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The first day of March swept in with an icy blast of wind and snow; the sixth day of Russia’s invasion unfolds with a gnawing sense of foreboding. Satellite images convey, with searing clarity, the pace of Russia’s progress towards Kyiv. A serpentine armoured convoy, some 65km (40 miles) long, bristling with tanks and troops, slowly snakes forward. It’s only 27km away.
It gives an entirely new, and terrifying, meaning to the expression “the world is watching”. Everyone can see these satellite images in shades of black and grey, which have a meaning that’s all too black and white. But it’s only Ukrainian forces, soldiers and civilians who can stop its lumbering advance. Western militaries continue to send in weapons and ammunition, and incessant salvos of strong words. On the ground, Ukraine is on its own.
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“We’ll burn the convoy,” a Ukrainian journalist vows when I meet him in a basement shelter. It’s this raw resolve, and burning patriotism, which has fired Ukraine’s unexpectedly strong resistance to the mighty Russian army’s advance.
He’s crouched over his computer and smartphone. Everyone is connected to the world above in this new subterranean world below in basements, bomb shelters and bunkers. The air raid sirens now seem to be wailing on a loop.
At the edge of a hard floor on a thin mat, bespectacled 13-year-old Rustam seems glued to his device, an extension of his lanky teenage frame. Today he’s watching TikTok videos of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson; yesterday he was inspecting videos of Chechen fighters with a fearsome reputation on front lines. “Are they coming here too?” he asks me, barely lifting his eyes from his phone. It takes the obsessive “doomscrolling” of our time to a whole new level; this isn’t just bad news when you see a Russian convoy heading your way.