Daily life carries on in war-torn Kyiv

Ukrainians defiant as Russia tries to make life miserable

Patrons dine outdoors at a McDonald's restaurant in front of a burned-out shopping centre in Kyiv. (JEDRZEJ NOWICKI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

KYIV, Ukraine — The air-raid alarm went off at 3:11 a.m. but offered little warning. Within three minutes, the missiles started to hit, almost 10 teeth-rattling booms that jolted Nikita Horskyi and Alona Horska awake.

The couple launched into what has become a familiar ritual in recent weeks. Horskyi scooped up their two children. Horska assembled makeshift beds in the hallway. Their 16-story apartment building has no shelter, and they knew that two walls offered more protection than the exterior wall alone.

Mark, their 10-year-old, thought, “God, help us,” as he said he does after every explosion. He hugged his stuffed goose and curled up in the hallway on a thin mat and a pillow resembling a smiling green monster. Arina, 5, lay down on a blowup bed with sheets of pastel bunnies and hedgehogs.

The family fell back asleep, accustomed to this particular nightmare, until the next missiles hit, two of them nearby, including one that killed a pair of security guards. Mark woke to the sound of glass shattering outside. He fell asleep for a bit longer, then he and his sister got up for school. Soon the jet-powered drones would arrive.

“Of course, it affects my mental state and my nerves,” Mark said. “I have to come up with things to calm myself down.”

This is the story of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on a recent Wednesday, and how life here has deteriorated. The Russian missiles come more often now, not just at night but all day.

In August, new Russian drones, powered by jet engines and capable of going up to 375 mph, began streaking into cities in exponentially larger numbers. They hit almost without warning. Ukraine has not figured out how to consistently intercept them.

President Donald Trump has recently lifted sanctions on Russian diesel sales, pressured Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries and suggested that Ukraine get a new president. He has said nothing about what Russia is doing to Kyiv. Moscow is killing more civilians in Ukraine than at any time since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

This Wednesday would be an average day. Not too quiet, not too loud. The air-raid alarm would go on and off seven times, keeping Kyiv under alert a total of about 10 1/2 hours. Parts of the city would lose power and running water. Six people would die.

In the fifth year of war, Russia is trying to make the capital unlivable, drive people away and force Ukraine to capitulate. Kyiv, a city shaped like a heart, has become a new kind of battlefield far from the front in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been unable to win the war.

Kyiv has given no indication that it will give up. But it will suffer.

People here once coped with major missile attacks every seven to 10 days and the occasional drone that made it past Ukraine’s defences. Life was sometimes miserable, like during power cuts last winter. But it was often joyful, with “Blade Runner”-themed raves and pouty influencers parading down hipster streets with camera crews. That Kyiv has been muted. Life has become grayer.

Russia has threatened to knock out power, heat and water in Kyiv this winter. This month, Moscow started trying to cut the city in two by hitting bridges over the Dnieper River, which divides the east, where rents are lower, from the west, where most people work.

Every decision, small or big, feels fraught with what-ifs that could be life-changing. People in Kyiv first decide where to sleep. A tent in a subway station. A car in an underground parking garage. A mattress in the hallway. A gamble in bed.

Shopping has turned into a Sisyphean task, because many larger stores make people leave when the sirens start. School is constantly interrupted, because children must go to the schools’ shelters for every alert.

Mark often finds himself in his school’s basement, which is rented out to a gym called the Shogun Fight Club.

There are punching bags, wrestling mats and concrete walls, but no desks or chairs. The children cannot study there. Some follow the paths of drones on apps.

Others play games, like one where a few boys pretend to be Ukrainian recruitment officers and then tackle other boys on the wrestling mats to send them to imaginary front lines. Or the one where the boys throw paper airplanes and paper drones at a burning building drawn on the gym wall in pencil, complete with people waving their hands for help.

The Decision

Anatoliy Kavunenko, 66, woke before dawn Wednesday for his early shift. Despite the ongoing alert, he decided to go to his nearby job as a security guard. His wife, Antonina, packed him lunch: eggplant with garlic and buns stuffed with mushrooms. Kavunenko walked out the door.

About 5:12 a.m., the second round of ballistic missiles hit. Antonina Kavunenko heard a thundering explosion and tried to call her husband. His phone rang and rang.

Every missile, every drone, changes a neighborhood’s life, a Russian roulette that has damaged thousands of buildings in Kyiv. When the alert ended at 7:05 a.m., people emerged into the acrid, smoky air that has blanketed Kyiv almost every morning for the past two months.

On the east side of the river, a missile set fire to garages over an area the size of a tennis court.

Kavunenko, 64, ran there, still wearing her dark-green velvet pajama pants and a light black coat. Firefighters told her that one of the two burned corpses on the ground in front of her was the body of Anatoliy, her husband.

“My brain can’t accept that this black piece of coal is my Tolik,” she said, using his nickname. She held her hand over her heart and took a deep breath.

“Please help me. How can I find out if this is him?”

The Jet Drones

At a nearby McDonald’s, which has been hit at least nine times, the menu was a shadow of its former self. All the attacks in recent months meant it had been stripped to the essentials — burgers and fries. There was no Coca-Cola.

At 3:29 p.m., the air-raid alert went off. Everyone inside the restaurant left for the nearby subway station, the customers hurriedly eating fries. Seventeen minutes later, the alarm ended. The workers filed back up the stairs.

Nearby, people waited for a tram. The air-raid alarm sounded again.

“We’re just so tired of it all,” said Heorhii Vasyliev, 52, who travels all over Kyiv for his construction job.

A drone hit in the distance, a low boom. “Oh,” he said, exhaling. “What can you call normal about any of this? Is this normal? Is war normal?”

On and off, off and on, the alerts continued. A drone on the west side of the river set fire to a Soviet-era, five-story apartment building, where mostly retired people lived. A charred piece of a balcony hung from a nearby tree. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames.

The jet-powered drones kept coming, and the list of minor atrocities unknown almost anywhere else in the world continued. Two people died on the west side of the river when debris from a drone interception hit a parked car. Two more people would die on the east side after a drone hit a 12-floor apartment building about 9 miles north of the Horskyi apartment.

The power went out in much of the city. The water, too, stopped working in parts of Kyiv. So did trams, trolley buses and parts of the subway on the west side. On the east, an entire district of high-rise apartment blocks blinked out, one after the other.