The brutality that Ukraine has been subjected to has given her countrymen a harsh sense of dignity that has to be seen to be believed. But six months of fear, adrenaline and sleep deprivation also cause tensions. Gaidai says the remarkable unity of the first few months has begun to give way to a feeling, familiar from the previous eight years of war in Donbas, that some parts of the country have come to see the war as something “over there”. In western Ukraine’s Lviv, teeming with refugees and foreign diplomats, journalists and aid workers, it’s possible to detect a degree of resentment – ​​especially with wealthy Kievites parking their SUVs all over its picturesque but impossibly narrow and taxing cobblestone streets. city. More than one exasperated Kievan suspects that prices have been raised to take advantage of the capital’s wealthy. Someone darkly suggested that a little more direct experience of war would teach Lviv some compassion. “F— them!” exclaimed one such acquaintance, who fled west when the offensive on Kyiv began in February. “I think that once the war is over, the people of Lviv should be banned from visiting Kyiv. Many people support this idea.” Irina Prudkova, an activist from Mariupol who showed me around the port shortly before the invasion in February, is more diplomatic. “They’re just people who don’t know anything about war,” he told me. She’s used to explaining, patiently, that Russian-speaking volunteers and soldiers from the Donbass have been fighting for Ukraine since 2014. Far more curious, she said, was the way faith in her homeland seemed to be overturned overnight on the 24th. “The people who supported Ukraine, who I thought would defend Mariupol, are now working for the Russians. And those who were always for Russia and called me a Banderite are fighting for Ukraine,” she told me by phone from Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine where a friend has lent her a room. He has no explanation for the strange reversal of faith and little time to philosophize. Her hometown is almost leveled. Her apartment, the neighbors tell her, was ransacked by an investigative team from the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency) as soon as the city fell. She and her husband Alexander have been reliably informed that their names are on arrest lists handed out to Russian soldiers at checkpoints.