Fear and fury in Kyiv

Recently, when Jared Kushner told a conference audience that Russia also wants peace, the room burst out laughing. After four and a half years of explaining this war to the world, laughter and humour is about the only thing Ukrainians still have in plentiful supply. 

Try not finding it funny when calling a taxi, your GPS sends you to Uruguay. Drivers circle the block hunting for passengers who, according to the app, are on another continent. One morning, once my driver and I had finally found each other after exchanging a few “it’s the Russians’ fault” calls, we passed a plume of smoke rising over the buildings, most likely from a drone shot down. Smoke like that is part of the scenery now, much like the funerals held almost every day on the central Maidan square.

“Drones still frighten me when I hear one nearby,” a Taxi Driver said as he drove me from the suburb to the center. “During a ballistic missile attack, I generally try to stay off the road. If there’s a major missile attack at night, we go down to the parking garage. We expected a massive attack yesterday, but it never came. All this waiting gets on my nerves more.”

Kyiv, as it ran out of air defence, became a target of an intensified bombing campaign. Over September, the city had more than 220 air raid alerts, according to the city military administration. Put together, Kyiv spent more than 228 hours under alert that month, nearly a third of the time, and a new alert often arrives before you have noticed the previous one ended. Anyone who obeys every siren would have practically moved into a shelter, so people gamble instead, hoping whatever is coming lands somewhere else. They check Telegram to see which direction the drones are heading and whether their own neighbourhood lies in the path, and over time one learns to read the explosions by ear. A distant rumble like thunder means it is miles away, while a crack like fireworks overhead means it is close, and if a heavy gong is followed by a chorus of car alarms, something nearby has just been hit. Through all of it, gunfire rattles across the city as crews try to bring the drones down.

For a Georgian, every time my taxi pulls up to a building, I marvel at how exactly it resembles Tbilisi, from the windows to the characters on the street and the boys hanging around the entrance who seem to come with the apartment block. Even the poverty is the same. Sometimes I stand outside in silence for a minute and pretend it is my city, which does not take much imagination. Russia, meanwhile, keeps blowing up the ugly Soviet blocks that both countries should have torn down years ago. This may indeed produce de-communisation.

The attacks come day and night. The warning system now distinguishes between drone attacks, marked yellow, and ballistic missile attacks, marked red. People in Kyiv have learned to do the same. Many carry on through a yellow alert, though Russia’s new jet-powered drones that are hard to shoot down and 50 per cent of the time reach their target, are making it look increasingly optimistic. The effect on the mind is peculiar. Each alert is a decision — bed or corridor, stay or go, and with more than a dozen of them a day, the decisions pile up until the brain decides to switch to idle mode. Two walls between you and a drone give you a decent chance of survival. Against a direct hit from a ballistic missile, the odds drop, which gives a logic to staying in bed. While a nice hotel in central Kyiv keeps beds freshly made downstairs, and a nice shelter with complimentary water. On the outskirts, the shelter is usually a smelly, mouldy basement whose residents are mice, and hardly anyone wants to spend a night there.

Sleep is the only real break from the warnings, if you manage to get some. After every attack, photographs and videos of the latest damage start circulating on phones, and people study them closely, trying to identify the street and working out who they know nearby. I keep wondering what makes these videos so addictive, the same pull that keeps people everywhere watching floods sweep away cars and airplanes wobbling onto runways. The Roman poet Lucretius worked it out two thousand years ago. “It is sweet,” he wrote, “when on the great sea the winds trouble its waters, to behold from land another’s deep distress,” and sweet, too, to look upon “the mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains.” The pleasure, he insisted, has little to do with cruelty. It comes from seeing “from what evils you are yourself exempt.” In Kyiv, tomorrow, the storm may reach it. So, you put the phone down, feel lucky, feel guilty for feeling lucky, and go about your day.

I woke up at five one morning, unable to sleep, decided to step out on a balcony for a smoke and a drone alert arrived on cue, as though the cigarette had summoned it. Back inside, my friend was sleeping closer to the window. Should I wake her? She needed the rest. Then again, if something happened and I had let her sleep through it, how would I live with that? I went back and forth and was still deliberating when I fell asleep myself, which settled the matter. At some point exhaustion wins out.

A few months earlier, in Israel, during an Iranian attack, a siren woke me at six in the morning and everybody in the building went into a shelter on the eighth floor. I wondered what an eighth-floor room could do against a missile. People told me later that going to a shelter cuts the risk of death by 80 percent. I had my doubts about the number, but almost everyone went. Israel is small, missiles arrive within minutes and alerts end quickly, so following the rules costs an hour and makes sense. In Kyiv, it would mean living in the basement, and unless you are Enver Hoxha that is not a good proposition.

In the mornings, offices fill with people who look drained and are somewhere else entirely, comparing notes on the night, where it landed, how loud, how close. My friends have reached that point and so has much of the city. A siren now draws a weary “oh, for f**k’s sake,” with all the urgency of an aunt calling on your birthday. People remain resilient, and they still mock the enemy, but years of wondering where their parents, children and friends are during every alert, have taken a heavy psychological toll. Many have slipped into apathy. Life in the capital has settled into a kind of resignation, and the dominant mood is exhaustion mixed with a collective shrug.

And yet people keep going out, and the bars, cafes and shops stay busy. Keeping up the routine is a way of not letting Russians dominate their lives, and besides, when the sirens start, it is better to be among people than stuck at home alone. Try buying a ticket to the opera, it’s almost impossible. The government has relaxed the curfew, so taxis now run after midnight, which was not the case a year ago, and bars stay open later, with the basement ones proving especially popular. One evening, the ballistic missile warning arrived in the middle of dinner on a street in central Kyiv. We looked at our wine, an acceptable Montepulciano, and we did not move. Neither did anyone else on the street. Caring about one more warning was beside the point, which may not be a wise conclusion but certainly, the most popular one in Kyiv right now.

Petrol stations have become one of Russia’s favorite targets lately, and Kyiv residents fear water, electricity, internet and sewage could follow. “Looks like the tactic is to find the painful spots to demoralise people. Who the f**k knows,” said Mykola Vigovsky, who lives in the city. “The Russians are hitting data centres to break the internet. A few drones land somewhere every day.”

Around the clock bombings have made life hard for everyone, and the hardest for parents, who send their kids to school every morning. Some classes now meet together in the basement. With winter approaching, many expect the capital to empty out. Those who can afford it are renting houses outside Kyiv or booking hotel rooms with windowless walls. Others have to stay put. For a bus driver, a grocer or a shoe repairman, leaving is a hard decision and an expensive one, and a better fortified apartment is also out of reach.

The same fatigue has reached politics. Corruption cases keep hitting the country, exhaustion has spread through the ruling class, and some members of parliament have now held their seats for seven and a half years. “It’s like being elected forever. All the energy people brought is sucked out,” said one Ukrainian lawmaker, who asked to stay anonymous. “Something needs to be done,” he added. Elections have become a subject that divides people. Most agree they may be necessary, yet holding them under wartime limitations is a difficult proposition.

Inside the government, too, whatever illusions parts of the political elite once held about reaching an agreement with Russia are gone, and hardly anyone now believes a lasting peace is possible. “I was the peace guy, always running with new ideas, talking to people, officially, unofficially,” said a senior Ukrainian official involved in the peace negotiations. “But now I’m quite depressed. I don’t see any movement into any direction. It’s just talk. Nothing, no feasible idea.”    

Russia’s strategy is to make ordinary life unbearable. But last winter, when the power went out, people lit candles and kept drinking in the bars, and this winter will likely look the same. Many of the people Moscow is trying to frighten grew up in the 1990s, when blackouts and salaries months overdue were a norm. It’s hard to scare these people with a power or water cut after living half a decade in total war.

On my last night in Kyiv, in a basement bar, my friends hurried me off to the station, even though my train was already delayed. I went reluctantly, suspecting the wait would grow longer. I was right. Drone warnings pushed the train back five hours, and I spent a massive ballistic attack sitting on my suitcase at the station, next to a girl who shook the whole time and a few meters from some forty children, six to eight years old, in uniform, bound for a sports camp. The explosions were loud and nearby. I wish I had profound thoughts at that moment. I did not. I thought that if I died here, my friends would regret hurrying me out of that bar. Mostly, I just wanted it to end. I put my arm around the girl and hoped, like everyone in that hall, that the rockets would fall somewhere else. With air defence this thin, it was going to. In a single month, attacks killed more than 30 people in Kyiv, children among them, injuring more than 230.

Then I got angry, really angry. Not only at Moscow, but more at Washington, where some people now describe the country being bombed as the main obstacle to peace. When did the difference between the side under the bombs and the side dropping them become a matter of interpretation? And what does that say about us? How will history judge that? The West had years to grasp that a war of this size demands military production on a matching scale, yet that realization is still not here. Costing lives in Ukraine, daily.

I made it out safely, but many in Ukraine do not have anywhere to go

When the train to Poland finally arrived, we went into one of those old Soviet sleeping cars, with a heavy sliding compartment door and narrow bunks built into the walls. The fifteen-year-old in my compartment washed her face and applied moisturiser with the leisurely care. While I curled up in my narrowly padded shelf, with a thin mattress, that requires a plan to turn over and tried to close my eyes. She has spent nearly a third of her life in this war.

The road to the Polish border reminds one of rural Virginia, rolling green hills and high sky. At a petrol station where I had set my heart on a hot dog, an alert came in. Russia now targets the crossings too, but by now it is fair to say Russia targets everything. Polish guards move at a speed that makes DMV look good. I made it out safely, but many in Ukraine do not have anywhere to go.