.LV154 KLAX 1/1 DT KLAX 0000 0000Z FM [email protected] - FREE TEXT - HOME POSTS ================================================================ Lessons from Ukraine, Pt. 1: The Capital of the End of the World 2026-09-15 Preface: This is part one of a series of blog posts where I talk about my experience visiting Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, from August 21-23. The situation in Kyiv is dynamic as always, and this is written from my experience as it happened. Things may have changed since! LESSON 0: The end of the world is served by regional rail. I found myself sitting at my desk one day in July, sometime around the 14th, poking around the webpage of Ukrzaliznytsia - the Ukrainian Railways corporation. I couldn't really tell you why I first got the urge to - perhaps some part nerdy curiosity, some part subconsciously actually thinking about it. What I can say is that I'd been listening a lot to Emperor X's album "Unified Field" recorded in various studios in Ukraine over the last couple years and it'd certainly left me with a lot of questions about the place. I already had a Europe trip vaguely planned for mid-August to burn some airline miles, so it wasn't an impossibility. Flipping through the website would be, unbeknownst to me, one of the many surreal yet tiny moments that would lead to me actually visiting the place. On the site - which was extremely clean, Amtrak take notes - it surprised me a little bit to find out that there wasn't really anything stopping me from just... booking a train to Kyiv. I had to verify my passport to do so, sure, but that was really it. Beyond that, tickets released 20 days before the train actually departed, and never really cost more than $25, so I just had to be a little patient. They were even refundable until day of, so, what was there to lose? Bored at my desk, I got my passport and decided to do the verification for the hell of it. The check involved taking a photo of it side by side with my face, as well as writing out a 4-digit PIN onto actual paper to make sure I was a real person. I wrote down the number on my notebook, submitted the form, and left the notebook on my counter and didn't think much of it. That was, until my roommate asked me why my notebook had a page with a giant scrawled number and nothing else. I replied sort of matter-of-factly that I was thinking about visiting Ukraine - the first time I'd actually said the words. I got the series of questions and comments I'd learn would become standard, the "holy shit, that's cool" leading to "wait, but why" leading to the three words I'd hear another hundred times: "hey, don't die." It was decently surreal to hear that for something I'd just done with a couple clicks on my laptop - something that wasn't binding, something that I didn't know if I even had any intent on following through on. A few hours later, an email hit my inbox. "Welcome to JSC Ukrainian Railways! Your account has been successfully verified. We look forward to welcoming you to Ukraine!" Attached to it, beyond the approval information, was a promotion in clean, plain English for the Iron Family, Ukrzaliznytsia's charity for the railway workers. "They keep Ukraine moving under fire - stand with them!" --- I spent the next few days planning out the rest of the Europe trip. I had friends I wanted to see in the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK, and the loose skeleton of a trip that'd start in Amsterdam and end flying home from Frankfurt began to take shape. But I'd kept the middle of the trip open - on the so-far off chance I'd actually decide to go to Kyiv. I told myself it was far from certain, but kept checking the UZ website every so often, flipping through the pages of how the war was treating them, how things were going, and always feeling a bit of an emotional pull about it. That changed on July 25. Emperor X, who I'd come to know a lot better soon by his name, Chad Matheny, was playing the last show of his tour for Unified Field in my home of LA. Chad's shows are not that big - two hundred people at the absolute most, and Chad makes a point of sitting around after the show to talk to everyone. We'd talked before at a show last October, and it was a conversation I'd very much taken to heart. After introducing myself, and my background in aerospace policy and as a quite left-leaning person working on the skirts of the defense industry, Chad asked me one of the most important questions of my life: "Do you believe in a just war?" I didn't have a direct answer then and there, but I had a lot of thoughts given that our political side of the aisle had largely ceded any interest in ever engaging with war. Not necessarily pacifism, but instead a hands-over-ears refusal to engage with the problem. Chad and I bonded a bit over our frustration about this, and I think it was where I had first started thinking about Ukraine nearly a year ago in this context. And so, after his show, I walked up to Chad once more. "I don't know if you remember me, but I was that girl that worked in space policy you chatted for an hour with at the last LA show. You asked me if I believed in a just war?" Chad immediately remembered me. Without missing a beat: "Well, do you have an answer?" "No, not yet." He looked a little dismayed, at least I thought. "But I was thinking about going to Ukraine about it." "Wait, seriously?" I watched him immediately light up, almost completely snapping out of the standard artist-at-merch-table type of personality. Yes - I said - or at least that I was thinking about it, and that I was already going to be in Europe to some extent around mid-late August. "I'm playing two shows in Kyiv, on the 20th and the 22nd. I really want you to come and talk there, they'll love you. You should totally do it." "I'm in." --- We spent much of the rest of that night chatting just like we did last time, at a bar by the venue, all as I was slowly processing what I'd actually just at least verbally, softly, committed myself to. But for the first time, the "don't die" was replaced by eager "yes"-es from people that'd been there before - from Chad himself, who'd been touring from Odessa to Kharkiv and was about to do it again. Chad somewhat drunkenly tried to teach me my first words of Ukrainian - privit for hello, dyakuyu for thank you, and slowly it felt more and more and more real, until we finally shared real contact information this time and parted ways around 1:00 am. Chad had another show near-ish to LA the next day, but after that, he'd be back off to Europe too. "Well, either I'll see you tomorrow, or..." "or see you in Ukraine," Chad left me with. "Yeah. See you in Ukraine!" --- The next couple weeks were a long, sequential series of small actions that slowly marched me a little closer. I'd assembled the rest of the Europe trip - a quick stop in NYC first, then friends in Amsterdam and Cardiff, and a Ryanair hop from Bristol to Krakow on credit I already had laying around. Krakow was not an accident. Przemysl, four hours east, was one of very few places where the broad-gauge Ukrainian rail network directly connected to the European standard-gauge system at a single station, making Krakow the closest you could fly to get into Ukraine. Everything else I had booked was refundable, making the trip still feel like a series of options I could take to end up in Kyiv rather than a commitment. Which made it almost too easy to not think about what I was assembling. Eventually, the 31st of July rolled around, and with it, bookings for the 20th on UZ. I waited on my laptop late in the evening until 11 p.m. sharp - exactly when tickets became available in the morning in Ukraine. Like clockwork, all of the trains had appeared, including the one I wanted: THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 - TRAIN 052K: Przemysl 22:30 - Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi 09:02 UAH 2582.21 / $57.73 USD Most long-distance trains in Ukraine are some form of sleeper train - and beds across the border are extremely lucrative, as they are relatively cheap and far preferable to crossing via bus or non-sleeper trains. Beds, therefore, sell out extremely quickly - so quickly that the UZ interface had been designed to show real time (to the second!) availability of beds on the trains. The moment I clicked on 052K, the one I wanted, I could quite literally see the reservations disappearing in seconds. I scrambled to click one - got unlucky the first couple attempts - then finally secured one and made it to the payment screen. A 15-minute timer showed up at the top of the screen. I'd successfully reserved my bed. I paid - with Apple Pay of all things! - and before I knew it, I was ticketed. A new email showed up. ------------------------------------ SUBJECT: Your ticket on Train 052K "Ukrainian Railways welcomes you! Your ticket is attached. Thank you for traveling with Ukrainian Railways. Train: 052K Przemysl - Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Departure: Przemysl Thursday, August 20, 22:30 Arrival: Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Friday, August 21, 09:02 Passenger: Lavie Ohana Car 7, Seat 35 Please note that passenger document checks are more rigorous now. Don't forget to provide your passport." ------------------------------------ And so, everything fell into place. A few instances of the same "don't die" conversation later, the days just... simply marched toward the 20th. I flew to Amsterdam by the 13th, made my next stop in Cardiff to see an old friend (in which I got terribly sick, and burned all of my time there getting better), and found myself on a flight to Krakow on August 20th. I think that was the moment that going to Kyiv first finally felt... real. That like, here I was in Krakow, with nothing left to do but get on the train to the border and accept. I had had the option to simply not go the entire time, but I continued to march toward it, and I had then suddenly come to the realization that I would be spending tonight asleep on a train moving through the west of Ukraine, hoping no drone would attempt to attack it on the way. And yet somehow, it still didn't fully click? Krakow was terribly hot, but also busy and wonderful in its own right, and all of these things took up much of my mental space in the time I was there. Even getting on the train to Przemysl, I spent much of the first couple hours staring at Krakow give way to its suburbs, then to other Polish cities, but slowly and slowly the train grew quieter. Once we had passed Rzeszow, I realized I was completely alone in my train car. Around 7:30, we'd finally pulled into Przemysl. Dead silent. Absolutely nothing like the nearly manic, bustling vibe of Krakow's main station. Instead, I found myself almost completely alone on the platform, in some Polish border town that had become one of very few gateways to Kyiv, and I made my way to the waiting room, where for the first time, I got a taste of what was about to come: |-------------------------------------------| | Odjazdy (Departures) 19:32 | |-------------------------------------------| | Time | Train | Destination | Pl. | |-------|---------|-------------------|-----| | 19:46 | R 30468 | Rzeszow Gl. | 3 | | 20:05 | IC33172 | Ustka | 2 | | 21:10 | RJ34000 | Praha hln | 2 | | 21:15 | R 30482 | Przeworsk | 2 | | 22:30 | UZ 052 | Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi | 5 | | 23:49 | UZ 716 | Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi | 5 | |-------------------------------------------| T- 3 hours, huh? It was, if anything, a good amount of time to sit and process the events that were about to unfold. Especially in conjunction with the eerie silence of Przemysl. I wandered the halls of the station - much larger than I'd expected, and all full with people silently waiting for their turn, before finding a cafe next to the station that happened to still be open. I managed to get around the language barrier just enough to ask for a cup of tea, and for the first time in a while, sat down and opened my laptop. There was, actually, one last bit of paperwork left that I'd forgotten to do. There are various sites that will sell you weirdly cheap insurance packages for Ukraine - like, 3 EUR - and some people had remarked that they'd been asked for proof of insurance at the border before. I wasn't sure, and didn't feel like finidng out the hard way, so I spent my last hour in Poland frantically trying to get any of these sites to actually let me buy an insurance package. Just when I finally got it through, my phone lit up right on time at 20:30 with a ping from the Ukrainian Railways app: -- 2 hours to departure, Train 052K Please head to platform 5. I walked over - Platform 5, the international one, was on the other side of the station, in its own caged-off enclave. Leading to it was a strangely nondescript office building holding the EU exit checkpoint, with one line for non-EU/EES nations (including Ukrainians) and a nearly empty line for EU and the nations eligible for the European Entry/Exit System, which included the USA and therefore myself. A Polish guard scanned my fingerprints and my passport, handed me the passport back, and I walked through a door to a little caged off outdoor area with not nearly enough seats. I found my way to a corner, sat down on the stone-tiled platform floor, and finally began to actually process what on Earth I'd gotten myself into. Looking around the families around me - almost entirely women and their children, men over 22 aren't allowed to leave Ukraine without a very good reason - it started to hit that I had gotten myself 90% of the way to the capital of the end of the world without doing anything special whatsoever. I didn't sign any special paperwork, I didn't have to make any crazy arrangements, if anything the experience was smoother than many trips I'd booked domestically back in the States. And yet, here I was, sitting on a Soviet-gauge platform, waiting for... A lumbering train slowly pulls into the platform, freshly painted blue and with the UZ "Y3" logo and the Ukrainian trident shield adorned on its side. A station worker moves aside the fence gate blocking the waiting area away, and everyone immediately gets up and starts moving down the platform to find their spot on the train. Each car had an amber display, translated from Ukrainian: ----------------- | TRAIN 52/51 | | PRZEMYSL-KYIV | | 6<- CAR ->8 | | 7 | ----------------- I found car 7, my car, and waited outside the door with the same families, all speaking Ukrainian or other languages I could hardly understand. I saw everyone holding their passports - and got mine out too, finding that I was the only American and plausibly the only foreigner at all on the train. We waited for 20 minutes in which not much really happened - everyone milling around killing time on their phones, staring at the train - which I'd noticed had a smiley face drawn into the dust on it - and that was really it. Eventually, the conductor - or "provodnyk" as I'd learn - finally opened the door. Everyone's ticket and passport got checked, and mine got me my first up-down "America?" stare I'd come to get very used to. Ukrainian sleeper cars are extremely utilitarian. There are a few classes - I was in a "coupe," which is a train composed of rooms carrying 4 passengers - two lower bunks, two upper bunks. Entering my room, I found the bedsheets and other linens all neatly folded on the top bunk for me to put together, standard practice. I got mostly through putting mine together without stumbling through any conversation until I found out that seemingly, I'd taken someone else's seat. Luckily, I didn't have to trip over too much Ukrainian (largely "pryvit... ya s ameryky... vy hovoryte anhilyskoyu" - "Hi, I'm American, do you speak English") before they informed me they did actually speak pretty solid English. Turns out - there are two numbering systems on the train cars: EU regulations and Ukrainian regulations, solely for these trains that actually cross the border. I had followed the EU-specified "Seat 35" markers to a lower bunk (which I knew wasn't quite right), when my upper bunk was actually 3 rooms down. Whoops. At the very least, everyone involved was incredibly kind about the ordeal. But, that small gaffe aside, I made my (correct) bed and laid down, anxiously waiting for the train to move. There was, at this point, no going back. Not much staring at the ceiling later, we slowly got moving. It's hard to explain the actual physical feeling of laying down in one of these old, ex-Soviet sleeper cars. People say that broad gauge trains feel different - and while in reality that's not completely true, *these* trains certainly did. After criss-crossing Europe on its newest, smoothest intercity trains, the Ukrainian cars could only be described as large, lumbering, the kind of thing that sways back and forth and feels like it moves the entire world with it as it does. The train slowly settled into a rhythmic, deep, clack-clack-clack, the kind of thing that felt like a machine pushing itself to life, all while I laid in a top bunk that never quite settled. I watched my phone anxiously as the dot on the map slowly crossed out and out of Przemysl, then out through Medyka, the very last town before the border, where it seemed to slow for a moment. But, we kept moving, and sooner rather than later that dot on my map had crossed the line in the sand. We were, at least physically, now in Ukraine, a thing I'd never imagined myself saying a couple months ago. The train came to a stop soon after, at a poorly lit stop a couple kilometers across the border, and all of the doors swung open and the lights came up to their brightest, which was certainly not pleasant. A bunch of Ukrainian border and security guards came on to check everyone's passports - or rather, put them all in a box to be checked outside. The guard asked me a question in Ukrainian - I couldn't make sense of it, and sort of panicked while pointing to my American passport and attempting to stumble over the same "sorry"s and other couple words I remembered. Lucky for me, the situation pretty quickly defused once he connected the dots, and the guard turned to me largely now looking surprised, simply asking "America?" I nodded yes, which seemed satisfactory enough for him. He took my passport, along with the others in the train, and walked off. The checks took longer than felt comfortable to be missing my most important document - something like 20-30 minutes, in which I could really only lay back down in the fully lit train staring at the ceiling. Just when I was about to fall back asleep, the guard came back. A couple "why are you visiting," (a friend, I replied) and "where is your stuff" and some cursory searches of my bags later, the guard seemed satisfied, and handed me back my stamped passport. I was now officially in Ukraine. A few more minutes later, the train finally got moving and the lights came back off, settling back into the swaying back and forth and the ever-speeding-up clacking that finally felt like we were really going somewhere now. I couldn't tell how fast - I could hardly see out of the window from my bunk, and it was quite dark out, but we were moving. I fell into a mental state somewhere between extremely light sleep and vaguely attentive - even trying my best, I couldn't stop myself from checking my phone and the Ukraine alert map every so often, keeping an eye on what parts of the country were lighting up, scrolling through the Telegram channels full of alerts, and trying to rest however I could while giving myself the lightest of assurances that a drone probably wasn't headed our way. We reached Lviv around 3:30 am - the only real stop of the journey, but only really marked by the sudden silence of the train otherwise interrupted by platform announcements at the Lviv station. By 7:00 am or so, I'd woken up to some sunlight peeking through the train windows, somewhere halfway between Lviv and Kyiv. We'd survived the night, clearly, and I steadied myself enough to try to put myself together in the just-as-shaky train bathroom, brushing my teeth and changing while trying to not get thrown into the walls. We were running a bit late - I didn't quite know how late, but from the looks of everyone around me, we weren't close yet. I decided to take the chance to get a bit more sleep. --- Waking up for the last time on the train, I looked at my phone and saw that it was 9:15 am. But I also looked outside and saw that the Ukrainian wilderness had given way to what looked like a cityscape, and that the thin railway corridor we'd followed had become a vast array of tracks, which seemed to give way to a set of platforms. We were approaching Kyiv's central station. I frantically undid my bedsheets, folded them aside, and grabbed my bags, not even finishing until the train had already come to a complete stop. Stumbling out the door onto the platform, it took a moment to sink in what I'd just done. A sign hung above me: |-------------------------------| |TRACK TIME TRAIN ARRIVAL DEPT.| | 9 09:45 052 09:02 -- | | PRZEMYSL - KYIV | |-------------------------------| I dragged myself up the top of the staircase to the overpass, and looked out onto the station and for the first time, Kyiv's skyline. I'd made it to the capital of the end of the world. Now what? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks for reading so far! This is part one of likely six in this series of "Lessons from Ukraine" I'd like to write. Don't worry, the next couple will actually talk about my time in Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole - but for now, might as well share how on earth I got there. And don't worry, I'm home safe, publishing this from some cafe in downtown Los Angeles like I've always been. See ya around! - lavie ================================================================ <EOM> twitter flickr [email protected] last build — 1789512987(2026-09-15T22:56:27Z) ACK