyiv #ukraine #menswear
Last night’s drone and missile attack was one of the most intense of the entire war. I don’t have a ton of drone and missile attacks to compare it to but I’ll take their word for it.
Now it can be revealed that I’m here to attend the inauguration of the Naukma Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. It’s a gathering of government ministers, politicians, archeologists, cultural historians and academics. Representatives from UNESCO, Nova Ukraine and Cornell are here. I’m grateful to be participating and will tell you much more about it in later posts and on my Patreon.
People here all subscribe to Telegram OSINT channels and are texting me screenshots of incoming drones and missiles. The missiles are purple, drones are yellow. An apartment building on the left bank of the Dnieper was apparently destroyed in this attack.
Tonight in Kyiv tells a very different story. A mass missile attack at 3AM and EVERYONE is in the shelter as the ground is rocked by explosions. Some people have been here all night, some (like me) were late arrivals. Everyone is calm, the lights are still on. Some are snoring loudly, some are reading books and then there’s me, sitting straight up in a chair in my bathrobe still with my heart in my chest from the blinding flash and explosion that woke me up and sent me crawling across the floor and high-tailing it to the shelter.
You need to turn your volume up to hear the air raid sirens of Kyiv. They started at dawn and this is the third time today. It’s gray and rainy after three days of clear weather so I’m writing in my room.
Before I came to Kyiv I promised friends to take air raid sirens seriously but after four days here they seem surreal. I mean that Kyiv is not a war-torn town cowering under attack from a superpower but rather a bustling and fairly cheerful modern city being harassed by dickheads with model airplanes, so sirens are a bizarre overlay. I don’t mean at all to diminish the devastation of the war or minimize the continuing risk here, but most people have no idea how much Kyiv is a MAJOR metropolis of the world, larger than Paris or Rome, and absolutely indomitable.
Putin’s only goal is to save face, he has no capacity to “defeat” Ukraine except to cling desperately to the land he’s managed to grab at the expense of over 350k Russian lives, so attacks on Kyiv have no purpose other than to annoy, petulantly play-acting like the regional strongman he no longer is. Amazing that almost all our current global conflicts can be similarly described.
The last time the sirens wailed I looked out my window at a woman walking her dog, a man emptying bottles into a dumpster, people strolling by with coffee in hand. I thought I heard distant explosions but then realized the man was rolling the dumpster out to the sidewalk. I know blackouts are a thing and I packed accordingly but have experienced none. I’ve been all over the city and have witnessed no damage from air strikes, no militarization, no fortification and fewer soldiers in the streets than in San Francisco. There’s a Ferris wheel. Two days ago I saw a riot grrl flash mob take over a pedestrian mall and make a music video of Gangnam Style in ripped fishnets with a decided goth-lesbian energy. It was celebratory, not “We are resilient against oppression!” but in a “We are teenaged punk dorks and our dads HATE this!” way.
So I’m not in a bomb shelter. No one is. The Ukrainian army is killing it. Kyiv is just trying to get on with it. When this war is over Kyiv will step into the light as a w
