Brooklyn-born Vladislav Davidzon, author of “From Odessa with Love,” is in Kyiv and writes that the residents of Ukraine’s capital are starting to worry.

While many Ukrainians have spent the previous months preparing for a possible full-scale Russian escalation of the war, others have blissfully ignored the obvious. The number of times I have been told that “nothing is going to happen” and “this war has been dragging on for 8 years and were have learned to live with it” beggar’s belief. Perhaps this is a self-defense mechanism and the only really rational way to live in the face of this sort of existential danger.

I have on a few occasions not been able to resist the temptation to respond and ask why they are more sure of their judgments than the generals, intelligence chiefs, journalists, diplomats and think tank professionals who think about this issue all day long.

In the last few days Moscow has recognized the so-called Russian proxy republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and sent in “peacekeepers” to reinforce the troops it already had stationed there. This followed a noxious speech that Russian President Putin delivered to the world.

Earlier tonight, the Ukrainian parliament has done what it has avoided doing over the previous months of Western warnings about a potential Russian military incursion and voted to impose a State of Emergency. This will last for the next month. The Pentagon has signaled that it believes that ever more Russian military forces are moving into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Russian television tonight is full of frenetic and unhinged programming about the “impending Ukrainian attack on the LNR and DNR.” Anchors claim Ukrainian saboteur teams are operating in Crimea.

The sense in Kyiv tonight is that the Russian army is definitely creating a pretext for a very dirty war in eastern Ukraine. It is not yet apparent if the Russian military intends to extend the boundaries of the newly recognized separatist statelets to the territorial boundaries of the Ukrainian regions in which they are located.

The warning over the possible large-scale targeting of Ukrainian cities, which have not felt real before, suddenly feel ominously correct.

While the day began ordinarily enough, the atmosphere in the Ukrainian capital tonight as the evening fell was one of sinister foreboding.

The high-end bars and restaurants in Kyiv have seen only a very small drop off in business over the last few weeks. Some Ukrainians continued to go out as if it was a patriotic duty. Now they’re all nervously looking around wondering if we should leave.

As I sat at dinner with a source, an American ex-pat banker who has returned to Kyiv for work, I began receiving phone calls from well-placed friends urging me to consider leaving the city. A well-known television journalist at one of the biggest networks wrote me “be careful tonight.”

It is hard to say if the alarmism of the American intelligence agencies of the last several weeks has finally burst through the dam of Ukrainian stoicism, bravery and sheer capacity for disassociation.