Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Inauguration Day +2

Kyiv, noon

    Wednesday noon, two days later, cameras on the plaza just off the Dniepr River and facing a large city park focused on the Palace.  Filling the park were ranks of Russian infantry, and filling the streets for a mile were armored personnel carriers and tanks. In the square before the palace, “Constitution Square,” a ground crew waited for President Putin’s arrival by helicopter. The city was curiously quiet. The Russian troops and mechanized units seemed unusually alert at the emptiness. At dawn, special units had arrived across the river, crossed the Metro Bridge, occupied the rooftops around the palace, and maintained overwatch. Drones of various sizes circled overhead, remotely controlled from scores of miles away.

    As President Putin’s helicopter landed, television screens across the Russian Federation showed him disembarking, and in split-screen, the doors of the palace opening. The Ukrainian president and his wife, he in a business suit and heavy topcoat, she in a dress and heavy jacket and fur-lined cowl, stood outside the doors, hand in hand. They stepped forward, hand in hand, down the long walkway to meet the Russian president at the open gate, a hundred feet away.

    As they reached the gate, the conqueror awaited on the other side.

    At that moment, for all the watchers around the world, the broadcast ended.

    Forty miles away, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a general few in the West knew much about, had breathed a prayer of thanks for his president and had lifted his hand from the detonator button on a truck-mounted communications unit. His aides, waiting outside the truck, were weeping. He stepped to the door and looked over his men. “President ‘Steadfast’ has left us. Remember him and his wife. They died for us.”

    In a nearby windowless building surrounded by armed Marines and, further out, by Ukrainian soldiers, the American ambassador and his senior intelligence staff were still wondering what was going on. President Nepokhytnyy had ordered them out of Kyiv by noon the day before, under escort of Ukrainian forces. They’d not had an easy time getting even this far, because every road and every train was jammed with city dwellers heading west. It was as though Kyiv was emptying itself out.

    Just seconds after noon, the building rattled and dust came off picture frames and out of wall-hung tapestries. A Marine captain flung open the door and shouted to the ambassador, “Sir, you’ve got to see this! Quickly, Mr. Ambassador!” Outside, a deep, sharp noise pulsed once.

    The ambassador rushed up a half-dozen steps to the entrance and out past the solid door. The captain pointed east.  “Sir, that’s a mushroom cloud from a nuclear weapon. We saw the flash. That’s Kyiv, sir.”

    “God almighty,” the ambassador breathed. “Get me some comms. I need to talk to President Martin.”