The piercing screams of children mingled with the barking of traumatised dogs and the shouts of soldiers desperately trying to maintain order, as the 14.07 to Ivano-Frankivsk pulled into Kyiv’s central station.
There was a crowd of thousands on platform one, surging towards the blue carriages and desperate to secure a prized place on a ride westwards out of the Ukrainian capital. Most people would not be able to board.
“Look at these faces around us, they are exactly the same as in the photographs from the second world war, and it’s just five days. Can you imagine what will happen in a month?” asked Tanya Novgorodskaya, 48, an art historian who arrived at the station on Tuesday afternoon with her 15-year-old daughter.
She had bought tickets for six different trains, but soon realised they counted for nothing. Instead, there was a boarding algorithm: first mothers with children, then women, then old people. Others were kept away by the police and soldiers standing guard.
Quickly, the train was crammed full. Families had to make split-second decisions, as mothers and children were allowed to board but grandparents told to wait behind.
This was the sixth day of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and by now fear had taken over. In the first days, there was a sense of shock and disbelief. Then came pride and inspiration, at the surprisingly resilient Ukrainian response and the unity of Ukrainian society.
But the success at repelling the initial Russian assault comes with a terrifying caveat. With Putin’s plan A failing, will his plan B involve turning Kyiv into Aleppo or Grozny?
The missile strike on a residential block in Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on Monday, followed by another strike that hit the city’s central square on Tuesday morning, led many in Kyiv to realise what the capital could be up against in just a few days.
On Tuesday there was another reminder of the sheer power that Ukraine is up against, when a missile strike hit Kyiv’s television tower, reportedly killing at least five people. The tower is close to the memorial site that commemorates the victims of Babyn Yar, the ravine where Nazi soldiers massacred up to 150,000 people during the second world war – including more than 30,000 Jews.
The Russian defence ministry warned residents of the capital to flee, promising airstrikes against an array of targets.
Like many, Novgorodskaya had underestimated the ferocity and barbarity of the oncoming invasion, and ignored those who told her she should leave. Even when the missiles started falling, she decided to stay and tough it out. On Tuesday, though, she changed her mind, having seen footage of the missile attacks on civilian areas of Kharkiv.
“We realised it might be the last chance to get out. Personally, I would stay and try to fight, but I think if you have children, you should leave,” she said.
She and her daughter had taken only a small grey hand luggage case between them, for a trip that could end up being indefinite. She hoped that, by evening, they might be able to force their way on to a train.
The crush to board the 14.07 was too intense for many to even attempt, and as pleading wails emanated from the scrums around each carriage door, a middle-aged couple stood some metres back, carrying a suitcase and a five-litre bottle of water, their brown boxer dog standing alongside them, panting nervously.
The man, Yuri, said his children lived in Munich and had been pleading with him for weeks to leave Ukraine, but like most people here, he had simply not believed Putin was capable of launching the kind of war that is now under way.
On the first night of the assault, he and his wife slept in the basement of their apartment block. It was icily cold, structurally insecure and there was no toilet. Since then, they had been sleeping in the bathroom of their ninth floor apartment and hoping for the best. When they saw images of the missile attacks on Kharkiv on Monday, they made the decision to flee.
“I am scared for what’s coming and I really want to get out of here,” he said.
But Yuri and his wife were far too low down the priority list, and far too polite, to have any chance of boarding the train. His wife tried to make the case that he had high blood pressure and had passed out the previous day, but he shushed her out of embarrassment, and nobody was listening anyway.
Finally, with a grinding of wheels and a hiss of smoke, the train pulled out of the station, a huddle of humans visible through the grimy windows and the faces of small children squashed against the glass.
On arrival in western Ukraine, many will have a further gruelling journey to get to the border with Poland, Slovakia or Hungary, where people have reported waiting times of several days this week.
Yuri and his wife were left behind on the platform along with thousands of others, hoping they might be luckier next time. An elderly man with an amputated leg stumbled on crutches, as his wife tried to rouse his spirits to wait another few hours and try for a spot on the next train west. A young couple hugged each other in support, both of them crying. A woman leaned against a pillar, dejected, tears falling on the cat she was cradling in her arms.
Adebayo Babatunde, a Nigerian management student who has been studying in Kyiv for the past six months, appeared to have little chance of being allowed to board, and no real idea of where he might go if he did. He was speaking to his sister, a British citizen who lives in London, via WhatsApp. He had applied for a UK visa in Ukraine weeks ago, she said, but had no response, and she could not get through to the Home Office or the British embassy.
“Please help my brother to get on a train,” implored the voice coming from the phone.
The train station is one of the few hubs of activity in Kyiv, which a week ago was a fully functioning, lively European capital city, but is now a ghost town. Khreshchatyk, the city’s broad central thoroughfare, was almost completely deserted on Tuesday. Most shops are closed, with the only signs of life the queues outside pharmacies.
On the edge of the city, more and more checkpoints spring up each day. On Tuesday, army cranes were lifting concrete blocks into the road to form barricades in several locations. The main checkpoints are manned by professional soldiers, while hundreds of minor posts are guarded by nervy volunteers, many of whom have never handled weapons before.
Digital billboards on the outskirts of town announce: “Putin has lost! The whole world is with Ukraine,” while the information tableaux at the side of the highway announce: “Air temperature +1, road temperature +2, Russians, fuck off!”
The threat from the Russian defence ministry appeared to justify the fears of Yuri, voiced on the platform earlier in the day as he explained his decision to leave.
“It was hard to believe Russia could strike Kharkiv, but now it’s clear what the plan is. They’re going to do here what they did in Chechnya.”
