The reality of being ‘under siege’ in Kyiv

I've never commuted into a warzone by train before, but I can now recommend it. The express train to Kyiv from Lviv near Ukraine’s Polish border has several advantages over coming in by car. Firstly, it avoids a 14-hour motorway drive, where fuel is short and traffic jams are long. Plus, the online booking app still works far better than any in Britain.

Despite the risk of Russians-on-the-line, the train has been kept running to help Ukrainians flee Kyiv for the Polish border. But it returns to Kyiv largely empty, save for a few Ukrainians on mercy dashes to pick up relatives. We trundle through the night, the lights dimmed. Vodka is shared round. The only problem is that we arrive into Kyiv central station at 5am, three hours before curfew ends. I try to get some sleep on the floor in the terminal, looking like some stray gap-year backpacker.

Leaving Kyiv station later, there are no bombs or bullets. Instead, what gives Kyiv away as a trouble spot is how empty it is. Downtown, there's barely a soul on the vast, Soviet-era boulevards. When the air-raid sirens sound, it feels like being in some Cold War newsreel. A word on that, though. Much as it looks terrifying on the TV news, air raid sirens don't mean that bombs are about to pepper your street. It just means that enemy aircraft are detected in the wider airspace. After a while, most people tend to ignore them, just like fire alarms in the office at work.

In similar fashion, Kyiv ‘under siege’ needs a little perspective too. In the first few days, isolated Russian units did punch their way in, only to be repelled. Right now, the only real fighting is in Irpin, a satellite town to the north-west. It's a bit like being in London with trouble in, say, Watford.

Still, most of the big city-centre chain hotels have shut, so I am staying in a flat that a friendly freelance journalist has rented downtown. It's a beautiful 19th century place near the parliament, the equivalent of a Whitehall pied a terre, and the landlord wants no money for it. Sadly, all I can think about is whether it will still be standing if Mr Putin missiles the nearby parliament.

A walk around town. The streets are full of militiamen, all on high alert for Russian saboteur gangs. Mr Putin has sent Russian infiltrators in to try to confuse and terrify the population. But the main effect has been to make everyone more vigilant than they might have otherwise been. It’s not often you walk past a checkpoint without being diligently bag-searched and asked for ID.

I am even frisked by a passing old lady, who demands to see my passport as I loiter at a street corner. As she checks my credentials to ensure I'm not a Kremlin agent, I realise she's already on speaker-phone to the local cops. And carrying a truncheon. It's Rosa Klebb, come out of retirement. 

A British passport, however, gets an enthusiastic thumbs up. At checkpoints elsewhere in the world, this is usually because the gunmen concerned are Chelsea or Arsenal fans. Here, it's because we've supplied the Ukrainian military with anti-tank missiles, already used to considerable effect against Russian armour.

We stock up on food at a local supermarket. It is reminiscent of my local Coop during lockdown: a few empty shelves here and there, and no fresh bread, but otherwise there's everything – even a well-stocked wine aisle. Alas, it turns out that Kyiv's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, banned the sale of alcohol just the day before. Having handed out free weapons to 20,000 civilian militiamen in the last few days, he wants everyone to remain sober. Drunken amateur gunmen will be no use against the Russians, and a danger to everyone else.

There are indeed weapons galore in Kyiv. As well as the assault rifles distributed by City Hall, gunshops have been selling out of pump-action shotguns, hunting rifles, and pistols. I can't help worrying that much of this hardware may end up finding its way over into Europe, just as weapons from Libya's conflict have sown havoc through Africa.

Ukrainians have also become world experts in the use of Molotov cocktails, courtesy of recipes distributed by the government. Back in Lviv, I even visited a hipster craft brewery that was churning them at its bottling plant. The brewery was at a converted Soviet-era industrial estate that looked like somewhere in Hoxton. Here, though, Molotovs aren't just Banksy agitprop.

On every TV news show in Ukraine, there are broadcasts by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. We often complain in Britain that too many of our leaders have never done any job outside politics. That's not true here. Zelensky was previously Ukraine's top political comedian, while Klitschko was one of the world's greatest heavyweight boxing champions. And while they may not have won the war militarily against the Kremlin yet, in PR terms, they've been unbeatable.

To avoid giving their location away to Mr Putin, they appear mainly in short iPhone broadcasts, usually in t-shirts and looking, tired and unshaven. Far from looking like cornered rats, though, as Mr Putin intends, they come across like guerrilla leaders, a pair of Slavic Che Guevaras. The contrast with the ageing Mr Putin – sat in his suit at his big long table, like some kind of ossified supervillain – couldn't be greater. The war has been the making of Mr Zelensky, who wasn't that popular before. Now, though, he'll go down in history alongside JFK as one of the few people who stood up to the military might of the Kremlin. Not bad for a chap who once played piano with his penis on TV.

The landlord of our apartment now needs it for his extended family, who are fleeing fighting elsewhere in Ukraine. AirBnB, however, is still working here, and reveals some remarkable bargains at the moment. For just a few hundred quid, you can get a downtown apartment fit for an oligarch, complete with formal drawing rooms, jacuzzis, reception areas and modern art on the walls. Note to AirBnB though: Kyiv hosts could do some with extra filters, such as whether the place comes with an underground bomb shelter. We find a cheap three-bedroomed flat near Independence Square and put up tape over the windows to stop them shattering too much if a bomb lands.

A day on the outskirts of Irpin, a suburb of western Kyiv. This is currently the capital's main hotspot, and has had lots of news coverage, with footage of people fleeing over a broken river bridge. The bombs up here are quite loud, although it's often hard to tell which side is firing, or where exactly is safe. A Sky TV news crew got shot at here a few days ago, having taken a road that Ukrainian commanders said would be okay.

It's easy to get into stray into trouble in these situations – and also easy to look very silly. At one point, we head down a very empty road towards the frontlines, thinking we're being rather intrepid. We then round a corner and bump into what looks like the entire world’s media, already looking slightly bored.