I started writing this piece in an underground garage turned bomb shelter in the western Ukraine city of Lviv. Situated about 80km from the Polish border, it has not yet been shelled by the Russian military. While the air-aid sirens were going off every day during the first week of the full-scale invasion of my country, Tuesday night was the first time I bothered to take cover. I was trying to score responsibility points with my parents: they were about to go over the border to Poland and needed to see that their daughter, bent on remaining in Ukraine, was not putting herself in harm’s way.
Yet the harm is all over my country. Vladimir Putin, better known in Ukraine as khuilo (“dickhead” – my people have never been known for their deference), planned to conquer this land in two days. His delusion has been exposed by a pre-written article, Offensive of Russia and the New World, which was mistakenly published by one of the main Russian news outlets on 26 February. Having failed to crush the armed forces of Ukraine with his murderous blitzkrieg, Putin is terrorising its civilian population.
