Ukraine in 7 days: Kyiv, Lviv and the Carpathians — and why not yet

Day 2 — Lviv’s churches, and the cemetery

• 09:00 — The Armenian Cathedral, which is the oldest and the best of them.
• 11:00 — The Boim Chapel and the Dominican church.
• 14:00 — The Lychakiv Cemetery — a wooded necropolis of nineteenth-century sculpture. The newest section holds the war dead, with flags, and it is the part that stays with you.
• 17:00 — The High Castle hill for the city at dusk.
• Blackouts are routine. Carry a power bank and a torch; hotels run generators but lifts stop.

Day 3 — To Kyiv

• 07:00 — The train east, five to seven hours, and Ukrainian Railways has run reliably throughout the war — it is the one thing that has.
• 14:00 — Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, begun in the 1010s, with the Orans mosaic in the apse and frescoes that survived every attempt to remove them.
• 17:00 — Andriyivskyy Descent, the cobbled street down from the St Andrew’s Church, with Bulgakov’s house on it.
• 19:30 — Podil for dinner, which is the quarter at the bottom of the descent.

Day 4 — The Lavra, and Maidan

• 09:00 — The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — the Great Lavra Belltower, the Dormition Cathedral, and the Near and Far Caves, entered with a candle. Shoulders and heads covered, and the caves are low and genuinely dark.
• 13:00 — The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, and the Motherland Monument, whose Soviet shield was replaced with the Ukrainian trident in 2023.
• 16:00 — Maidan Nezalezhnosti, which is a square and also a political fact. The memorial to the Heavenly Hundred killed in 2014 is on the slope above it.
• 17:30 — The flags on the Maidan lawn, one for each of the war dead, planted by families. It is the hardest hour in the city.
• 19:00 — If it is open, the growing collection of destroyed Russian armour displayed on the streets outside St Michael’s.

Day 5 — Kyiv, and the edges

• 09:00 — St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery and the museum below it.
• 12:00 — Bucha and Irpin with a guide from there, if you are going — go only with someone local, and go to listen. This is not sightseeing.
• 16:00 — The Chornobyl Museum in Podil, which is the substitute for the Zone and is better than most expect.
• 18:30 — Besarabsky Market and the streets around it, which are as close to ordinary as Kyiv gets.

Day 6 — Chernihiv

• 07:30 — Two hours north. One of the oldest cities in Ukraine, with a group of eleventh- and twelfth-century churches — the Transfiguration Cathedral, Saints Boris and Gleb — that predate most of what survives in Kyiv.
• It was besieged and heavily shelled in 2022, and the damage is part of what you would see.
• 11:00 — The Antoniyevi Caves under the Trinity monastery.
• 14:00 — The city itself, where the repaired and the unrepaired stand next to each other.
• 17:00 — Back to Kyiv well before curfew.

Day 7 — The Carpathians, or out

• The Carpathians are a long way from Kyiv — an overnight train west — so this day works as the end of a Lviv-based trip rather than a Kyiv one.
• 09:00 — Yaremche, Vorokhta and the Hutsul villages, with the wooden tserkvas — sixteen of which, across Ukraine and Poland, are UNESCO-listed for a building tradition that uses no nails.
• Hoverla, the highest point in Ukraine at 2,061 metres, is a four-hour return walk from Zaroslyak.
• 14:00 — The Carpathian Biosphere Reserve and the old-growth beech forest, also UNESCO-listed.
• Then west to the Polish border, and allow a full day for the crossing — it is the slowest part of the whole trip.

Chernobyl tours ran until February 2022. The Exclusion Zone was occupied, is now mined and contaminated in new ways, and is closed. Do not expect it to reopen soon.