Rather surprisingly, Ukraine’s capital Kyiv seems far removed from the ongoing crisis with Moscow.
One would expect Kyiv to be utterly subsumed by a sense of trepidation, for the city’s frightful civilians to barricade themselves inside their homes with piles of bullet-stopping sandbags.
Instead, it seems the Ukrainian capital is mostly indifferent to the prospect of a Russian invasion.
Those with whom I spoke, be it at Kyiv’s airport or inside the city proper, all seem utterly convinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to unnerve both Ukraine and the West, but he will not actually order an invasion.
The striking indifference of the average Joe here in Kyiv to what the Ukrainian leadership describes as “the White House’s hysteria” is difficult to explain.
The people in the capital seem to outright reject U.S. reports that warn of an imminent Russian invasion, reasoning they know Putin far better than U.S. President Joe Biden does.
Those who did take the myriad of warnings from both Washington and Jerusalem to heart are Israelis from mixed families in the capital, many of whom have already left Ukraine.
They haven’t left in droves mind you, but certainly in large enough numbers that seem somewhat unconventional.
So much so, in fact, that Israel’s flag carrier El Al has decided to schedule additional flights from Kyiv to Ben Gurion Airport due to the sudden spike in demand which saw every flight thus far packed to the brim with passengers.
By Sunday night, some 650 Israelis and their Ukrainian family members will have departed from Kyiv to Israel on three separate flights.
Washington's intelligence agencies marked Wednesday as the day Putin will most likely order some Russian operation, not an invasion perhaps, but a move many fear will serve as tinder for a war that will change the current world order.
Putin, on his part, is expected to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Schultz this coming Tuesday. Many around the world hope this meeting will convince Putin to opt out of going to war since Germany is the largest importer of Russian gas and oil.
Said meeting was sharply criticized by British Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace, who on Sunday equated efforts to appease Putin with the failed 1938 Munich Convention — at the conclusion of which France and Britain agreed to Hitler’s demand to annex the Sudetenland to prevent a German invasion of Czechoslovakia, which happened anyway months later and presaged the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of the second world war.
“It may be that [Putin] just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West,” Wallace told the Sunday Times.
The meeting is seen as the epitome of a failed effort to appease aggressive dictators. And while Wallace’s criticism wasn’t pointed at anyone in particular, it does reveal certain disagreements among Western powers over how to respond to the threat posed by Putin.
Germany, for example, has been much more cautious and soft-spoken compared to its NATO allies — in part, perhaps, owing to its dependence on Russian gas.