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The Knights, everything changed, waiting for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, written and read by Luke Harding.

It was the evening before everything changed.

The Ukrainian novelist, Andre Korkov, had invited me for dinner, a few friends he said and bush.

We had first met earlier that memorable winter, a pleasant meal in a Georgian restaurant in Podil, a neighbourhood in the lower part of Kiev, next to the Nipro River.

The date was now February 23, 2022.

It was 8.15pm and I was late. I stopped in the shop, bought a bottle of Coliness Port from a winery in Odessa and hurried to Korkov's flat.

These meetings happened under the shadow of war. The news was alarming, terrible even. A week earlier, Russian-backed separatists had shell the village in Ukraine control territory, next to the pro-Russian regions of Lohansk and Tanyaetsk.

The missile had landed in a school gym. Mercifully, no one was killed, but the eight-year conflict in the east was heating up.

Humor was essential in these dark times. Korkov sent me a meme via WhatsApp. It showed Fiodor Dostoevsky's head floating serially in a hole in the school's wall, peering at the rubble.

Around the great 19th century Russian writer was Sokobolz, a mural depicting a jungle and a climbing rope.

Korkov was an agreeable companion, the author of many playful and magically luminous books and Ukraine's most celebrated living writer. Also, remarkably, he was an optimist.

I, by contrast, was increasingly gloomy. The Oman's pointed in one scarcely believable direction. Russia was about to invade Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin had a long-standing interest in Ukraine. In 2014, he responded to a pro-European uprising in Kiev by annexing Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and coordinating a counter-abellon in the Dombass.

A region subsequently controlled in part by Russia-installed rebels. By the end of the decade, it had grown into a brooding obsession.

The crisis had been growing since autumn 2020, like a fog rolling in. First, Putin had sent troops, tanks and armed vehicles to Russia's western border with Ukraine.

And to Belarus, a brother state the Moscow had practically absorbed. The vehicles bore a curious white symbol, the letter V.

Next, Putin had issued a series of demands, so imperious and swaggering, you could only marvel at their audacity.

He sought nothing less than the enolment of the security infrastructure that has governed Europe for the three decades since the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse.

Further, he wanted the Biden administration to guarantee Ukraine would never join NATO. The United States-led military alliance set up in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union.

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