No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing

From No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing :

This moment is “strange—very, very strange,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, told me. For people in his country, the Russian threat is both dire and entirely unsurprising. Zagorodnyuk noted, as everybody in Kyiv does, that Russia already invaded Ukraine in early 2014. The Russians already occupy Crimea, which is Ukrainian territory. Fake “separatists,” supplied with Russian weapons, already control a small piece of eastern Ukraine, where they continue to fight the Ukrainian army, every day of every week. Some 14,000 people, including both soldiers and civilians, have already died in a conflict that continues only because the Russian government wants it to continue. Before I even broached the subject of whether Ukraine’s armed forces were ready for a new offensive, Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, reminded me: “We are in a state of constant military preparedness now for eight years.”