On the menu today: As you will see from the dateline below, I am now in Ukraine — but getting into the war-torn country is a more complicated process than most Americans would expect. And I may have seen President Zelensky’s motorcade yesterday. It’s a long story, so grab a coffee, and I’ll get you updated on the trip so far.
Into the War Zone
Lviv, Ukraine — Before crossing the border into Ukraine, my traveling companions and I decided to check out Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which, as yesterday’s newsletter laid out, is the hub of the NATO effort to send military aid to Ukraine. The airport was a strange combination of small local airport, with flights to Warsaw and Gdansk, and major NATO air base, with lines of tan, heavily armored trucks called MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush protected). The radar for a British Sky Sabre air-defense system and Patriot-missile batteries were visible from the road. (Because anyone in Poland can just drive up and see it from the road, I’m not telling you anything new or sensitive about the facility’s security.)
While we were there, we saw a massive Royal Dutch Air Force plane on the tarmac beyond the barbed-wire fence, and remembered that Zelensky visited the Netherlands Sunday. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte and Zelensky announced that the Netherlands would provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets, now that the U.S. has signed off on the proposal. Zelensky also traveled to Denmark, where Danish prime minister Mette Fredericksen announced a similar deal to provide F-16s.
When Zelensky needs to leave the country — which doesn’t happen often — or when a foreign leader visits Ukraine, Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport is the departure/arrival point.
We stayed just long enough to avoid anyone asking why four Westerners were gawking at the military planes and equipment on the airport’s tarmac. We were eager to get across the border into Ukraine.
My traveling companions had warned me that the border-crossing points between Poland and Ukraine could have long lines and frustratingly long waits — hour upon hour that can take up an entire day. Some of this was the scrutiny of a country at war, some of this was the heavy volume of Ukrainians traveling back and forth, but a lot of it was just the routine sluggishness of bureaucracy. My traveling companions warned me that the border guards would take my passport for inspection, walk back into an office and disappear, seemingly teleported to another dimension for a disturbingly long period of time.
You might think this was where either side’s border guards might have wanted a bribe, but the answer was actually the opposite. Ukraine’s earlier notorious reputation for corruption, and the importance of government employees being honest and honorable in light of the war, have made everyone paranoid about the perception of being corrupt. I don’t bribe people in general, but I’m told to not even joke about it.
Two of my traveling companions have been in and out of Ukraine many times during the war, and Monday, the line at the Krakovets border crossing was longer than they’d ever seen it. Lots of Ukrainians had parked their cars in line and were standing outside them — smoking, eating, couples bickering. Kids were playing on the shoulder. There was a separate lane for the seemingly endless trucks. There were port-a-johns and trash cans along the side of the road. Clearly, the border authorities expected long lines, lots of cars, and long waits in this spot. The temperature was 28.5 Celsius, which was about 83 degrees Fahrenheit — not scorching hot, but not pleasant for standing around on a highway, either.
It was Monday afternoon, but we were on a deadline. All across Ukraine, a curfew goes into effect at midnight. The purpose is to give authorities a time when no one should be on the streets — making it easier to pick out saboteurs and anyone else up to no good — and to move around military units and equipment without any concern that people walking the streets will see it and post some picture on social media. My traveling companions said that if we’re on the street after curfew, the police would let us off with a stern warning, because we’re Westerners. For a Ukrainian, the consequences are more serious.
Lviv is a bit more than an hour from the border. Our hopes of having a lot of time in the city were dashed; this wait was going to take hours. For a while, we hoped we would qualify for the much shorter “tax free” line, but a short conversation with a border-patrol officer made it clear that we didn’t. We took our place in line, and my companions discussed whether we should take our chances on driving to some other border checkpoint, where the lines could be better, or the lines could be worse. There have been horror stories of people waiting 13 or 14 hours to get through. But the guy at the front of the line told us he’d only waited two hours.
I didn’t tell many people about this trip to Ukraine before I left; those I did tell usually expressed some concern about staying safe in the country currently being invaded by the Russian army. If only they knew how difficult it would be just to get into Ukraine.
After about an hour and a half, we received an indicator of what might be making the day’s wait so bad; a handful of policemen started manning positions along the shoulder of the highway. One shooed people back into their cars, and we complied. One of my traveling companions surmised the policeman was carrying an FB-PM-63 RAK submachine gun, a serious bit of firepower. We started to wonder if this was a presidential escort, and that our arrival had coincided with Zelensky coming back into Ukraine. There are a lot of border checkpoints, but this one was particularly close to the airport he uses, and he was just in the Netherlands.
Another considerable stretch of time passed, but at least now, we had the police to watch, periodically changing their positions and pressing their earpieces against their ears. In addition to the submachine gun, one cop carried a small sign with a red dot in the center, which I presumed was for stopping traffic but really made it look like he was prepared for a spontaneous ping-pong game.
And then, on the other shoulder, the caravan arrived — first a police car, then nine huge tractor-trailer trucks with their cargo under a tarp. This, presumably, was some sort of particularly valuable and sensitive military equipment being moved from Poland to Ukraine.
After the nine Optimus Prime-style tractor-trailers, a few more police cars sped past our left side. Those police vehicles were followed by black sedans with flashing blue lights on the dashboard and rear-view mirror, the kinds of vehicles that back in the states I would have guessed were U.S. Secret Service. One of them was a Mercedes-Benz, and the men inside were wearing balaclavas and masks.
Can we say for certain we saw Zelensky’s motorcade yesterday? No, but there aren’t that many VIPs who would warrant that kind of security, and we know the president had just returned from northern Europe, and at the airport behind us, we had seen the massive Dutch Air Force plane.
Alas, after that excitement it was back to waiting. When crossing from Poland to Ukraine, you go through the entire process twice, once on the Polish side, once on the Ukrainian side. One delay stretched into another, and because of an issue with the car, we had to transfer to a bus to get to Lviv.
It was considerably later than expected — after 10 p.m. local time, with that curfew deadline creeping closer — when we got on the road to Lviv, and the night’s darkness didn’t give me much to see in my initial view of the country. As we left the border checkpoint, one of my traveling companions, a walking encyclopedia of military history, exclaimed, “Czech tank traps!” These were “Czech hedgehogs,” those large, metal, six-pointed defense obstacles that were in the background of seemingly every World War II movie. We drove by a military checkpoint in the opposite direction.
Lviv hasn’t been hit nearly as much as other cities in Ukraine closer to the front, but it has been targeted regularly — a state aircraft-repair plant, an oil depot, a tire-assembly plant, electrical substations, railway infrastructure have all been hit. Last month, a Russian missile hit a residential building, killing seven people. Compared to many other cities in Ukraine, Lviv is particularly safe; the air-defense systems have stopped, impeded, or mitigated the damage from a large number of attacks. But most cities outside Ukraine don’t have any risk of Russian missiles landing in them.
Our double-decker touring bus wouldn’t make a likely target for any Russians, but a whole bunch of Ukrainians who weren’t deliberate targets got killed just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m in a place where the odds of being in the vicinity of a Russian bombing attack are not high . . . but they are not zero, either.
Thankfully, our late-night drive into the city was uneventful. We checked in to our hotel with 20 minutes until curfew.
ADDENDUM: While in the city hall of Kovel, Ukraine, about 60 miles from the border with Belarus, I experienced my first air-raid siren. It was loud, and surprising, but everyone around me reacted with the nonchalance of New Yorkers responding to a car alarm going off down the block.