Kyiv’s decision to ban public celebrations of its independence day on Wednesday marks a rare blip in the apparent rapid recovery of the capital since the Russians were defeated in their attempt to capture the city in March.
Streets, shops and restaurants have been bustling, with trade in some cases returning to prewar levels, local people gather on the beaches in the August warmth and there have been only two missile attacks in the capital since the end of April, making the fighting appear distant.
Although some city restaurants were closing early at 7pm this week, the expectation is that the situation will be temporary. Even McDonald’s, which left Ukraine at the beginning of the war, has promised to return in September to the keen anticipation of Kyivans.
But the appearance of normality is deceptive: it is not hard to find evidence of the war. Even though the city is not supposed to host internal refugees, because it is not considered completely safe, there are 140,000 registered refugees and many more who have escaped privately.
Some gather at the Red Cross distribution centre, one of 11 in the city, at a former bank near the Maidan square in the heart of the city where food and medical parcels are handed to families, pensioners and those with disabilities, often on small incomes.
Tetiana Goienko, the head of the Kyiv Red Cross, said “because Kyiv is not supposed to host any displaced people, they have to rent their own accommodation”. But the capital is expensive and the available financial support is limited – a pensioner is given 3,000 hryvnas (£69) a month, jobless adults 2,000, while families get an extra 3,000 per child.
It can be hard to find jobs, with positions attracting dozens of applicants, although some sectors such as construction are said to be busy for obvious reasons. Those that do get work may carry the burden of this year’s events, which have forced as many as 13 million from their homes across Ukraine.
Katerina, 43, was a dental surgeon from Mariupol, who found herself in Kyiv for work at the start of the war, and so was separated from her 77-year-old mother, Raisa, for an agonising month. Eventually, after a desperate search, a colleague found her mother and she was able to get her safe passage out of the besieged southern city.
The apartment she lived in was destroyed, Katerina added, and she and her mother lost almost all their possessions in flight. With the Russians now in control of the city, ruined by the spring fighting, there is no prospect of returning.
Eventually Katerina began to rebuild and found a job working as an administrator for the Red Cross team, although she said “what I earn here in a month is what I used to earn in two days”. It is slow work rebuilding, although Katerina, who was born in Moscow and describes herself as ethnically Russian, is emphatic about the need for Ukraine to fight on.
“The only thing Russia has brought us is pain and suffering. We want to live in Ukraine. We don’t want anybody else to decide for us where to live,” she said. “My mother and I could have moved there and got citizenship super easy because we are both ethnic Russians, but we don’t want to – and the Russians don’t understand this.”
A few minutes walk away the fashionable ZigZag restaurant is now full in the evenings. Its owner, Liubov Tsybulska, says it is as busy as it was before the war, although there are some obvious changes, including a predominantly male waiting staff because so many women have fled the country, while men between 18 and 60 are normally prevented from doing so.
It has been a year of transformations for ZigZag. When the Russians were at the edge of the city it provided 700 meals for soldiers with the help of volunteers, then reopened on a part commercial, part voluntary basis, before gradually returning to near normality, aside from the curfew, which forces it to close at 9pm or 9.30pm when it would have been open until 2am at weekends.
For Tsybulska, ZigZag was always also a patriotic endeavour. “We are pulling Ukraine from Russia here with our food and values. Since we were open in 2016, when it was not fashionable, we insisted that waiters spoke in Ukrainian not Russian.”
But rather than the ostentation of the past, when the restaurant celebrates its seventh birthday shortly it will not have its customary party but instead donate the money that would have been spent to the armed forces.
So normal seeming is much of Kyiv life that some in the middle classes hope for a loosening of the remaining wartime restrictions.
On the beach one Sunday afternoon, Oleskandr, 52, says the war has made him very much in demand as a psychologist, but he hopes for a break from the pressure of his work, where he counsels soldiers dealing with life-changing injuries.
However, it is difficult to make plans, say Oleksandr and Svetlana, 44, because it is impossible to rely on normality lasting. He would like to take a short break abroad – “we hope martial law is eased at least so we can get out of the country for a holiday” – although they, too, insist Ukraine must fight as long as it takes to defeat the invaders.
But there remain worries about the medium-term health of the economy, whether winter will lead to another wave of displaced people arriving, and whether patience will wear thin with a war where a hoped-for counterattack shows no signs of materialising.
One opposition MP, who asked not to be named because they did not want to make criticisms in public, said they were worried “when people’s expectations finally hit reality” and they realise that war would be long and expensive to win. Busy Kyiv may look largely revitalised but the strains of the conflict may yet come to the forefront.
