A Decision I Never Wanted to Make
My last days in Kyiv on the eve of war
This is part 2 (of 3) of my Ukraine-related reflections; this one is personal. Thank you to everyone who read and commented on last week’s post, Who Cares About Ukraine? Part 3 next week will focus on…whisky.
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24 February 2022, 4:30 am – Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
People weren’t expecting it. Colleagues, students, and everyone I talked to were adamant there would be no invasion. In the weeks leading up to it, I was on the fence. I spent nearly every waking, non-working hour glued to the news, agonising over possibilities. I drank way too much whisky to calm my frazzled nerves. I was a wreck.
It seems selfish to focus on how I was affected by events, but…(I will nonetheless – it’s the only story I have to tell).
Warnings and Doubts
My employer, the British Council, strongly urged foreign staff to leave in mid-January. There weren’t many of us left by then. When I arrived in Kyiv in 2010, there were around 20 to 30 foreign teachers. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, that number dropped dramatically and by 2022, only a handful remained.
Only one teacher left in January.
At first, I had no intention of leaving.
I couldn’t avoid the news, and the more I read, the more anxious I got. I cherry-picked articles that downplayed the likelihood of an invasion (confirmation bias, anyone?), but fear-mongering headlines vastly outnumbered the ones urging calm. And I’m rarely calm, even under the best of circumstances.
My friends and family were deeply concerned (to put it mildly).
Family Emails
My father, a US military man for a quarter of a century, much of it in Western Europe during the Cold War, was…worried.
His email:
23 January 2022
US is advising non-essential (families) embassy folks to start leaving on Monday.
Here's how a battle plan would play out:
1. Electrical nodes and communications will be the first to go down.
2. Key military facilities will be next, especially command and control. I'm not in the loop on Ukraine’s capabilities.
3. Britain and US have been flying surveillance flights for the past few weeks.
4. Other stuff going on, not at liberty to discuss.
5. Advanced Russian aircraft now in Belarus.
My concern is key government leadership and facilities being neutralized, ie Kiev (sic). With that comes collateral damage. Russia is dead set on not wanting Ukraine or any more of their former satellites in Nato so they may do unpredictable things.
Just to be ready, have all key documents, financial, travel documents ready if you have to get out. Of course, you can come here if it comes to that.
My response to my family in an attempt to reassure them.
28 January 2022
Not much to report. Everyone generally okay here. Emi stayed home all week, she's fine today, but Olya and I seem to have caught whatever she had and we've both been ill this week - probably omicron but who knows! I stayed home Tuesday and today, worked online Wed and Thur and will be back in the office tomorrow till late. Got to spend some extra quality time with Emi this week and yesterday evening was particularly fun with some nice snow, so I pulled her in the sled near our local playground and ran up and down over the small hills and she had fun.
Hope everyone's not worrying too much, Ukrainians are all pretty calm about things and don't expect much to happen. Putin is pretty nuts but even he has to believe that any kind of attack will be catastrophic for him and Russia, especially economically. Despite all the news you hear about 'evacuations' it turns out that a majority of staff and families at the UK and US embassies have stayed, only a minority actually left. And other embassies here - EU, and others - haven't evacuated anyone and most aren't even advising its citizens to leave just yet.
We're still deciding on the best course of action - we're fortunate that Olya has a visa. The concern among US or UK citizens with Ukrainian wives is that they don't all have visas and are scrambling to get one just in case. But if things look a bit dicey, we at least don't have that to worry about.
Anyway, will keep you posted, but remember that the media - wherever and whoever they are - like to splash headlines with doom and gloom laying out every possible scenario, no matter how likely or unlikely - they get more clicks and eyeballs.
That email aged like milk.
Preparing for the Worst
My brother-in-law forwarded a long, unsettling message from a friend in the SAS (the British Special Air Service—similar(ish) to the Navy Seals). He was experienced in disaster preparation, and his list of precautions read like a survival guide from hell. Trudging hundreds of miles with heavy packs, rationing food and water, weapons, navigating checkpoints, avoiding threats. The tone was grim. (That message, shared in confidence anyway, is long gone, sadly.)
People were assembling emergency bags with essential documents, food and water. We packed some things, too – just in case.
Eventually, my nerves got the better of me and I was ready to leave. It wasn’t so much me I was worried about, but my daughter.
The problem? My wife wouldn’t budge.
Logistically, leaving wasn’t simple. Though she had an American visa, neither of us wanted to go to the US. She was open to staying with my sister and brother-in-law in the UK, but her visa wasn’t ready yet. She’d applied for one for my sister’s wedding that summer.
And beyond logistics, there were…other reasons. Our relationship was on shaky ground. Olya didn’t want to leave her family behind either.
The Final Push
Saturday, 12 February: I got a phone call in between my morning classes.
"I would leave ASAP if I were you," our teaching centre director warned. The US and UK embassies - both, since I’m a dual citizen – were also urging me to get out immediately.
I was completely frazzled. Teaching online at home, talking to my director between classes, and then afterwards, I rushed to the teaching centre to conduct IELTS speaking exams.
I haven’t been back to the office since.
In a panic I booked wildly overpriced flights for me and my daughter to leave on 14 February, the day after her 4th birthday, before dashing off to do my exams.
Just to be on the safe side.
We had return tickets for mid-March. During the birthday party, my mother-in-law reassured me that nothing was going to happen. “Don’t fall for the propaganda.”
Even with tickets in hand, I was a nervous wreck. My director called during the party to warn me that airspace closures were imminent. Our flight was scheduled just before that deadline, so we were…okay…(I hoped).
I tried distracting myself with the Super Bowl that Sunday night after the party, thinking “God help you, Putin, if you dare interrupt this.”
I barely registered the game – my mind was elsewhere.
My daughter and I made it to the UK, where – thanks to another COVID outbreak – we were all teaching online anyway. Some of my students, who I had assured I was staying, felt betrayed. A couple even mocked me, saying I was being overcautious (though they didn’t quite put it that way).
Then, that weekend, disaster struck – Storm Eunice hit.
Power outages. No internet. No way to contact work. It was a Friday and I had classes that day and the next. My sister was able to send a message on my behalf and they were none too pleased: “You left Ukraine because you were worried about an invasion and now you can’t teach because of a storm?”
Power returned Tuesday and I resumed teaching. By Wednesday, 23 February, I was feeling rough and told the office I wouldn’t be able to teach the following day. It turned out that all of us – me, my sister and brother-in-law – had been hit with Covid.
And then the full-scale war broke out.
I awoke to texts from my mother-in-law and father.
Kyivites piled into their cars and started fleeing. The streets were choked with traffic. The so-called predictions at the start of the invasion were that Ukraine would barely last three days before the Russians descended upon Kyiv.
Small problem: my wife’s passport was still at the UK embassy, awaiting her visa. And they were closed.
And she too, coincidentally, had Covid.
I called the UK embassy hotline in desperation. My director tried to help. I was panicking from the safety of a couch in the UK, while my daughter, bewildered, asked what was happening.
Friends messaged me, strategising ways for Olya to escape. From a group chat of university friends:
“She needs to break it down into chunks and make her way just to the next city/bus stop/whatever... And she needs to move NOW and not wait for an opening... It will only get harder and harder. Once Russian troops are in Kyiv, it'll be a different game altogether.”
Eventually, the embassy returned her passport and the next day she crammed into a car with her sister, mother, and a friend (plus her baby) and endured a 72-hour drive to Warsaw. The borders, predictably, were mobbed.
Luckily, they had a flat to stay in thanks to the generosity of my friend Rachel, who just happened to be away on holiday with her family at the time.
In mid-March, we all reunited in Vienna.
We’re still here.
This was a tough read. I can't begin to imagine the stress of having to move quickly with a child in tow. I appreciate you sharing, though. If we don't share real stories, mythology moves in to take the space.
Damn Daniel, that's an incredible tale. I don't know how you weathered it all, I would've been a gibbering mess in the corner.