It is a glorious spring evening in Lviv and what could be better than a ballet gala at one of Europe’s grandest opera houses? The performance starts with an unusual announcement. In the event of an air raid siren, all spectators must go to the bomb shelter. The red-velvet seats are less than a third full – not for fear of going to a ballet in a war in which Russians have bombed a theatre, but because they can sell only 300 tickets since that is the bunker’s capacity. There is an emotional rendering of the national anthem for which the audience stand, hand on heart, and it is hard not to shed a tear, then the lights dim and the curtains open. The ballet was exquisite – ballerinas from Lviv and the eastern city of Dnipro performing fragments from La Bayadère and Don Quixote – the perfect antidote to a month spent reporting on the war and the kind of atrocities by the Russian army which, even as a seasoned correspondent, it is hard to stomach.
Before the performance I have coffee with the artistic director, Vasyl Vovkun. ‘I feel sorry it took a war for foreign journalists to discover us,’ he smiles. Me too. How did I not know this beautiful old central European city with its cobbled streets and trams, coffee-scented air from its wonderful cafés, tree-lined promenades with men playing chess on benches and babushkas selling lilac blooms? And this ornately decorated theatre, now the only one open in Ukraine. It closed when Putin launched his invasion in the dawn hours of 24 February, and joined in the war effort. The bunker became home to some of the refugees passing through Lviv, while its wardrobe department turned their skills to making tourniquets and camouflage webbing.
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