A Ukrainian City Prepares for Battle Far From the Front Line

Today, that restaurant’s owners, which have opened dozens of others, are helping the war effort, said Taras Maselko, spokesman for the restaurant chain, !Fest. One of them, Pravda Beer Theater, now manufactures Molotov cocktails out of its craft-beer bottles, with a moniker on each displaying a naked Vladimir Putin and a slogan likening him to a part of the male anatomy.

Mr. Maselko said bartenders have made about 2,000 cocktails so far, and delivered them in cardboard boxes to military units and local territorial defense groups that staff roadblocks. Since the invasion began, government officials have distributed instructions on how to target Russian vehicles with Molotov cocktails, advising them that even armored vehicles can be disabled by setting fire to tires, windows, or the intake ports of their ventilation systems.

Until this week, most of the cafes and restaurants that used to draw tourists to the city remained open, but gradually they have closed as the first waves of refugees came and went and the aura of the city became more warlike, said Andrey Hankevych, a local cybersecurity business consultant from New York who has made Lviv his home for the past 20 years.

The waves differed from one another slightly in their composition, he said. Many of the first were young men who were fleeing the fight, and after them came entire families trying to leave the country. When the government declared martial law last week, it said all men between 18 and 60 wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country.

Now Mr. Hankevych said he has seen many families being escorted to the border by men who return to Lviv to prepare to fight.

“Right now it’s calm before the storm,” said Mr. Hankevych. “Most of the people who are frightened have left already. The ones who remain want to fight.”

One of them, Dmitro Zahlyuskyi, 24, said that he dropped his mother and two brothers at the Polish border crossing earlier this week, and returned to Lviv where each day he has been helping to knit camouflage nets near the city hall with other volunteers.

A native of Kyiv, he said he was sorry to say goodbye to his family, but that he didn’t want to be in Poland while Ukraine was at war with Russia. “What would I do there, sit in a cafe and drink cappuccino?” he said. “It would have been upsetting.”