Kyiv residents who managed to sleep on another night of intense Russian air attacks woke to an increasingly familiar scene on Monday morning, as smoke wreathed several districts of the city, hospitals treated the wounded, and damage to civilian buildings and transport infrastructure made journeys to work slower and more stressful.
At least one person was killed and eight injured during a night of drone and missile attacks on the city of 3.5 million. Apartment blocks, office buildings and a kindergarten were set on fire and the entrance to a metro station was hit, sending smoke pouring down on to platforms where people were taking shelter.
Russian drone attacks on Ukraine – and particularly Kyiv – have intensified sharply in recent weeks, and the two heaviest strikes of the war took place this month, peaking overnight from July 8th-9th with the launch of 728 drones and 13 missiles.
Ukrainian officials said on Monday morning that Russia fired 426 drones and 24 missiles overnight, most of which were shot down or electronically jammed. But the toll on the country and its people from direct strikes, falling debris and stress and tiredness accumulated over more than three years of full-scale war continues to mount.
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“When people asked me whether I was worried about living in Kyiv, I would say that yes, it’s being shelled and bombed, but it’s well protected. That’s how it felt until a few weeks ago. There were drone attacks every other night but they would hardly reach the actual city – they were usually shot down in the regions,” says Nazar, a Kyiv resident.
“But in the past month there have been lots of occasions when suddenly lots of drones have come into the city. I’ve started hearing explosions closer and closer, to the point where I couldn’t ignore it like before. That’s when it started feeling less safe.”
In Kyiv and other towns and cities where air-raid alerts can last for most of the day and night, Ukrainians must decide whether to take a risk by doing what they had planned – from staying in bed and trying to sleep to following a normal work routine – or to seek shelter in a basement, underground car park or metro station.
“Seeing drones over my residential area, over my actual apartment building, is a scary thing. They make a particular annoying, threatening noise, which speeds up as they’re about to hit a target. It sounds like something from a second World War movie,” says Nazar, who lives in a 16-floor flat in Kyiv’s western Nyvky district.
“Now a few buildings have been destroyed not far from me and you hear about hundreds of these drones coming. You don’t feel safe. So now I go to the underground shelter at 3 or 4am.”
The Shahed drones fired at Kyiv and other cities are not the small, light models – similar to hobby drones but carrying explosives – that both sides use on the front line.
The Iranian-made Shaheds are 3.5m long, have a wingspan of 2.5m and weigh 200kg, and can fly for some 2,000km before plunging into a target and detonating a 40kg warhead. Russia now mass produces its own version of the Shahed, called the Geran.
“It’s a guessing game. A matter of luck,” Olesya, who lives on the eighth floor of an apartment building in northwestern Kyiv, says of the danger of being killed or hurt.
“While before I would have stayed in my flat during an alert, now, if there are too many drones flying overhead, I go into the corridor of the building (for greater protection) or to a lower floor,” she adds.
“People who have stayed in Kyiv tend to find some kind of rational decision in terms of everyday functioning. So if you stay in your apartment there is a chance that you’ll be killed there, but there is also a chance that you’ll get a good night’s sleep and not be hit ... But sometimes it’s very hard to sleep and function normally afterwards.”
Russia’s escalating attacks have coincided with fresh concerns over Ukraine’s air defences, as the United States halted supplies of some crucial weaponry and then announced that some would be delivered after all.
That was followed by a White House decision this month to send more air defence systems and other arms to Kyiv via a new deal with Nato. Germany and other European states are expected to provide Ukraine with advanced US-made Patriot air defence units from their stocks and then “backfill” with equipment bought from the US.
As ever during nearly 3½ years of all-out war – and 11 years of conflict since Russia occupied Crimea and created heavily armed militias in eastern Ukraine – the timing and scale of western help for Ukraine is still unclear.
“I live on the 14th floor and I have Star Wars going on outside my window. Not just tracers but I can see Shaheds flying past,” says Viktoriya, whose flat on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river is on an approach route for many drones and missiles targeting Kyiv.
“Before, the majority was repelled. But now I don’t think we have enough air-defence assets or manpower to track everything, so they do get through,” she adds, calling Russia’s tactics “terror for the sake of terror”.
“Now I see more people going at night to metro stations and other shelters with sleeping bags, mats, dogs, backpacks and other necessities. They’re becoming more systematic and going fully prepared. But there are also those who don’t go, and feel the chance of being hit while going to the shelter is higher than when being at home.”
On July 8th – the night of the heaviest Russian air attack so far – 32,000 people took refuge in Kyiv’s metro stations, including almost 2,200 children, according to city officials. Figures for night-time visits to the metro system in July are expected to surpass those for June, when 165,000 visits were recorded, up from 65,000 in May.
Russia has also launched intense drone and missile strikes on western Ukraine this month, shaking the residents of cities that are 1,000km from the frontline: the mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk said it had suffered its heaviest attack of the war in the early hours of Monday, and that four people had been injured in nearby villages.
There is fear in Kyiv and other cities, just as there is anger at the West’s failure to back up rhetoric with action, but such feelings are by now familiar to Ukrainians – as are Russia’s demands for a settlement that would amount to capitulation.
“I wouldn’t say there’s a catastrophic shift in how it feels ... But it does feel very targeted, very instrumentalised, this terror against civilians,” Olesya says. “It feels very thought-out, to make people scared and panic and potentially put pressure on the authorities and demand talks – any talks just to stop this. I don’t feel this is working for now, at least on a mass scale.”
“I don’t think we are depressed or saying this is the end of Ukraine,” says Nazar. “Surprisingly, I have more resilience than I thought, and I think people are on same page in that way.”
