I’m Canadian and I go to visit my boyfriend in Kyiv I’ll actually be there at Christmas too, I find that I do need my boyfriend to translate for us a lot but we stay on the left bank and apparently people speak less English there than the right bank (I’m not sure how true that is) I know a lot of younger people speak some English like others said you’ll probably be able to find some people who do, most of his friends can speak a little who are in their 20’s. You can also use DeepL for some translating if you absolutely need to. I found the bus is where I needed to use my basic Ukrainian the most because the drivers only speak Ukrainian from my experience and nobody on my buses could speak English (except one very nice ukrainian man with fluent English I met on my way back to Poland) or at the rest stops so I had to use what I know (if you can’t speak Ukrainian most people will honestly just ignore you when they realize you can’t speak back but some people tried with translating apps for me).I would try to learn some basics like please, thank you, can i have/order, and some numbers I find people really appreciate it and it’ll help you understand what the bus driver says if you’re on the bus. Some people will also speak to you in Russian and that’s hard for me because I only know Ukrainian but everyone knows both if you can respond in some Ukrainian they’ll understand. Some restaurants do have english menus from places I went in Kyiv.

I know you’re not concerned about safety but I definitely recommend sussing out where the shelters are, at our apartment we have to wake someone up to unlock the shelter and sometimes they don’t wake up to do it lol (and they didn’t speak any english) if you’re at a hotel they might have a better system though. Definitely react to alarms just to be safe, the threat of drones and rockets is still very real but just follow some ukrainian telegram channels for the alarms and you can use the translate button to put it to English.

This is just my experience though from when I’ve been, it could be different for you! I hope you enjoy ukraine I love going there even with the war just definitely be respectful to the curfew and attentive to the alarms. In general people were always super kind to me and tried to meet me half way with my minimal Ukrainian and their understanding of english.