Obvious there are some exceptions, but that's why I said "western europe."

Pre-war Kyiv was still much much better than say St. Louis.

USA! USA!

We found an example of a place more violent than most cities in the richest country on earth and possibly in all of human history!

It's a city in a country engaged in a hot war!

I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but the overall US homicide rate is comparable to the UN casualty count for the Russo-Ukraine war (most of which will be in Donbas, not Kyiv). So I wouldn't be completely certain the rate in Kyiv is necessarily higher. I don't think there's good figures but I'd wager it's actually lower than some US cities.

Yes, a city torn in war is less safe than SF, I'll give you that!

Might as well add Lagos too!

Per Wikipedia, in 2019 there were 1428 murders across Ukraine (perhaps this includes the already-invaded Donbas and Luhansk regions, though I somewhat doubt it).

Let's assume all of those happened in Kiev, with a population of 2.8 million (since I can't find more specific data easily right now). That gives a wildly inflated homicide rate per 100,000 population of 51.

St Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham (AL) all had murder rates that year higher than this inflated figure.

I don't think it's in dispute that most European capitals of any size have areas where one could easily get murdered, though. I can personally easily think of areas of London and Paris where I'd not be surprised by news of it happening.

kiev is hardly what comes to mind when talking about european capitals.

At about 1.4 it's still pretty low compared to American cities. It's also not really "getting up there" as it appears to be on a relative decline lately.

UK is not Europe. London is not a European city.

There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).

London is quite low but unfortunately death by stabbing in the teens-to-20s age group has increased dramatically over the last two decades.

If you're not in that demographic, you're probably fine.