[anelson]

It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country.

It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.

It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.

I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.

Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.

[vladgur]

That a pretty intense career trajectory - curious to hear your story.

Kiev was wonderful in the peace time, but what made you stay during war, given your ability to move around freely

[anelson]

That’s a long story. Mostly just a series of unexpected turns and a search for meaning in my professional life.

As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.

The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.

I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.