Kyiv

Six months ago this week, the United States and its European allies enacted one of the most comprehensive, stringent sanctions regimes against a major economy in history. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24 not only shocked the West’s sensibilities, but pushed Washington and Brussels to take actions that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks prior. As far as the West is concerned, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is nothing less than a dangerous pariah state — and its aggression against a neighboring country meant it had to be treated as one.

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

It was 2 a.m. when Russian gunmen broke in and took away 21-year-old Milana Ozdoyeva. When Sara, her three-year-old daughter, tried to grab her mother's hand they shoved her aside. Milana's son, who was 11 months old, just stared uncomprehendingly. ‘They were wearing masks and camouflage,’ Milana's mother told me. ‘They forced us all to the floor at gunpoint. Milana was too terrified to speak. She just looked at me and mouthed the words “mama”. It was the last time any of us saw her.’ The kidnapping and subsequent killing of Milana took place in Chechnya on 19 January 2004. Her sin was to have been married to a man who was suspected of taking up arms against the Russian military.

I write this from my Kyiv air raid shelter. It has become my second home, an improvised bedroom, study and kitchen. For food, we eat bread and borscht. It is a spartan existence, but conducive to reflection. I still can’t get used to the siren that sounds five times a day, although I have got used to sleeping on the floor, in hallways, subways or the metro. I keep a bag packed with essentials by the door that I can grab and run with when the alarm sounds. On the first night of the war, I spent the first hours in the subway, along with thousands of Kyivites. Nobody slept. Everyone sat in silence. From time to time in different parts of the platform, dogs barked, cats purred and, of course, babies cried.

The Russian Defense Ministry held a briefing last week claiming that they have discovered US-led biological laboratories in Ukraine. Moscow stated that a rapid halt was brought to the facilities’ activities, adding that Kyiv and Washington had violated the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons. The Kremlin did not feel the need to provide evidence of its claims, par for the course in Putin’s Russia.

Kyiv, Ukraine I've never commuted into a warzone by train before, but I can now recommend it. The express train to Kyiv from Lviv near Ukraine’s Polish border has several advantages over coming in by car. Firstly, it avoids a 14-hour motorway drive, where fuel is short and traffic jams are long. Plus, the online booking app still works far better than any in Britain. Despite the risk of Russians-on-the-line, the train has been kept running to help Ukrainians flee Kyiv for the Polish border. But it returns to Kyiv largely empty, save for a few Ukrainians on mercy dashes to pick up relatives. We trundle through the night, the lights dimmed. Vodka is shared round. The only problem is that we arrive into Kyiv central station at 5am, three hours before curfew ends.

No one should think that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine means that Xi Jinping will decide to use force against Taiwan anytime soon, if ever. China is not Russia, nor Taiwan Ukraine. Yet neither should policymakers presume that Beijing will not be influenced by what happens on the other end of Eurasia. Washington must consider whether and how Putin’s aggression has raised the stakes in defending Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China. At the least, US strategists will seriously have to assess whether a global environment in which norms of international behavior are regressing may serve to spur Beijing to military action that once seemed unlikely.