6) A friend of mine from Western Europe just got back from Kiev (just went to visit a good friend), and the stories he told me were beyond surreal - just think "Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe.
There is a SERIOUSLY large number of people in Kiev who are now very, very rich and living it up to the max, with long lines at trendy restaurants and upscale grocery stores with hugely inflated prices, and the more expensive, the longer the line (because it's cool/trendy/upscale). Luxury cars are on every street. Everyone ignores the air raid sirens and anyway, they're turned off on the weekends to "let people sleep." In short, from Kiev (the city's) POV, it's "LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL."
My buddy asked his (Ukrainian local) friend to take him somewhere to get a photo of some bomb or missile damage or some other kind of photographic "souvenir" of the war, and it was a hard task to fulfill. Eventually, my buddy got taken to an apartment building with obviously missile damage, and the Ukrainian friend openly admitted it was caused by an errant Ukrainian AD missile, not a Russian one. In other words, my friend couldn't find even a single Russian-damaged building to photograph in all of Kiev.
If you're in Kiev, it truly DOES appear like Ukraine is kicking Russia's ass, and life is good. Literally everyone remaining has a pipeline to foreign money, whether it's directly via corruption/nepotism or via channels like foreign NGOs (which are FLUSH with money), the UN, or online jobs where you can charge triple because you're Ukrainian (and thus hiring you is "helping the war effort" and something you can brag about on your corporate webpage). But the whole thing has a ghastly danse macabre feel to it.
No surprise then at all that Kiev residents think bombing Russian cities is a jolly affair.
To the last comment, check out the last video on his blog post.
This is a problem.
Most people are not insensible to the plight of Ukrainians who had Russians appear in their country and are being hauled up to the front lines to fight them off.
But when you see videos of people in malls, dressed nicely, walking around on the streets, going into nightclubs and restaurants as if there were nothing going on, and we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars WE HAVE TO BORROW against the futures of our children and grandchildren, it is natural for people do resent it, and deeply.
Personally, when this scumbag Zelenskiy lectures us on how much cash we should be giving him, and what we should be doing on climate change (which in his view is not nearly enough) It makes people like me harden our hearts to the whole situation.
I detest the Russian oligarchs in charge of that country. But I despise the Ukrainian oligarchs just as equally, with the exception of accepting that the Russians should have stayed on their side of that stinking border.
We know a Ukrainian family who has an apartment in the main Kiev square. They are big UN fans. Their purpose was to hobnob with the upper crust.
This more recent invasion expansion started up and they tried fleeing to Poland. Only the wife, kids, and her parents were allowed to go. Her husband had to stay behind.
She has refused to respond to phone calls or emails, since our last contact with her, when her husband was left behind.