My sister was struggling to get baby products for my nephew because the prices skyrocketed. One of my brothers-in-law and my father will potentially lose their jobs because their businesses worked very closely with European businesses, and all of those lines of communication are closed off now. Due to Russian cards getting blocked and Russia being disconnected from SWIFT (the international payment system), my family had to send me some money in advance, just in case, and I had to withdraw it really quickly before I lost access to it.

• According to officials in Kyiv, there were approximately three million Ukrainian citizens living in Russia in 2018, including migrant workers sending remittances back home and many are palpably pro-Russian.
• Its impossible to get objective and representative data on the attitudes of the Russian population towards the war in Ukraine, but the indications are that the invasion has provoked deep misgivings, at least among those who access global media.
• While polling works when people are willing to tell the truth, other tools are needed in places like Russia where such openness and access cannot be assumed.
• Polls have suggested that even though they are the least likely to support the invasion, many still back it.
• Since 2001, the numerical influence of ethnic Russians in Ukraine diminished even further, as a result of the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the two separatist republics in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

But when things opened up in the 1990s, he says, his field exploded. "During that time, lots of data became available from the Russian permafrost regions," he remembers. International scientists started collaborating with Russian scientists to investigate how permafrost was changing. On top of that, western scientists no longer have access to field sites in Russia, he says.

Do Ukrainians and Russians believe a full-scale war is possible?

But what kind of guarantees they would give independent Ukraine is not yet clear. That the Kremlin was right to block the majority of independent media sites they used to read. Probably yes, if more people had stood up for their freedom and challenged state TV propaganda about trumped up threats from the West and Ukraine. A bus service has started up connecting the city to the local cemetery where growing numbers of soldiers killed in Ukraine are being buried.