As sirens sounded in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities, announcing the Russian offensive against the country, Moscow woke up to an almost normal Thursday on its surface.
There has been an isolated incident so far, of a protester named Irina who tried to put up an anti-war poster next to the popular monument to the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) on elegant Tverskaya Street. In Russia, it is forbidden to perform acts without prior permission from the prefectures.
THE sheet he walked there, just north of the Kremlin, and also south, passing, passing through the nerve center of the city, Red Square. There was a somewhat larger number of police in the area, discreetly concentrated in the corners of the street, but nothing too flashy.
Local tourists took pictures by the mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union whose namesake Putin said he was the creator of a fiction called the Ukrainian state, as usual. There were few, courtesy of the pandemic and the freezing cold under a leaden sky.
This was the case of Yevgeni, a resident of Yekaterinburg (Urals, central country), who is visiting relatives. He said he arrived the day before and was startled by “big explosions and the red sky”. “Only later did I remember the holiday,” he said.
In fact, around 8 pm on Wednesday (23), Moscow shook with large explosions and fireworks that colored the central region of the city: it was Defender of the Fatherland Day, one of the sacred military dates for Putin, which refers to victory. against Nazi Germany, the president’s ideological pillar.
Just read the president’s speech announcing the war to see how he works on the issue, talking about “denazifying” Ukraine. Due to the past that associates the resistance to the Soviets with the Nazi invasion of the neighboring country, in fact I live without much disguise in some military units in Kiev, it is something that speaks to the Russian public.
Next door, in the Alexander Garden that borders the Kremlin wall, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed Jair Bolsonaro and Olaf Scholz last week and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before meeting with Putin.
In the always busy Moscow metro, there was nothing to indicate that this is a country at war. People followed with their heads down, looking at their cellphone screens.
Already the financial market, knowing the inevitable rebound that will come, the Central Bank took some measures, banning, for example, the short-term sales of Russian bonds indefinitely. Stock markets in Moscow and St Petersburg were suspended, and ubiquitous exchanges on the streets were already selling the dollar at more than 80 rubles, the highest level since 2016.
Nothing like what happens in the neighbourhood, of course, where withdrawals over 100,000 hrivnias (about R$17,000) were banned in banks, although card and online transactions remain normal. Buying and selling of foreign currency was also suspended.
The country is under martial law, and the Kiev metro has served as both an air-raid shelter and an escape route for many residents of the capital.
