WHEN RUSSIA’S president sends 190,000 troops to invade your country, which he refers to as “historically Russian lands”, one logical place of retreat stands out. That is Lviv, a city that was Polish from 1918 to 1939 and part of other central European states before that. It is a place of baroque buildings, art academies and fiercely anti-Russian sentiment. Its location, in the far west of the country, could make it the last place in Ukraine that Russia tries to conquer. That makes it appealing not just for those fleeing the rest of the country, but also for those eyeing up a potential seat for Ukraine’s government if Vladimir Putin’s forces manage to seize the capital, Kyiv.
Life in Lviv is not completely untouched by the war. The town has not yet been the site of any fighting, but shops and restaurants are mostly shut and some have been boarded up. Long queues snake from every cash machine. Air-raid sirens blare during the day and a curfew begins at 10pm each night. Checkpoints have sprouted up on the city’s edges. Nerves jangled on February 26th after reports said that Russian helicopters and 60 paratroopers showed up several hundred kilometres west of Kyiv, suggesting that Russia might try to cut off Lviv from the rest of the country.
Yet patriotic spirit remains strong. Ukrainian flags are draped from windows on quiet streets. A volunteer network has sprung up to assist those arriving from the rest of the country. Local university students are rolling out mattresses on their dormitory floors for compatriots with nowhere to go. The shops which remain open do so thanks to fearless workers plugging on. At SDV, a café in the city centre, the owner makes cappuccinos and operates the till with one hand while clutching her infant child in the other.
Some Ukrainians fleeing the fighting have opted to retreat to small towns and villages where relatives live, in the hope that the war passes them by. But for others Lviv is a better redoubt. Russian forces may not seek to occupy it at all and, if they do, it is close to Poland, an EU and NATO country that is welcoming Ukrainian refugees. But there is just one good road to Lviv from the capital, and traffic jams extend for kilometres. Some drivers are running out of fuel en route. Other refugees have hopped onto packed trains.
Yuliia Silyuk, a fresh arrival, did not have time to pack everything when she fled Kharkiv at dawn on February 24th. Now she cannot get what she needs in Lviv. “I was looking for socks but everything is closed,” she says. Ms Silyuk’s family drove for 27 hours to reach the city. “We were lucky to get here so quickly. Our colleagues left later, they are still driving,” she says. She will head on to Poland with her children, but her husband, a man of military age, is barred from leaving the country under martial law.
Long-term accommodation is hard to come by. Dmytro Hidulianov, a phone sales attendant, moved to Lviv from Kyiv days before war broke out. He complains about paying rent in two places, before pausing to wonder whether anyone will be collecting rent in Kyiv on March 1st. “I tried to book an apartment, they are really hard to find,” he says. He is paying nightly to stay in a pricey hotel (by Ukrainians’ standards). Despite the squeeze, prices have risen by only 10-20%, says Mariia, an estate agent. “Not everyone makes business from this,” she says.
The idea that Lviv could be a Ukrainian haven was cemented in mid-February when most big Western embassies relocated their staff from Kyiv to hotels in the city. But in recent days many have moved on again, this time across the border into Poland and Moldova. Many residents, and those arriving, hope the city is peripheral to Mr Putin’s plans for Ukraine, which centre on Kyiv as the birthplace of Slavic civilisation a millennium ago. Many big firms have sent at least some of their board members to Lviv to work.
But the Ukrainian government is not yet willing to retreat. The West is worried that by staying in Kyiv, top officials risk being killed—or forced under duress to agree to concessions they would never freely accept. But Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is refusing to budge, saying he needs anti-tank ammunition, “not a ride”. Civil-society leaders in the capital are making plans to resist any government set up by Russia.
The Ukrainian government does see the value of surviving even if Kyiv falls. To that end it has dispersed ministers around the country and beyond, says a diplomat. Lviv is the strongest domestic candidate for an alternative base, but a bolthole abroad is also an option. In 1939, after Hitler’s troops stormed Warsaw, the president of Poland moved his government to Kuty, a small town now in western Ukraine. It lasted less than a week there before relocating to Paris.
Some in Lviv put faith in the notion that Russia knows how hated it is in western Ukraine, and so will not seek to occupy the area. It has long been considered a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism. In the late 19th century, notes Yaroslav Hrytska, a historian in Lviv, when the Russian tsar on two occasions banned the speaking of Ukrainian between his subjects, many Ukrainian nationalists hopped over to Lviv, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where no such rules applied.
But nowhere in Ukraine feels secure at the moment. “Today every city must be prepared,” says Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, speaking mid-raid from a bunker full of children’s artwork beneath the town hall. “I don’t think Lviv is completely safe, but we are prepared,” says Irina, a pharmacist who was born in the city, from the back of a queue to withdraw cash. She has a bag packed, ready for a hasty departure. ■
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