Nervous Kyiv residents venture out to stock up after weekend lockdown
Kyiv — Residents of Ukraine's capital of Kyiv were allowed out of their houses Monday morning for the first time since Saturday night, when the local government — bracing for an escalation of Russia's siege on the city — said anyone out on the streets would be treated as an enemy.
CBS News visited a grocery store Monday and saw lines down the street, with people waiting hours to get inside. There were already bare shelves early in the morning, but the atmosphere was generally calm and people did not appear to be buying more than they needed.
"Maybe it's going to feel a little better if you have some food in your fridge," Alex Budin, a Ukrainian who lives in Los Angeles but was visiting home when the Russian invasion began, told CBS News. "It's all about that right now. Simple things."
Budin's family lives in Crimea, a part of Ukraine that was unilaterally taken over by Russia after Putin's last invasion in 2014.
"It's definitely like a survival mode," Budin said of life in Kyiv as Russian troops continued their push toward the city. "You have to still be aware of things around you because you don't know who is your friend or enemy, because there are lots of people that pretend to be Ukrainian soldiers, and obviously they're not."
Budin said he would buy whatever he could when he got into the store.
"It's stressful, of course, because you can't sleep and you go up and down, up and down all the time, see the sirens going on and it just drains you. It drains you, and people are getting very aggressive to each other as well because of the stress," he said.
Natalia, 22, was also waiting in line at the store on Monday. Her boyfriend is Turkish, and the pair spent the weekend sheltering in the Turkish embassy with about 180 other people. Natalia said the embassy cooked for them, but she didn't know how long everyone would be stuck there, so she wanted to get some extra supplies just in case.
"Everyone is saying that there is nothing left, and I don't know what to buy. Just water, food and stuff," she told CBS News. She said she wanted to leave the country, because going back to her home town might put her family in danger if they had to come out to pick her up from the train station.
"It's the worst thing ever, which would ever, ever, ever happen to anyone," Natalia said. "Who has ever been in a war, they should understand how it feels. But I just want people to help us as much as they can, and to stop Russia from attacking us."
