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I stopped by the supermarket where I usually shop today. The only noticeably empty shelves were those for juice in Tetra Paks and a few kinds of expensive imported beer, including some very good Lithuanian ones. Otherwise, it was the same absolutely normal, almost absurdly vast selection of food and groceries you find in any large Ukrainian supermarket. Apparently, the impulsive rush to stock up on buckwheat, matches, and salt, as during COVID, has already passed. So take everything emotional you read in the media and on social media about “panic,” “collapse,” and especially “famine” in Ukraine with a large grain of salt. Of course, Russian strikes on warehouses, civilian infrastructure, and transport bring absolutely nothing good. But businesses adapt quickly: they rebuild their logistics and set up decentralised just-in-time deliveries, much as we have continued to have petrol at gas stations without major difficulty since 2022, after Russia destroyed all of our oil depots. The same is true in Kyiv: the city and military authorities will eventually have to reconsider their increasingly untenable restrictions, which, in this new reality of Russian drones attacking the city one by one but around the clock, are bringing much of urban life to paralysis. Thank God for a functioning market economy, open borders, and modern technology, which still make it possible today to buy a bottle of Hungarian-bottled Pepsi even in badly damaged frontline towns in Donbas. People adapt and carry on with their lives as close to normality as circumstances allow.

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