The Kyiv I returned to is battered, but not broken

COMMENTARY

Edward Johnson, Sibylline’s Head of Global Analysis, returns to the city that shaped his life and finds Ukrainians steeling themselves for another punishing winter without surrendering their resolve or democratic expectations.

By Edward Johnson, Associate Director and Head of Global Analysis,

TELLING family, friends and colleagues that Kyiv is your August holiday destination elicits many different reactions.

In my recent experience, these range from genuine concern from those closest to me, including full-time residents of the city, to perplexity, to excitement for an adventure, through to a concern for my wellbeing that previously I would not have expected from acquaintances who expressed it.

To be frank, from the first time I went to Kyiv in 2009 as part of my undergraduate degree, most people have been unable to understand why this country would be my destination of choice. Yet it has been.

My first years in Ukraine gave me a confidence that a naive, rural, middle-class Englishman needed to gain.

As I returned year after year, the country shaped my academic and professional career, but perhaps its greatest gift to me was my wife, whom I married in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 2018.

Our last visit to Kyiv was in 2024 and was a true release of emotion for both of us. It was an opportunity to see family and friends after two years of war.

Our trip was almost sentimental; aside from the daily power outages and the odd air-raid siren, Kyiv ‘almost’ felt like its pre-war, indeed pre-pandemic, self.

Certainly, the majority of people I have met in Ukraine in 2026 believe their country will prevail in this conflict, their confidence unbroken.

While there may be a sense of resignation to the hardship of the oncoming winter, I have not perceived a sense of culmination or exhaustion among the population.

Kyiv is starkly different to 2024, at least from my perspective – from the number of damaged buildings, closed or shuttered businesses and, perhaps most notably, demographically.

Writing this in the dog days of summer in the northern reaches of Kyiv, I am continually struck by the cohabitation of teenagers and the elderly.

The former gather in groups, enjoying the late summer, drinking, playing music, scrapping and generally doing what teenagers do. Pensioners prefer an early evening stroll along the riverbank and through the parks, fantastically renovated from their post-Soviet dilapidation.

Between these two generations, the absence of so many working-age adults, particularly men, is difficult to ignore.

As the war heads into its sixth year, its fronts range from trench warfare to both sides targeting sites thousands of kilometres away from their respective capitals with enduringly rudimentary and increasingly technical munitions.

This visit has felt different.

Kyiv feels bruised and sullen. My family, friends and their friends and family are simultaneously resolute and unbowed, yet inhaling as much summer air as they can ahead of a winter, the prospect of which few relish.

Recent political developments have dominated many of my conversations here.

Now-former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s call for presidential elections, among those I spoke to, elicited ridicule and disdain.

Aware that in Ukrainian politics stars rise and fall faster, more readily than even British prime ministers, those I spoke to seem sanguine about Ukraine’s fortunes, Fedorov aside.

Certainly, Ukrainians have not lost the one aspect of their political life that separates them from their neighbours in Russia: a clear and growing sense of accountability and expectation from their political leaders.

Since 2009, I can attest to moments of chaos and comedy – read: a sitting MP being thrown into a dumpster outside parliament. Authoritarian laws were passed, only for the people of Ukraine to assert themselves and overcome their drift away from democracy.

Certainly, these past four and a half years have tested every Ukrainian I know in a multitude of ways.

If there is one thing my August holiday to Kyiv has taught me, it is that despite the prospect of another freezing winter without power and possibly water, European dithering and American indifference, Ukrainians know that the alternative offered by their neighbour to the north-east represents a far worse future for them and their country.