A BITTER FROST descended on Kyiv on the first morning of March, and the mood grew chillier, too. For five days the Ukrainian capital has held off Russia’s massively superior armed forces. But the enemy remains near the gates, and a vast column of armoured vehicles, stretched out over 40 miles (65km) and closing in from the north-west, suggests things are about to get much worse–though its progress is being hampered by logistical problems and perhaps by Ukrainian action. In the evening a missile hit a television tower in the north-west of the city, reportedly killing a family of five and taking some services temporarily off the air. The missile may also have damaged part of the nearby memorial to the victims of the Babi Yar massacre by the Nazis. The talk in town is that residents must prepare for a siege–perhaps for a nightmare on the scale of Aleppo in 2012-16 or even Leningrad, which held out for nearly 900 days against the Nazis in 1941-44, at a horrific cost in lives.
On the morning of March 1st President Volodymr Zelensky announced he was putting an experienced soldier in charge of governing the wartime capital. General Nikolai Zhernov, a veteran of the Donbas war in 2014, would secure supply lines, hospitals and basic services in the event that things get much worse, he said. Ukraine’s security services also issued new warnings to citizens of Kyiv, urging them to install apps to report on advancing forces. The state cyber agency said it was blocking Russian mobile numbers. It asked citizens to report any phone lost to the invaders to the phone companies for blocking.
For the time being, Ukrainian authorities say the capital is not in immediate danger of being encircled, because the routes to the south-west remain clear. “The enemy is close,” said Mykola Povoroznyk, the deputy head of the city government, “but the task of avoiding a siege is achievable.” Food producers, drivers, and other essential services were doing everything to keep Kyiv going, he said. The city had set up a humanitarian hub to co-ordinate the response, but it wasn’t a situation in which they had much advance planning to call on. Until a week ago Kyiv was a peaceful European capital. “We’ve had to start from the ground up in almost every respect.”
In the city’s main station, panic has set in as families try to take the last trains to safer regions in the west. Just four trains left on February 28th, zigzagging along an unusual southbound, then westbound, route through goods depots and smaller towns to avoid the fighting in the immediate outskirts. The carriages are filled to the rafters: 16, 17, 18 people in compartments that usually carry six, sleeping on the floor and on top of one another. Women, children and the elderly have priority to board. That has left a lot of angry men, with aggressive soldiers putting them back in their place.
Ten minutes’ drive away from the station, the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital is busy. Everything has changed here since Vladimir Putin launched his war on February 24th. Mothers and babies have moved to basements with mattresses packed next to one another. According to its director, Vladimir Zhovnir, the hospital is now caring for 200 children, not the usual 650 or so, together with their anxious mothers. Four children and two mothers have been admitted with war injuries and the life of at least one of these children still hangs in the balance. The hospital is coping for now. But doctors fret that barely any planned operations, for example for the brain tumours that Dr Pavlo Plavskyi operates on, are taking place. Parents cannot or are too frightened to travel to the hospital with their children and that, he says, means that some will die as a result.
Dr Plavskyi says that many doctors, nurses and other staff have left Kyiv since February 24th, but many others have not even left the hospital and have barely slept. Maryna, a nurse, looks after critically ill babies, and normally there are eight nurses in her team giving one-to-one care. Now she says she is alone. Two nurses from her team cannot come to work because a bridge from where they lived has been blown up, and the rest have fled Kyiv. Maryna is now sleeping on a mattress on the floor next to ten babies and nine mothers, including a pair of twins. “I was on the 12th floor when I heard jets on the first day,” she says. She stayed because “the mothers can’t stay with no nurses,” and the babies need someone to insert their cannulas.
On Kyiv’s streets there are queues at the few supermarkets that are still open and at pharmacies. Everything else is closed. Shelves are depleted but not empty. In the shops The Economist visited there was no bread but there was water, pasta, chocolate, cheese, salami and other food good for sieges. No supplies had arrived since the war began, said one food-store manager who did not want to be named. He hoped they would resume tomorrow. Except for main roads there is barely any traffic, and few people are on the streets. Petrol has run out and garages are closed.
At one of the big international hotels, The Economist witnessed something resembling a war cabinet. In the chair was Alexei Alexeevich, 64, until February 24th a security guard but now reprising something like his former role as a major in the Soviet army. There was lots of work to do still, he reminded his colleagues in a stern baritone: taping up windows, barricading the doors, and securing whatever food supplies one could at this stage. He wouldn’t insist anyone stayed. There would be a van to the station for the staff who wanted to get out. Two of the young receptionists said they would take him up on the offer. They hope to reach Poland.
“War changes people,” says Mr Alexeevich. “Nobodies become leaders, and leaders become nobodies. The well-off go out and steal, and the homeless take up arms to protect property.” He says he hopes it will not change ordinary Ukrainians, a tolerant nation at heart. But as Mr Putin dials up the terror, the danger is that it will do exactly that. Hanna Sokolova, a journalist who lived in the Kharkiv residential district hit by Russian Grad missiles on February 28th, says she has been overtaken by negative feelings of “Russophobia”. Mr Putin’s war has driven her from her home. “For the first time in my life, I understood that I’m capable of killing someone.”