The snake symbolizes Russia

Banya (n, v) The process of transitioning between sweltering hot and freezing cold environments while being whipped by birch tree branches (my definition).

To truly feel the comfort of warmth one must freeze, and for one to find pleasurable comfort in the cold they must come from the sweltering heat. The ideology of swinging between the extremes is baked into the psychology of the Ukrainian people, and everything here seems to function in the ways of the banya.

The juxtapositions in Kyiv are manifold: people are either really hard on each other or very kind, the architecture beautiful or ugly, the smiles are wide and real, or faces rigid like stone, the women hot and the guys not (some exceptions here), people drink a lot or a little, service is excellent or terrible, people just get by or are rich (small middle class), the weather is post-apocalyptically dark or pleasantly uplifting....