Writing in the New Statesman, Andrey Kurkov gives something of the mood of Western Ukraine, which is pummeled weekly by Russian strikes, and bombarded daily with war propaganda. Kurkov, an actual Ukrainian patriot, loves his country too much not to see its faults as clearly as its strengths. He captures the odd, determined, but ominous mood in a country that desperately needs men to continue the fight, and from which 700,000 men of fighting age have fled:

Yet that night, even the warmth from several blankets did not help me fall asleep. Earlier in the evening my wife and I went to the theatre to see a play based on Tennessee Williams’ novel The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. I did not like the performance. But I watched it to the end, especially since we had bought the last two tickets the day before. The theatre was sold out and at the end of the performance the entire audience gave a standing ovation. Eventually, I had to get up too. I looked at the happy faces of the actors and felt the enthusiasm of the audience around me. As they continued to applaud, I tried to understand: what was happening? It was a tritely staged play about the love adventures of a rich American woman in Rome after the Second World War, about Italian aristocrats impoverished by the war, forced to become gigolos or beggars. At the end of the play, one of the heroines, an old Italian countess, utters an essentially anti-American monologue, from which it is clear that she is a supporter of Mussolini and cannot forgive the Americans for the defeat of fascist Italy.

Notably, this dispatch was written before President Zelensky ousted the enormously popular general, Valery Zaluzhny. Read the whole thing.