As the sky darkened in Ukraine’s capital on Friday, 39-year-old Maine native Ryan Weaver stood in his apartment window, peering down on a main artery as he chatted online.

Suddenly, he spotted something unusual.

“That looks like an army vehicle. Looks like two of them. I definitely have the chills,” he said as stared at the brightly lit roadway that still had a few passenger cars whizzing along despite the incessant talk of approaching Russian tanks, the vanguard of an invading army that threatens to occupy a nation fighting for its continued independence.

A little later, the military vehicles rolled by just outside. They were Ukrainian, heading for a battle that remained, for the moment at least, out of sight.

Weaver is a Belfast native who had worked in Portland before deciding a couple of years ago to “get away from my life” and bop around Europe on a tourist visa.

Stuck in Kyiv in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he stayed long enough to fall in love, get a job teaching kindergartners, learn to speak some Russian and find happiness in a faraway land.

“I’ve built a life here,” Weaver said. “I’m a free man right now. It feels good.”

But, he added, “Suddenly there’s a real problem surrounding us.”

Weaver said he lives “on a main drag into the city,” with the presidential palace less than two miles away. A major theater is nearby as well as a number of apartment blocks, with a subway stop close by.

Now the once-peaceful area is perilously close to becoming a war zone.

At 4 a.m. Friday, Weaver said he woke up to the sound of a huge explosion, which he later learned happened on the far side of the Dniepr River, a few miles away.

All day and into the night, air raid sirens wailed off and on, a warning for people to get under cover. But Weaver just kept an eye out and mostly stayed put in his apartment, venturing out only once to the grocery store.

“I haven’t gone far from home,” he said. “But it’s been interesting to watch from my window.”

He said he is not scared, but “probably should be.”

Two days earlier, despite the threat of war hanging over Ukraine, Weaver said, “I left work from a kindergarten down the street, walked home and saw my girlfriend. It was a normal night.”

He woke Thursday “to chaos and panic” after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to attack Ukraine.

Looking outside, Weaver saw “people running in every direction with suitcases and families and bags of food or whatever that they could put in their backpacks or hold in their arms.”

Many of them left Kyiv for areas seen as safer, particularly in western Ukraine.

Chatting Friday on social media, and sharing photographs and audio and video clips, Weaver talked about his feelings and concerns while his girlfriend prepared blinchiki, a crepe-like meal that he called “a wonderful Ukrainian delight.”

Weaver, who had run-ins with the law in Maine, said he loves the life he’s had in Ukraine, where days typically began with a trip to the gym, then his job as a full-time teacher at “a very nice school” within walking distance and finally home to a woman he treasured, a professional dancer and choreographer.

“A normal day was peaceful, quiet, great food, great people,” he said.

“It’s kind of why I don’t want to leave,” Weaver said, despite the dangers that may lie ahead.

He said, though, that he will likely try to get to the city of Lviv, which is closer to Poland, where the U.S. embassy is operating. He has to straighten out his passport and travel documents, he said.

Weaver said he is “just so grateful to have experienced this country exactly how it was. It was an amazing place with some amazing talent and culture.”

And he worries that with the unpredictable Putin at the helm in Russia, much of it is in danger.

“I don’t think a genocide is beyond this guy, really,” Weaver said.

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