A Wartime Summer Night

Autumn has arrived in Ukraine. However, before we dive into the now and the tomorrow, let’s look back on a night when temperatures were warmer.

The evening of September 9th is like many others in the capital of Ukraine. Contrary to popular belief, Kyiv is not a city of death and destruction. Not only.

Around the Khreshatyk metro station, close to Maidan Nezalezhnosti (the independence square), teenagers are busy being teenagers. Which is to say, walking around and sitting around. A small economy has formed around the chilling teenagers’ fragile egos. Want to show how hard you can punch a thing? Well, somebody brought one of those things that measures how hard you can punch, which you usually see at fairs. Or try to score a really small football goal? You're not gonna believe this:

Two metro stations to the north lies the "Podil" district, the cultural heart of the city. Full of classy restaurants, bars with craft beer, and, especially on Fridays, drunk uni students. On the first Friday of the semester some weeks back, a guy reportedly jumped from a tree screaming "Slava Ukrainii".

Walking through Kyiv's center can feel quite cinematic, street music coming from everywhere. Yet inside the span of ten minutes, the genre can change from breakdance beats to good-looking guy with guitar, to guy with really loud piano, to drunk guy playback rapping, to Ukrainian indie-rock. Then you feel more like inside a Fortnite lobby.

Of course, Kyiv is more than just Khreshatyk and Podil. We're talking about a whole-ass city here. Before the war, Kyiv’s rave scene prided itself for rivaling that of Berlin. It still has its own strip, with some reclaimed abandoned buildings. There’s also a myriad of local beer shops, bars and restaurants, many of which have opened only recently.

Yet, the evening ends after 10pm. There's a curfew at midnight, making the last metro connection shortly before 11pm a very crammed occasion. Some people might continue the night at somebody’s flat, but most head home. The curfew hast become a fact, programmed into peoples’ lives.

And as Kyiv’s streets begin to clear out, at 11:08, the air force announces that a swarm of 33 "Shahed"-drones is entering Ukrainian airspace, coming from the Kursk region in Russia, on the north-eastern border. The Shahed, which Ukrainians often call "flying whores", is an Iranian single-use drone. It looks like an oversized paper-plane, sounds like a lawn mower, flies low and slow until its nose, filled with explosives, dives into its target and explodes. First used by Russia last fall, its low cost has made it the munition of choice for strikes deep behind the frontline. Over 2'000 of them have been launched up to now.

The drones fly over Sumy oblast, then over Chernihiv oblast. On 12am, Kyiv's streets are empty except for occasional garbage trucks and other services. On 12:03, the air force declares that the drones are moving towards the Kyiv region. Then air alarms spread in nearby regions. The drones are seemingly changing course. Another hour later, at 01:15, wailing air raid sirens - which were first heard on the morning of 24th February 2022 and have since become a fact of everyday life - wake up much of the city. Depending on your location, the sirens can be very loud or barely audible with windows closed. Most people also have phone apps that buzz and, if not muted, scream at you. The English version of the app is voiced by the guy who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The sirens last for a few minutes, then silence returns. Only a widget on your phone tells you the air alarm is still active.

Air raid sirens, recorded from a window in the Shevchenkivskyi district

Those who are awake now face a choice: to scramble for shelter, or to close the window and continue sleeping. In the beginning of the war, this decision was a no-brainer. Now, almost 1'000 hours of active air raid alerts later, it’s become surprisingly ambiguous. Twenty year-old Polina usually just turns away from the window and goes back to sleep. Vlad (21) often hides in the corridor to be safe from shattering windows, and because it feels better than doing nothing, Sonya (19) tries to cope with her anxiety attacks by chain-smoking in the staircase.

30 minutes later, Kyiv's air defense systems start their work. In the sky above the city and the surrounding areas, deadly drones and friendly missiles meet. Incredible feats of engineering clash together: if humanity has mastered one thing, it's the art of blowing each other’s stuff up.

A game of life and death plays out over the houses of civilians, set in motion by a button pressed hundreds of kilometers away.

On the ground, there might not be any signs of what is happening in the skies above. Depending on your location, you might not even hear any explosions. The only indicator of what is happening might be messages in telegram channels, informing you of every detail (except the ones that are classified for security reasons). Or you might hear the unmistakable, airplane-like sound of defense missiles flying over your house, might even see them take off like absurdly large pieces of firework. You might hear the impact when they hit their targets. You might jerk out of bed or incorporate the sounds into a half-waking nightmare.

The air defense does its duty, most of the drones get shot out of the sky. Some debris lands in the city, causing fires. A person is hospitalized. At 3:08, the all-clear is given in Kyiv. This night wasn’t one of the really bad ones.

Some hours later, a night like many others gives way to another day. Many inhabitants of Kyiv wake up exhausted from their disrupted sleep. Others pick up their phones and experience the deeply strange feeling of reading in the news that death was so close, seeing videos on Instagram of missiles flying over your city and of burned-out houses on familiar streets.

Communication about the attacks is mostly quite minimalistic. Sonya says conversations with her friends often look something like this:
"omg these fucking missiles jesus i haven’t slept in four days"
"same sis"
"fuck"
"fuck"

Note: Information on military events taken from Ukrainian military. Pictures aren’t from the exact day discussed unless stated otherwise.