Yet on that trip it was noticeable that fear was turning to exultation as the Russian failure to reach Kyiv became clearer and the extent of Putin’s losses were revealed, though there was horror at the reports of atrocities in Bucha and other recently liberated cities.
Now I was back for a third time. A lot had changed since April. Though the sirens warning of missile attacks sounded only once or twice a day and were ignored by most people, the mood was grim. The situation in the east was precarious. The resistance in the port of Mariupol had collapsed.
Last week I spoke to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Inside a high-security sandbagged building (like President Zelensky, the famous former world heavyweight boxing champion is feared to be a prime target for Russian assassination squads) he insisted he remains confident of ultimate victory.
He said: “Firstly, no one would launch this kind of war in 21st-century Europe unless he’s suffering from a very sick mind. And secondly, our people are fighting for our homes and our lives. I ask Russian soldiers: is it worth it to die here in a foreign land far from your homes?”
Klitschko added: “I have Russian blood in my veins. My mother is Russian, and speaks no Ukrainian, by the way. I cannot hate my mother. How can I hate Russians? I just hate what they do.
“When Russians have killed tens of thousands of my people, including so many civilians, and when they want to destroy my entire country, this is not the time to have statues about our so-called friendship,” he tells me.
He and younger brother and fellow boxer Wladimir (they never faced each other in the ring because their mother forbade it) together dominated the world heavyweight class for more than a decade. The mayor told me sport taught him lessons in persistence and tactical nous that have proved useful now. “One of them is not to judge from appearances. Some macho people crumbled, some mild and meek people turned into lions here.”
The Klitschkos are contemptuous of Germany and France for continuing to pay billions for Russian gas and oil, feeding its war machine. But not Britain. Vitali told me: “I love Boris.” He penned a message, on a set of Klitschko official-tribute postage stamps, writing: “To Boris”, dated it and drew a heart.
A boy whose mother was killed in Bucha looks out over Kyiv
Outside, on the streets, there was a similar sense of defiance towards the Russians, but little of Klitschko’s confidence in victory. A taxi driver told me you could avoid conscription if you had the right connections or a large sum of money. “I love my country, but I don’t want to die,” he said.
One couple told me: “We know things are being kept from the public, and it’s good they think we’re going to win. But the truth will start to filter through to them within a month.” They left the country by train a few days later.
I made my second trip to Bucha and Irpin, satellite towns about 20 miles north of Kyiv. The famous bridge near Irpin over the Dniepr River had been destroyed by Ukrainian explosives, not by the Russians, to prevent the invaders thrusting further towards Kyiv. Already, a new, temporary bridge was carrying traffic across into the satellite towns.
In Bucha, the railway station was open again. There had been burnt-out Russian tanks nearby but they had been removed. I bought a few frozen pastries from a bakery. Not much else was working, apart from a gym. But electricity was running again — Mayor Klitschko had erected cables from Kyiv.
In a nearby village, I walked through ruined apartment buildings, laid waste by Russian forces more than two months ago. The smell of charred remains lingered. An enterprising builder had put up a cardboard notice: “Windows replaced, cheap prices”. A trickle of people drove past to inspect their ruined apartments. There was no sign that the builder would do much trade soon.
Viktor Synytsky, 43, showed me where he had escaped death, thanks to his Russian jailers fleeing during a Ukrainian bombardment. In a cellar nearby, I saw blood and bullet-holes.
Ukrainian police had found the bodies of five men held prisoner there by Putin’s army.
If things remained gloomy in these shattered towns, the sense of foreboding was even worse, according to reports from the east, where Russian forces were making sporadic but steady progress with their blunt tactics, concentrating huge bombardments and slow movements of infantry.
In the south, after the fall of Mariupol, the Russians had a major supply line to the east, and had shut off all the Black Sea ports to the west of Crimea, a disaster for the export of grain.
Back in Kyiv, the sun shone and the streets were astonishingly well-kept — no rubbish at all in the streets or gutters. Cafés, supermarkets, phone-shops and even barbers and hairdressers had reopened. Still sandbags were stacked at restaurant doors and at places of worship. X-shaped metal barriers known as “hedgehogs” restricted passage in many places. There was a strict, 11pm curfew. Posters and electronic signs proclaimed the heroism of the soldiers and declared, “Slava Ukraini (glory to Ukraine)”.
Millions have been displaced or have left the country altogether — including the majority of the Jewish community. On the wall of the Chabad synagogue, run by the city’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Markovitch, and his wife Inna, was a photograph of the shul’s football team. I asked Rabbi Jonathan — who had served 12 years in the Israeli air force — how many of the football team players were now in Kyiv. None, came the answer.
I went with Rabbi Jonathan and the rebbetzin to visit an elderly gentleman, Boris Prister, in a smart Kyiv apartment (the couple call in on up to nine people a day to check on their welfare).
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch
The 87-year-old exclaimed: “They’re shooting at me with my own rockets.” He showed me photos of his various international trips — something that in Soviet times was forbidden to most people. He had never revealed his Jewish identity, so he was able to become the deputy chief of a secret Soviet production facility for missiles, based in Moscow, and had designed a key part.
Offered a food parcel, he said he and his wife didn’t really need it. Then he was given the opportunity to put on Tefillin for the first time in his life. His wife scowled and he said: “Perhaps next time.”
Next we visited a 73-year-old former gymnastics teacher, still elegant despite a debilitating illness. In her one-room flat, she asked for only one thing: a new Russian translation to accompany the book of Tehillim that had pride of place in her sitting-room cabinet.
The rabbi and rebbetzin hosted a wonderful Friday night dinner with an array of guests, including two non-Jewish local MPs and a Jewish drone hobbyist who suddenly became very useful to the war effort. The Saturday morning minyan, though, was one short.
Out on the streets, I met Alex Flolov, just 20 years old. Early each morning he patrolled a square mile of apartment blocks alongside the zoo — now closed — looking for spies. The Russians, he said, were smuggling them in to identify targets. He showed me a crater from a missile strike.
Part of it had struck a children’s playground; holes were gouged in the wooden slides, but no children had died when the rocket hit at 6am.
“They will never crush our spirit,” says Alex. “But we’re ready for worse.”
