Great Western Coffee Shop

An Ukrainian friend long resident in the UK recently returned home for ten days to meet her brother (a paramilitary firefighter) and a friend. She flew from Stansted to Rzeszow in Eastern Poland  and took a bus to Przemysl on the border with Ukraine and then an overnight train  to Kyiv, some 300 miles away, in a four-berth sleeper compartment that was not very comfortable. This enabled her to “sleep in” when the train arrived at 0215, rather than de-training and being on her own with luggage at that time of the morning.

Life in the capital city seemed almost normal, though sirens sounded a number of times and she spotted a couple of missiles.

On the return train journey, there was an oppressive checking of passports by aggressive officials. She was travelling on her British passport, which an official looked at with a sneer, asking “What’s this?”  It may not have helped that she primarily speaks Russian – as do around 12-15% of Ukrainians, with another 20-30% using both Russian and Ukrainian. Historically, Russian was more widely spoken, but the war has led to a shift towards Ukrainian.

The officials took away all the passengers’ passports but returned them before the train crossed into Poland.

Though she's been to Ukraine at least once since the invasion, to "rescue" her mother, without problems with her phone she had trouble getting it to work this time, not only when contacting people back in England, but when trying to communicate with the taxi driver who'd called to collect her from her hotel. She had to buy a new SIM card with a new number.