Time to dare and endure
A dispatch from London
Today in the magazine, John Oxley writes:
It’s not quite a year since I was last in Kyiv. It seems absurd now, but I went there for sanctuary. I’d been stuck overseas by the UK’s Covid Red List. Spending ten days in Ukraine was the only way home. I went to my favorite restaurant there, Ostanya Barikada, which means “Beyond the Barricades.” It’s in the heart of Maidan Square, where pro-EU, pro-NATO protests toppled the government in 2014. It’s themed around the revolt. You can take a 3D tour on their website. Everything on the menu is Ukrainian, in style and origin. The walls display artefacts from protests in 1990, 2004, and 2014—each one taking the country further out of Russia’s unwelcome clutches and closer to the West. Now I see that square on the news every night, accompanied by sirens and explosions.
In some ways the war seems unreal. Unfathomable. One of the world’s largest armies is bearing down on a city I love. Russian artillery is coming to kill my friends. Ostanya Barikada is delivering food to militia checkpoints; they’ve switched from delivering bottles of beer to Molotov cocktails. Everyone I met in Kyiv is either fleeing or fighting.
Rational as I want to be about this, I cannot. …