If I had one wish before boarding the overnight train from Przemyśl, in Poland, to Kyiv – aside from an unlikely outbreak of peace among the nations – it was the following. Please, please God: no fat drunk men in the cramped four-person cabin tonight.
I can abide 12 hours on a bunk bed. I can stay awake all night, itchy, hungry, bored, cold. And it’s not that I am prejudiced against fat or drunk men. I just cannot abide their snoring. The low, cabin-shaking white noise I have endured on previous trains has left me with deep psychic scars. I was lucky this time.
On Friday evening three leaf-like, silent women shared the cabin with me. They entered, quietly said hello, quietly drank some herbal tea, then quietly clamped ear mufflers to the sides of their heads. Everyone was asleep within minutes.
Anywhere but Kyiv
Kyiv is frozen. “Don’t go there,” a British diplomat friend told me when I mentioned going back a few weeks ago. Some Kyivans I know have swapped the city for the countryside. A lot of couples with children don’t want to hang around during this, the most calamitous winter of the war. More than 600,000 people have left the capital in the last few weeks, says the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko.
Their enemy has spent over ten billion rubles in January alone flinging missiles designed to sink warships at apartment buildings and heating grids. The outlook is so desperate, one friend admitted, that Kyivans are discovering that they actually do, after all, love their mother-in-law – just so long as she has a nice, safe house somewhere in the country.
Ukrainians like to joke away their desperation, their exhaustion and their contempt. Contempt is the precise word for how they feel. If you could convert their pure hatred for the enemy into energy you could give light and heat to a million homes. Meanwhile the schools are closed. Offices are closed. Rare plants in the botanical gardens freeze to death. Pets freeze to death. The elderly are trapped in their apartments.
On 13 January Yevhenia Mykhailivna Besfamilnaya, a Holocaust survivor, was found frozen in her apartment. The police initially refused to kick down her door after there was no answer. They couldn’t smell anything; surely if she was dead there would be that unmistakable smell of rotting body? Yevhenia was a private person, the police said, why should they disturb her privacy? Her neighbours eventually persuaded them to enter the apartment. There Yevhenia, according to a news report “was frozen, covered in ice; she had not yet started to decompose”.
Crampon my style
I find it difficult to walk around Kyiv. You either fall over, or you involuntarily ice skate. An Irish expat here warned me to buy crampons if I didn’t want to humiliate myself. I secured them to my boots shortly before I set foot on Ukrainian territory. After ten minutes walking from Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Station I looked down. The crampon on my right boot had mysteriously disappeared. I was down on my face a few minutes later. Nose stuck to the ice, I reflect that this probably never happens to John Simpson.
The fog of war
I’m staying in a famous mob hotel. I only realise this after I arrive, when the concierge tells me that I’m free to use the sauna, steam room or swimming pool. There are none of the usual wartime Clive Myrie/NGO bean-counter/earnest Finnish weapons salesman types in the lobby: only hulking terminators with green tattoos of cobwebs crawling up their necks, sitting underneath despot-chic crystal chandeliers. Every single guest looks like they have murdered someone in exchange for a modest cash payment.
I’m confused. Hundreds of buildings in Kyiv don’t have heating, there are blackouts all the time, but this hotel has an operational sauna? I ask around: what does it mean? It means gangsters, duh. The hotel is on the same street as a foreign embassy and the HQ of a major charity. Apparently neither of them have much power right now. Why? A fellow guest suspects that they fell afoul of the mob, who routed all the power into the sauna we are (shamefully) sitting in early one morning. “These people have connections,” he says, darkly, in a heavy accent. I ask him what he does. “It’s to do with security. But nothing sexy or cool.”
I ask him what will happen in the future, given that he has an answer for everything. “The real war starts when this one is over.” It’s the first plausible thing he says.
As I leave the steam zone I receive a worried text. My interlocutor has been reading the news. About blackouts and bombings and drones. Am I OK? I hesitate as I reply: “Err, I’ve just left quite a nice sauna, actually.” War is hell.
[Further reading: Militarised police have taken America to a new level of brutality]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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