He What…!!?? (He being Putin)
My wife’s impression from 2/24/2022
This is Chapter 9 of our book “Accidental Ukrainians” which is being serialized on Substack.
The famous visit week came and went, the food eaten, the wine and spirits drunk, the sights explored, the shopping done, the gifts exchanged, the tears spilt, the good-byes said, the warm embraces offered, and our first with the family was over.
We all followed the “case of Russian military exercises on the borders” with a tinge of eye-rolling and sarcasm. It smelled of bluff and muscle flexing, that seemed juvenile and loud. “The loudest in the room, they say…” Ukrainians did not panic, neither were they surprised- after all, the country was at war since Crimea was occupied. The hot zone was the East, but the rest of Ukraine has operated in the “business as usual mode”, which inevitably affected every person who was not immediately present where the “action” took place.
My knowledge of that war as a US citizen, too caught up in my own job to pay attention to anything else in the world, extended to “they are fighting for Crimea, not sure who started/did not intend to give up/whose fault it is, the government, the president, of which country”? In a word: ignorance (is bliss).
It was not until we landed in the Solomenskiy district of soon to become our beloved Kyiv…
