Kyiv, Ukraine – When Olena Krakovska is at work selling tools for manicures from a small shop on the basement floor of a shopping centre in central Kyiv, she doesn’t hear or see much. “I’m already in a bomb shelter. Air raid or not, I’m at work,” the 42-year-old single mother of two boys told Al Jazeera. Outside there are regular wailing air raid sirens, red-and-white explosions of Russian drones hit by Ukrainian interceptors, gong-like thuds and white plumes of smoke swelling in the sky. Falling debris, from tiny metal pieces to larger fragments of fuselage, flop in the wind and come down with the sour stench of gunpowder.
But when Krakovska is at home, the air raids rattle her senses and nerves. “There’s been too many recently. My brain isn’t functioning, my movements are uncoordinated,” she said. Since mid-August, Russian air raids in Ukraine have become longer, more frightening for residents and more frequent as part of Moscow’s new tactic aimed at “terrorising our people, our cities and our villages far more intensely,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on September 6. Between June and early August, there were five air raids a week with a combined duration of 2.3 hours, according to a calculation by the UA.news web portal.
In the third week of August, their number rose to 12 and their duration to 7.9 hours, and in the fourth week, 34 over 23.2 hours. Early September brought a brief lull – Russia stopped shelling Kyiv for three days when United States negotiators visited Moscow and Kyiv. But on Monday, shelling resumed with a six-hour air raid, killing five, wounding 35 and causing several fires. Each raid involves fewer drones and missiles, but the timing is unpredictable, keeping hundreds of thousands awake all night and paralysing all walks of daily life.
They interrupt office hours, business meetings and school lessons, traumatise people and cause long traffic jams. They also turn commutes on public transport into hours-long ordeals. Stoicism, a macabre sense of humour and ingenuity keep Ukrainians optimistic. “There’s no way out, only when you’re in a coffin,” Krakovska quipped. That’s a phrase she heard from her great-grandmother Serafima, who survived the 1932-33 Holodomor famine and the 1941-43 Nazi occupation of central Ukraine. “She saw things that were way worse than what we’re living through,” Krakovska said.
What worries her during her working hours is not the air raids but the schooling of her sons Bohdan, 12, and Volodymyr, 10. Their academic year began on September 1, but after two days spent in the airless school basement-turned-bomb shelter, she decided that they should study online, at home, in front of laptops. But video games are just a click away, and the boys can barely focus on what their teachers say. “They don’t socialise with friends, don’t play outdoors. They bicker.
They pay less attention to their classes and homework,” she sighed. Her daily habits have changed, too. Krakovska lives on the left bank of the Dnipro river that bisects Kyiv and is up to a kilometre (0.62 miles) wide. She used to spend 45 minutes getting to work by subway listening to music, scrolling through social media or reading e-books.
But Kyiv authorities stop the movement of subway trains across the Dnipro during air raids – and crowds of frustrated commuters spend hours in subway stations or nearby. One day in late August, Krakovska, like hundreds of other exhausted people, spent almost three hours waiting for the train inside a station. She kept checking the Telegram channels that report the progress of air raids, worried about her phone’s dying battery and her sons’ safety. Her shopping habits have also changed.
She no longer idles in supermarkets looking for discounts – Russian attacks have destroyed several warehouses, leading to some food and medicine shortages. “You still can buy anything, but you need to spend more time looking,” she said. These days, she quickly buys food from small vendors next to the shopping mall or her apartment building. One of them is Olha Bondar, 49, who owns a tiny fruit and vegetable stand in an underground pass. She has begun to earn a bit more – but the war consumes every extra kopeck she makes.
She and her son Vadym fled Volnovakha, an eastern town with a pre-war population of about 20,000, days before it was occupied by Russian forces in 2022. Most of Volnovakha lies in ruins, including her grandfather’s house where she grew up playing with her siblings and cousins, weeding beds of beets and tomatoes and throwing Colorado potato beetles into a tin can with gasoline. The black and orange beetles “look like St George’s ribbons,” one of Russia’s main ideological symbols now ubiquitous in occupied Ukrainian regions, she said with a grimace of disgust. Some of her relatives have not left because of their pro-Moscow sympathies. “They blame Kyiv and the West for all the death, destruction and squalor around them,” Bondar said with a shrug.
She does not mind the air raid sirens as long as she gets text messages from her 24-year-old son who volunteered to enlist in 2023 and serves in northern Ukraine. “I hear his voice or read his texts – and nothing else matters,” she said, before weighing a kilogramme of velvet-blue plums. She lives in a rented one-bedroom apartment. But more affluent Kyiv residents have fled for the suburbs, renting or buying houses with wood stoves, wells and cool, dark basements to store food. “We just can’t find a house, they don’t let people with pets in, and we have two fox terriers,” Roman, a software engineer who withheld his last name because his main client is a defence company, told Al Jazeera. He and his partner Alisa, a yoga instructor who switched to online lessons, feel stranded in their two-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of a nine-storey building.
After recently enduring a 3.5-hour traffic jam, Roman prefers to talk to his colleagues and clients on Zoom. He also said his mental health is affected; he has started taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. “Otherwise I just lie awake listening and thinking, listening and thinking,” he said while his dogs rummaged in the grass near his apartment building. “And his tossing and turning drives me nuts,” Alisa quipped. But they keep adapting and thinking ahead because the coming winter will bring more strikes on energy infrastructure and exhausting blackouts. “We got used to things we’d only seen in horror movies,” she said.
