Travelling in 2017 with my wife by rail around Lviv, Kiev and the Black Sea, three years after the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, proved to be a great challenge for our minds. On the one hand, there were quite a few stories of an uneasy easiness that was difficult to digest: In a country with such an obvious high poverty level, too many young people drove too many Porsches, tourist agencies offered rental tanks instead of rental cars,  and when my wife and me entered one of the beautiful beach clubs which mushroomed in the summer of 17 all around Kiev, we were not taken serious for not ordering a magnum bottle of champagne in the midday.sun. On the other hand, in every Ukrainian city, there were photos of victims of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and stations recruiting fresh soldiers. The huge billboard on the Maiden now sounds like a foreboding of way worse things that have come.