But also that it was safe enough to walk those streets. that told you how much the center of gravity of the battle had shifted and that kyiv essentially has been successfully defended. a few weeks ago it was anything but. nobody knew which way it would go, and indeed it was vladimir putin s plan to take kyiv and to put in a puppet government. what is happening now though is the battle is changing to the east. we are now going to have the first really large set piece battle. you can say it has world war i or world war ii written all over it, but we will face battles of mass in the donbas. the problem is this to some extent is slightly more at van tagous to the russians, they know the terrain better and it is largely depopulated. the president and the vice president of the eu s executive branch met with president zelenskyy in the country s capital on friday. from there the group made the trip to kyiv, to the kyiv suburb