Kyiv
On the morning of 24 February, I woke just before seven as a tentative apricot dawn was spreading over scrubby flatlands dusted with light snow. The secret train was trundling into an unprepossessing town, houses scattered amid spindly pines, nothing to write home about. I didn’t even look for a station sign as they’d all been removed to fox Vladimir Putin’s mercenaries. This country is under martial law, a curfew, and as morning was breaking Ukraine was entering the fourth year of fighting off its vast neighbour’s vicious and unwanted advances.
We’d boarded the previous night near the Polish border (I know it sounds ridiculous but I am not allowed to say where) and I had claimed my couchette with toddler excitement. Two pillows, crisp sheets, comforter and brown-paper-bag dinner which I consumed immediately, including both mini bottles of red and white wine and marshmallows for pudding.
My cabin-mate was battle-hardened Dame Shelley Williams-Walker, formerly at No. 10, now Boris’s press agent, travel agent and personal organiser. She is also a lethally effective bouncer, I found, as people can crowd him for selfies. Especially here. Big in Ukraine. Not a lot of people know this but here croissants are confected with messy yellow icing in his honour, streets are renamed Boris Johnson Street (in a town near Odessa) and there’s even a pub in Kyiv with murals of, yes, you guessed.
When one Channel 4 telly anchor texted me to ask my brother to give him an interview on the anniversary, I put him off, saying I didn’t handle his media and anyway, he was too busy. Which was true. ‘It’s the one country where they still like him,’ was the ungracious reply.
I found I took like duck to water to introducing myself to people as ‘seester of Borees’ if anyone wanted to talk to me, which they didn’t really. Shelley, aka The Shellster, is soft on fans but adamantine when telly hacks shout ‘Over here Boris, Good Morning Britain’ – as I found out in the capital an hour or so later – but for now, we are still on the train.
As there were no signs to tell us where we were, I opened Google Maps on my phone, and noticed that a derelict house by the track had its roof stoved in. Oh, and another. The travelling blue dot on Google Maps told me I’d woken in Bucha, a dormitory town of Kyiv. This is where many innocent townspeople had been tied up and shot in the head for the crime of being Ukrainian, a town where mass graves were discovered and the Russians had claimed the murders had been staged or carried out by the Ukrainian army.
Minutes later, breakfast arrived in a brown paper bag. I wasn’t hungry enough to face the croissant with beef and vegetables, although Boris told me later (he was in the couchette next door) that he’d managed to choke his down.
The train arrived in Kyiv at 8 a.m. and one of the advantages of being ‘entourage’ was getting into a waiting convoy and driving across the train tracks to leave the station, while others had to queue for the coach. That was pleasing. In my position as seester of, you have to take the wins, you know.
At 11 p.m., back in my room, the air raid siren went off. Then a Tannoyed announcement to go to the basement
I would say that the heavy hours of the day commemorating yet another anniversary of a pointless illegal war passed in a blur of interviews, panels and speaking to world leaders – but I can’t speak for Boris, who is continuously referred to here and on stage as ‘Prime Minister’, despite his feeble protests.
Dinner was with a former Ukraine ambassador to London and Charles Moore of this parish, a splendid local feast of platters of sliced fat, borscht served in hollowed-out cabbages, pierogi and squirty chicken kievs, washed down with horseradish vodka, almost every dish served with a blob of sour cream. At 11 p.m., back in my room, the air raid siren went off. Then a Tannoyed announcement to go to the basement.
I opened my window and watched the drones streak past the golden domes of churches like shooting stars and went down, as ordered, into the bomb shelter. ‘Do I have to stay down here all night?’ I asked a Chinese American from the World Bank. He said no, I could go back to my room but to stay well away from the window. Then he glanced around the other guests seated at tables and looked confident he’d given me sound advice. ‘If it’s cruise missiles,’ he explained, ‘and not Shahed drones, the Americans would be down here. They get better intel.’
On 24 February I began the day in Bucha and ended it in a bomb shelter and the sound of gunfire in the night sky. It makes an anecdote, I guess. A diary entry.
But this is all day every day for the indomitable Ukrainians, the bravest people I know, for three long years. If only the darkest hour was just before dawn.
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