In an interview for the BNR. Assoc. Prof Daniel Benatov, who lives in Kyiv stated that people there are afraid there might be electricity and petrol shortages.

“There are a lot of people at the gas stations. For the time being, people with military experience from the war in Donbas are being called up, as well as professional reservists, those are the people being mobilized at this time. The worst thing of all is the panic, it is more dangerous than an explosion,” he says.

In the capital of Ukraine Kyiv there are queues in front of petrol stations and ATMs, because people are trying to flee the city, Tetiana Dotsenko, lecturer at the university in Kyiv said for the BNR’s Horizont channel:

“Everyone is leaving Kyiv. Mostly, they are going to Western Ukraine. For the time being the ATMs are still working with an awful lot of people queuing up in front of them. We believed the issue would be resolved by diplomacy right up to the last minute. We really didn’t expect this to happen,” Tetiana Dotsenko said.

Bessarabian Bulgarian Tatyana Staneva, who is a film director and producer, and who lives in Kyiv says, that sirens can be heard and that people are looking for bomb shelters. She says she has started collecting her papers.

“There are traffic jams. And there are no flights. I don’t know if it wouldn’t be better to wait before we flee Kyiv. Villages are the safest place, in cities there might be electricity and water outages,” Staneva says.