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Last week, a friend asked me what I could learn from a four-day trip to Ukraine I was planning that I couldn't glean just by reading the news. It was a fair question. With the trip now behind me, I can answer.
I learned how strange it is to visit a country to which no plane flies and, as of last Monday, no ship sails — thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin's cruel and cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative through which Ukrainian farm products reached hungry countries like Kenya, Lebanon and Somalia. The only feasible way for a visitor to get from the Polish border to Kyiv, Ukraine, is a nine-hour train ride, where the sign inside the carriage door urges, "Be Brave Like Ukraine."
I learned that you need to download the Air Alert! app to your smartphone as soon as you enter the country. It sounds an alarm every time the system detects drones, missiles or other incoming aerial threats in your vicinity, something that happened time and again during my short stay. Following the alarm, a recording — in English by "Star Wars" actor Mark Hamill — intones: "Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don't be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness."
I learned that Kyiv is hopping. Despite what the U.S. Embassy says have been 1,620 missile and drone attacks on the city — and despite an economy that contracted 29% in the first year of the war — cars jam the roads, people dine in outdoor cafes on well-swept sidewalks and activists, civil servants and elected officials freely share divergent views with visiting columnists. To adapt a phrase attributed to Yitzhak Rabin, Ukrainians are going about their everyday lives as if there is no war, while waging war as if there is no everyday life.
I learned that every member of the U.S. Embassy staff in Kyiv, led by our courageous and cleareyed ambassador, Bridget Brink, volunteered for the duty. They have been separated from their families and living for months on end in hotel rooms. They have the job of overseeing one of the largest U.S. assistance efforts since the Marshall Plan, ensuring that tens of thousands of individual pieces of American military hardware in Ukrainian hands are properly accounted for, reconstituting an embassy that was gutted on the eve of Russia's invasion and keeping tabs on Russian war crimes — some 95,000 of which have been documented so far by the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office.
I learned what it was like to sit in conference rooms and walk along corridors that would soon be shattered by Russian ordnance. On Tuesday, I joined a diplomatic group led by United States Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power on a visit to the port of Odesa. Power met first with Ukrainian officials to discuss logistical options for their exports after Putin's withdrawal from the grain agreement, then with farmers to discuss issues such as de-mining their fields and de-risking their finances. The stately Port Authority building in which the meetings took place, a purely civilian target, was struck barely a day after our departure.