Heading to Kyiv

Hello from Warsaw

Hello dear friends! Thanks for being my first subscribers!

I arrived in Warsaw yesterday from New York, and tomorrow I head to Kyiv. Some of you have asked about the logistics of getting to Ukraine during the war. The airspace is closed, so the easiest way to go is by train. Tomorrow morning I’ll take a train from Warsaw to the border, wait a couple hours, and then board an overnight train to Kyiv. That trip takes 14 hours, but it’s not so bad because it’s in a sleeper car. I’ll be in a compartment with three other bunks.

There’s great love for the trains in Ukraine, especially for the ritual of being served tea on the sleepers in glasses hugged by metal handles. My assistant Illia told me these were retired during the pandemic in favor of disposables, but then brought back by popular demand. Now the train company sells them so you can get the experience at home.

Kyiv sounds relatively calm these days. The normalcy was the biggest surprise when I visited last December. The only daily reminders of war in the capital were occasional air raid sirens (which most locals had begun to tune out) and the absence of street lights at night (to save the power grid). As a result, traffic accidents were the biggest safety hazard caused by the fighting.

I’ll be in Kyiv for a couple days before heading to Odesa for interviews focused on LGBTQ people who survived Russian occupation.

I’ll keep you updated along the way and thanks for supporting this work!

Lester

PS Over the next week I’m going to send out the posts I recently did on Instagram as newsletters. I know most of you were prompted to sign up from the Instagram posts so I hope that’s not annoying. It’s a way for me to get some more content on the Substack before I make a broader push for sign ups.