In the bustling, technicolour city of Kyiv, known for its vibrancy, its poets and its techies, there is still one unchanged element that overrides all progress — the omnipotent, omnipresent 'law-enforcing' machine, the cops. In a city where a latte can be ordered from your phone and arrive at your window via drone, where software engineers and AI architects vie for Ivy-league educated linguists for the title of 'coolest occupation', it's somewhat heartwarming to see some things stay constant. The cops are still very much in charge, and certainly not ones to be taken with a pinch of irony or a dash of sarcasm. Despite the fact that the city has been christened 'Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe', an accolade measured not by the number of tech startups or the burgeoning AI community, no no. It seems to be about the number of skinny jeans and dark roast, locally-sourced coffee beans per square meter or the frequency at which blockchain gets mentioned in casual conversations. Yet amidst this swirling vortex of technological advancements, poetry slams and ambiguous wordplay, the contours of the city still possess a sepia-tinged hue. Yes, dear reader, we're talking about the steadfast men and women in blue. Kiev’s police force, or ‘militsiya’ as they're commonly called, is one of those old-fashioned institutions that has remained wonderfully, irreplaceably untouched by this tsunami of technological advancement. They are the unsung poets of the city, composing symphonies of traffic tickets and bureaucratic administrative forms. Tech unicorns come and go, IPOs fluctuate like the Holosiivskyi National Nature Park's autumn leaf fall, but the cops continue to write their magnum opus, unwavering as ever in their epic saga of authoritative presence. Officer Vasyl, a veteran of 30 years in the force, reminisces fondly about the 'good old days’. "We didn’t have to worry about drones delivering summoned warrants or tech bros proposing algorithmic approaches to solving crime patterns," he says, chuckling, "All we had was our instincts, our smokes, and giant piles of paperwork.” His eyes gleam with a nostalgic pride, the kind you'd expect from a hardcore Luddite reminiscing about the joys of a pre-digital typewriter. Ironically, in a twist of fate that only life can produce, the hardboiled, tech-resistant cops of Kyiv have found unanticipated allies in their cyberspace-traversing counterparts — the poets. Kyiv's community of poets, who weave gold from words, harken back to an earlier, less binary time. In their verses and their verses' pauses, they echo the same disdain for the encroachment of mechanization. So, in a city racing to an algorithmically-defined finish line, the poets and the policemen have become strange bedfellows, both reveling in the charming obstinacy of their own ‘old world’ ethos. But fear not, technocrats, hipsters, and wolf-of-all-streets entrepreneur-cum-engineers, your utopia is nearly complete. For, unfortunately, even the die-hard poets and stubborn cops will eventually have to succumb to the deus ex machina of modernization. Though, until that day arrives, they’re hanging on to their metrical feet and handcuffs for dear life, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.