Vitaly Kim’s now famous daily video blogs combine humour with withering putdowns of the “idiotic” Russian army. But when he speaks, people listen
, who have surrounded its capital to the north and east, Vitaly Kim looks surprisingly rested. Ukrainian units have been pushing the enemy back from Mykolaiv, he says, and that is diminishing the invaders’ chances of fully encircling the strategic port. But his reassuring calm stems not just from the latest bulletins from the front lines—serenity is a “weapon” in its own right, he explains. “We got scared at the start, and then we learned indifference.
In a video-conference room inside the heavily sandbagged and fortified provincial administration building, the half-Korean, Russian-speaking governor says he started making the videos by accident. His press secretary had to evacuate with her young children. “So I needed to reach people quickly, and this was how.” He might not be a trained soldier, he says, but a successful career in agriculture, construction and catering has helped teach him how to strategise: “War is war, not pretty pictures.
Downtown, the streets are quiet, with marked exceptions around army-enlistment centres and posts offering humanitarian assistance. Only the poor, immobile and fearless remain in the city. A sizeable proportion of those are pensioners, too infirm or stubborn to leave. They scurry with wheeled shopping trolleys to the last open shops. The few cars moving about the city race past disabled traffic lights—trying, like everyone else, to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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