It’s truly terrifying to come under ballistic missile attack, but such strikes have a certain familiar logic in a city that’s been at war all these years. The alerts told you that something would happen, mostly at night. It would eventually end with the all-clear.
No longer. The rhythm has changed.
Great flocks of whining drones, their numbers swelled by new, jet-powered versions, arrive hour after hour, day and night. One swarm ends and another begins, with a gap that may be as short as 15 minutes. The old habits of wartime Kyiv, when we organized our day around a mostly predictable pattern of attacks, have been replaced. It is everywhere, all around and all at once.
This creates new pressures. Last week, I woke up with my son and waited for an air raid to end so I could take him to school. I drove him there and dropped him off. Almost immediately, the attack resumed.
A friend bringing her child to the same school wrote that a Shahed drone had fallen nearby. Then there were more. I knew something was being hit close to the school. So I drove back.
The children were in the shelter. Of course, I knew that rationally the shelter was safer than being outside. But the only thing I wanted was to have my child next to me. That was the only part of what was happening that I could control.
There was black smoke rising as I drove toward the school. The internal debate about whether I should be driving around Kyiv while Shaheds were flying was put aside. My child was there. Next to me.
Later, it turned out that collecting the children was the right decision. Pipes had broken in the shelter and water was rising from under the floor. Parents were asked to take their kids home.
So we went to eat Crimean food, although the drones were still flying. This is one of the practical absurdities of life in Kyiv now: you cannot really plan anything. You do not know when school will start. You do not know whether a meeting, appointment, or school day will happen when it is supposed to.
But you still have a job. And the jobs we do here still have to be done by someone.
Most of Kyiv continues working for the same reason. Some large businesses close during air raids. McDonald’s does (its restaurants are regularly hit, and on September 25, a warehouse was destroyed). The post office does. Many others remain open, because for a café, shop, or business, closing every time there is an alert can eventually mean never being open. So people work. Couriers drive. People buy groceries. Someone takes a call. Someone makes coffee. Someone curses because the GPS is not working.
And above all of this, the drones keep coming. Recent Russian attacks have damaged pharmaceutical warehouse infrastructure around Kyiv and a Coca-Cola production facility. Petrol stations inside the city are being hit and are burning, and so are grocery stores. Those facts enter ordinary life in strangely mundane ways. You begin wondering whether medicine will be available. Whether there will be fuel. Something disappears from a supermarket shelf. A warehouse you had never thought about suddenly matters.
The things destroyed can feel almost random from where we are standing. Something you use every day without ever thinking about the fact that it can cease to exist overnight.
The experience now feels different from a single “attack”. It is the condition of being under attack.
I woke this morning during another one. I did not check where the drones were flying. Where would I even expect them to be flying? There was a time when knowing the direction seemed useful, as if enough information could give you some control. Now I increasingly think: who knows? Everything I do, I do during an attack. And perhaps the strangest thing is how normal and busy Kyiv still looks.
Recently, I was stopped at a traffic light and saw a completely naked woman walking beside the road. She did not seem to be performing or joking. She simply looked disconnected from everything around her.
For some reason, that disturbed me more than the sounds of war. We have become good at categorizing those sounds. That’s a Shahed. That’s air defense. That explosion was far away. Something is burning. We’ll find out what.
A petrol station burns, and eventually someone clears the wreckage. A warehouse is destroyed, and someone works out where the medicine will come from instead. Windows are replaced. Roads reopen. Children go back to school. All this we can see, but we can’t see what happens inside people.
Perhaps that woman had nothing to do with the war. I know nothing about her, and I do not want to turn a stranger into a metaphor. But seeing her made me think about something I cannot stop thinking about now: we do not actually know where the limit is for any of us.
We know when a building has been destroyed. We know when a petrol station is burning. We know when someone has been killed or wounded.
We are much worse at knowing where the end is inside a person.
People often speak about Ukrainians “getting used to war”. I don’t think that is quite what is happening. If something terrible does not end, you eventually stop waiting for it to end and get on with life. You work inside it. You take your child to school inside it. You collect him again inside it. You buy food, make plans, cancel plans, and make new ones inside it.
And most days, you keep functioning. Until, physically or mentally, someone doesn’t.
None of us really knows where that line is.
We just know that every day, the attack continues: and so do we, for as long as we can.
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary, Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
