Andy Bell 🔸🇬🇧🇪🇺

Tonight I took the car and drove across all of Kyiv, just to see how my beloved city feels at this time. It’s a strange feeling. On the surface, you see the same utterly ordinary life that’s been here for almost all the ten years I’ve been wandering these streets. Streams of cars stuck in traffic on the immense Beresteiskyi Avenue, streetlights, neon signs, shops, advertisements, traffic lights flashing, pedestrians. Somewhere behind the lit-up windows, three or four million lives rush past you. Supermarkets are full of people picking up groceries on their way home from work. As usual, people sit outside the cafes, wrapped in blankets. The McDonald’s restaurants, glowing yellow, are full of people eating burgers -- as always, until the sirens start wailing again. Nearby, hipsters sip “Drunken Cherry” at tables and on the marble parapet over the underpass. The favorite little "Pita" with its awesome Middle Eastern food is open as usual. In short, it’s an utterly ordinary, chilly September weeknight in a big, vibrant metropolis. I swear, if you got in a car too and drove around this city without knowing you were in Kyiv, you’d never guess that a brutal, catastrophic war was being fought over it, right here and now. And amid all this, every couple of hours, somewhere in this vast city, death comes crashing down. Here, then there. An impact, columns of smoke, fires, videos on social media. A supermarket, a warehouse, a shop, a parking lot, a shopping mall, ambulances and fire trucks. Then somewhere else. And again. And tonight, sometime in the night, another apartment block will be brought crashing down to a terrible roar, and several more families will die beneath the rubble of their homes -- because one power-drunk, aging dictator has gone mad with impunity and the intoxicating taste of blood. That’s how this city lives, waiting for the heroically fighting army to hold out and save the world.