‘We will fight’ Actors and lawyers get ready to take up arms

Kyiv’s middle classes brace for war

The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas – which falls on 7 January – or had left town for the holidays.

Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Last Friday’s dawn cyber-attack on government websites was the latest in a series of hostile acts.

What to do in the event of a military operation by Moscow, and whether to stay, flee or fight? The consensus – at least according to surveys – is that a third of the population is ready to take up arms. In the upmarket Podil district, with its art deco mansions, a new piece of graffiti read: “Biy Moskaliv!”(“Beat Up Russians!”)

Sitting in a law office just across the road, Serhii Filimonov explained what he intended to do, should the Kremlin attack. “There are about 50 of us. We will meet and decide where we can best fight,” he said. His group is made

up of middle-class professionals: IT staff, designers, actors, journalists. Filimonov runs a security business and starred in a film shown at Venice.

None of this is likely to alarm Russia’s defence ministry, which has sent 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s border.

But the Kyiv creatives know how to shoot. All are combat-hardened veterans of the 2014 war. Filimonov took part in the bloody battle for Ilovaysk, when the Russian army trapped Ukrainian forces, and was wounded by an enemy mortar strike.

“We have registered weapons. We will defend our homes,” Filimonov said. “Putin wants to go back to the borders of the Russian empire. You can see this in Belarus, Kazakhstan. Here in Ukraine he wants to create a tsarstvo – a tsardom. This is a war of civilisations. It’s the west versus Eurasia, democracy against slavery and authoritarianism. We want democracy and freedom.”

Most experts agree that Russia’s vastly superior army, air force and navy could quickly seize Ukrainian territory. But Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Kyiv’s former defence minister, says the Kremlin’s conscriptheavy military will face resistance, should it try to occupy towns and cities. Volunteers such as Filimonov and small army groups will launch bloody partisan attacks. “I don’t see any panic at all,” Zagorodnyuk said.

Masi Nayyem, a lawyer who founded the Podil practice, admitted he was looking forward to shooting at Russians again. In 2016 he fought with a paratrooper brigade in Avdiyivka, Ukraine’s frontline position outside rebel-held Donetsk. “In peace time you have to be serious, responsible. In war you don’t have any considerations or need to think about consequences. It’s black and white,” he said. d.

Talks between Russia and d the US, Nato and the Organization for rSecurity Security and Co-operation in Europe pe ended last week in a dead end. The e Kremlin has demanded assurances from the Biden administration that Ukraine and Georgia will never join n Nato. In essence it wants to overturn the postcold war order – restoring central and eastern Europe as a zone of Warsaw Pact-style Russian influence.

Beneath the Kremlin’s tough-man rhetoric lies a mystery. It is unclear why Putin is moving with such haste. His demands are “non-starters”, as the US’s negotiator and deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, put it.

Andrew Wilson, professor in Ukrainian studies at University College London, said the timing from the Kremlin’s perspective was opportune. Putin has jailed his chief domestic critic, Alexey Navalny, and squashed Navalny’s opposition movement. Russia was awash with cash, thanks to rising energy prices. The Kremlin faces off against a US administration it regards as weak and indecisive.

What Wh could happen next? “Creating a crisis c to create opportunities is what they [the Russians] do,” Wilson said. sa “I don’t think a full-scale invasion invasi is possibility number one. The Ukrainians U have pretty successfully advertised the huge cost of invasion invasi and occupation. But Putin has to have a win of sorts, either on European Europ security or Ukraine itself.”

All of o which presents observers with a dilemma: dilem how to report on a crisis that does d not quite feel like a crisis, and appears a largely to exist inside Putin’s Putin’ head?

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, the Russian political scientist Lila Shevtsova said the stand-off had little in common with the political deals at Yalta in 1945, or at the congress of Vienna in 1815. Back then, the participants stuck to the rules. “[Putin’s] aim, really, is a Hobbesian world order, built on disruption and readiness for surprise breakthroughs,” she wrote.

How a surprise breakthrough might morph into war is a topic of conversation inside the Kyiv government of comic-turned-president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has moved towards Nato and the west.

US intelligence agencies say the risk of invasion is “high”. Their Ukrainian counterparts think Moscow may be planning a “staged provocation”. This could be an attack on Russian citizens, or against Russian soldiers in the breakaway enclave of Transnistria. The Kremlin would blame the “attack” on far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

It is possible, of course, that Putin’s brinkmanship is part of an elaborate bluff, in a series of stress tests designed to reveal weaknesses among the west’s ruling class and the United States. Filimonov thinks a storm is coming. “Putin needs Ukraine,” he said. “An attempt to seize it is inescapable. We will fight until the end.”

‘Putin needs Ukraine ine – an attempt to seize ze it is inescapable. We will fight to the end’ d’