A Grim Reality Confusion As The World Turns On Its Head In A Just A Few Days

Last Monday, Oleh Synehubov was wearing a sharp suit with a neatly knotted mauve tie as he sat in an over- furnished room in the grand regional administration building in Kharkiv discussing his plans for his region’s next quarterly budget.

- Shaun Walker

Five days later, dressed in combat fatigues, he was giving a video address to citizens, heralding the repulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine’s second-largest city, and announcing that anyone on the streets after 6pm would be “liquidated”, as the Ukrainian army attempted to weed out saboteur groups in Kharkiv.

It was a week of grim transformation in the lives of almost every Ukrainian, after Vladimir Putin launched a ruthless assault on the supposed “brotherly nation” of Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands have fled to the west of the country to avoid advancing troops and missiles, with many spending long hours in queues at checkpoints on the way and at the borders with Poland and Hungary. Many more have stayed and made the decision to fight.

“I’ll be honest, I’m really scared. It’s the first time I’ve held a gun,” said 50-year-old Alexander, brandishing a shotgun at a barricade near a village outside Kyiv on Saturday. Behind him, an older man looked out across nearby fields through a pair of binoculars while women were preparing crates of molotov cocktails as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

The speed and effectiveness with which so many Ukrainians have mobilised has been an impressive sight, particularly as so few genuinely believed Putin would launch such an all-embracing attack on the country. True, he had been massing troops around Ukraine’s borders for the past three months, and US and British intelligence released ever more apocalyptic warnings of the scale of what he was planning.