Kyiv
On the morning of 24 February, I woke just before seven as a tentative apricot dawn was spreading over scrubby flatlands dusted with light snow. The secret train was trundling into an unprepossessing town, houses scattered amid spindly pines, nothing to write home about. I didn’t even look for a station sign as they’d all been removed to fox Vladimir Putin’s mercenaries. This country is under martial law, a curfew, and as morning was breaking Ukraine was entering the fourth year of fighting off its vast neighbour’s vicious and unwanted advances.
We’d boarded the previous night near the Polish border (I know it sounds ridiculous but I am not allowed to say where) and I had claimed my couchette with toddler excitement. Two pillows, crisp sheets, comforter and brown-paper-bag dinner which I consumed immediately, including both mini bottles of red and white wine and marshmallows for pudding.
My cabin-mate was battle-hardened Dame Shelley Williams-Walker, formerly at No. 10, now Boris’s press agent, travel agent and personal organiser. She is also a lethally effective bouncer, I found, as people can crowd him for selfies. Especially here. Big in Ukraine. Not a lot of people know this but here croissants are confected with messy yellow icing in his honour, streets are renamed Boris Johnson Street (in a town near Odessa) and there’s even a pub in Kyiv with murals of, yes, you guessed.
When one Channel 4 telly anchor texted me to ask my brother to give him an interview on the anniversary, I put him off, saying I didn’t handle his media and anyway, he was too busy.
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