Last Friday, the Ukrainian military handed out over eighteen thousand weapons to civilians across Kyiv alone. Travelling or simply walking around Ukraine, now awash with arms, has become dangerous. Outside Kyiv, I witnessed a chaotic checkpoint in the countryside, where a band of fifty armed fighters had hastily erected barriers with sandbags. 

The volunteers, many of them local workers in their fifties and sixties, stopped cars demanding drivers to present their documents.

Tension was high at the checkpoint due to the proximity of the Vasylkiv airbase a few miles down the road which Russian forces had been attempted to capture over the previous two days. We were asked to show our documentation three times by different men, all of whom were armed with automatic weaponry. One of them, fifty-year-old Alexander, told The Currency: “I joined the volunteer force because Russia gave me no choice.” Alexander managed a women’s fashion shop in Donetsk where Russia triggered a deadly separatist war in 2014. He left the area because “all the evil of man came to the Donetsk region with the Russian invasion.”

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Twenty-four hours earlier, Vladimir Putin ended months of global speculation over his intentions in Ukraine by launching the biggest invasion of a sovereign nation in Europe since World War Two.

To the eyes of a stunned world, Putin suddenly morphed into a menace of global proportions, unshackled from international norms, and bent on levels of destruction not seen since Hitler’s charge across Europe in the 1940s. Having suffered the highest deaths per capita of any country in World War Two, Ukraine is once again shouldering the biggest burden for the world in a major conflict against nationalist authoritarianism.

With military offensives proceeding in three separate directions, Kyiv in the North, Kharkiv in the East and Kherson in the South, Ukraine is facing the bleak prospect of being cleaved into two. However, according to Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, by Monday morning, Russia had lost 29 planes, 29 helicopters and 5,300 troops, an astounding number if true.

In the fog of war, official numbers can’t be relied on but there’s little doubt the Russians are meeting stiff resistance. To date, they have failed to take any major airport, large town or city, nor have they established air superiority over the country. Even Chechen leader and longtime Putin stooge, Ramzan Kadyrov claimed in a Telegram post, “Russian battlefield tactics are taking too long and are being ineffective.” Russian advances are being hampered by an army high on morale and well supplied with shoulder-mounted light anti-armour weaponry.

The delivery of fabled British NLAWS and American Javelins lit up social media channels in Ukraine in the weeks leading up to the attack. Now the same channels feature the twisted, smouldering remains of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles, obliterated by successful Ukrainian guerrilla attacks. Russia still has plenty of options for battlefield escalation, however, with only an estimated 50 per cent of the Russian armed forces that were surrounding Ukraine now in the country.

Columns of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles continue to pour over the border from multiple positions. Multiple sources say the decision has been made by Belarus’ dictator Alexandr Lukashenko to officially join Russia’s war efforts. As soon as this morning (Monday), Belarus troops are expected to cross its southern border with the advancing Russian troops. To achieve strangleholds over population centres, they must surround them. One of the factors hampering this is the sheer scale of the civilian resistance effort. Volunteerism was key to the expansion of the Ukrainian army in the 2014 war in Eastern Ukraine. Now it’s a driver for morale across the country and key to Ukraine’s battlefield plans. Recognizing this, the Ukrainian government announced a general mobilisation and banned all men between the ages of 16 and 60 from leaving the country. 

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At the checkpoint Alexander, the fashion shop manager is now holding a pump-action shotgun, on the side of a field outside Vasylkiv. He’s standing his ground. “I have an ageing mother, a lovely wife, and a young daughter. I have nowhere to take them, so this time, I’m staying to fight.”

Journalist Johnny O’Reilly at a checkpoint outside Kyiv. Photo: Johnny O’Reilly

Russia’s answer to Ukraine’s civilian volunteers is their advance army of saboteurs, many of whom were put in position days and weeks before the invasion, to await instructions for locating and priming targets for bombardment.

The saboteurs, many of them pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens, have revealed a new element to modern battlefield warfare. Posing as normal citizens, many of them are deployed to mark buildings for bombardment by placing special light transmitters on building roofs. Others mark the ground outside strategically important buildings with specialized ink picked up by satellites and drones. On Friday a group of saboteurs were blamed for an arson attack on an electricity plant in Kyiv. To hamper the work of the saboteurs, the Ukrainian government called a 48-hour curfew on Saturday morning. Warning civilians not to leave their homes during this time, the major of Kharkiv announced that “Any unauthorised vehicles will be liquidated.”

With Russia’s advance into Ukraine stuttering, the international community has mobilised with astonishing speed. On Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz reversed Germany’s policy of deterrence towards the conflict by announcing an increase of $113 billion in defence spending. He also proposed enshrining the 2 per cent Nato military spending threshold into the country’s constitution. Later in the day, EU President von der Leyen announced that “for the first time ever, the European Union will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack.”

The bloc also banned Russian registered or Russian-controlled aircraft from taking off, landing in the EU or flying over the bloc’s airspace. The speed with which all 27 EU nations come to agreement over these transformative changes in security and foreign policy has been stunning.

In the space of a short four days, the bloc has been redefined. 

According to former US State Department analyst, Mac Bergmann, “We are witnessing the emergence of a global power in this crisis: the European Union.” Also over the weekend, Hungarian President Viktor Orban finally turned against his former ally and provided the EU with the unanimity required to put in place the so-called nuclear option of removing Russia from the world’s Swift banking system.

Banned from sporting competitions, the skies over Europe and even the Eurovision, Russia’s international pariah status is now confirmed. 

On Sunday, Putin, shorn of all options for leverage except one, convened a meeting at yet another elaborately long table with two of his cowed National security advisors and announced that Russia’s nuclear forces have been put on a “special regime of combat duty.” His decision to raise the spectre of a nuclear option is a significant escalation, but also a sign of desperation.

On Sunday, a referendum in Belarus to allow Russia place nuclear weapons on its territory sparked protests in several cities across the country for the first time in months.

Over the weekend, 2,000 people were arrested across Russia at widespread anti-war protests. On Sunday, Russians were rushing to take the last flights out of the country before the EU no-fly rule comes into play. Over the next few days, the full effects of sanctions will only start to be felt across Russia. Only four days into the war, events are moving at supersonic speed. The conflict is expanding and evolving into a simple zero-sum game with everything on the table and seemingly only two possible outcomes – the end of Ukraine as a sovereign nation or the end of Putin.

Johnny O’Reilly is an Irish journalist living in Kyiv.