THE CITY IS SINKING INTO SPRING FOG, but it is still cold. Since yesterday, here, in the center of Kyiv, you can tell a story about the war on every street corner. Almost every intersection is guarded day and night by armed members of the Territorial Defense.

"A LITTLE GIRL looked at me with a friendly expression. She was coloring the backrest of a wooden bench with a piece of chalk. She tried to tell me something, but she was interrupted by her grandfather, who seemed annoyed. “Listen here,” he said to me in a somewhat brazen voice, “I told my daughter, ‘Let’s buy the apartment in Kyiv.’ But she replied, ‘Nobody wants to live in Kyiv, with its stuffy big city air! We should get a nice apartment under the green trees of Bucha, outside of Kyiv.’ And, being the foolish person I am, I agreed!” He looked at me reproachfully, as if I were the one who had persuaded him to buy an apartment in a pleasant suburb now smothered in fire, rockets, and mortar shells."