The mission was supposed to be a logistical routine one. A ground robot rolled out to deliver supplies along a planned route somewhere in Zaporizhzhia area. Then it strayed slightly off course – and ran straight into an enemy group.

The Russians opened fire on it. “The robot basically performed a reconnaissance function,” says Lieutenant Serhiy Volkov, commander of the UGV unit ‘Tryhlyav’ within the 110th Mechanized Brigade.

“It saved the lives of our personnel by keeping them out of a dangerous situation.”Nobody was hurt, as the robot drew the fire instead.

Stories like this are becoming less unusual. As Ukraine dramatically scales up its use of unmanned ground vehicles – the Ministry of Defence plans to procure 25,000 systems in just the first half of 2026 – commanders like Serhiy Volkov are finding that the machines keep finding new ways to be useful.

Serhiy’s unit didn’t start out as a robot unit. The 110th Brigade was formed as a conventional mechanized force. Ground robots only arrived in late 2024, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces selected ten brigades for a pilot program. The 110th made the list because it already had experience with aerial drone systems.

Tryhlyav unit receive cargo delivered by a ground robot. Photo from the unit's archive

“That’s when we started forming a separate company of around robots,” he says. “With some transformations along the way.”

Today the unit handles four main types of missions – logistics, casualty evacuation, fire support, and engineering tasks. “We have a separate fire strike platoon that works against detected enemy groups and counters drones,” Serhiy says. Engineering robots handle barrier placement – laying both explosive minefields and non-explosive obstacles to block Russian troops movement.

Serhiy Volkov, commander of the UGV unit Tryhlyav / Photo from Serhiy’s Facebook page

Logistics, he says, has become the spine of everything. ”Because of the enemy’s heavy use of FPV drones, classic troop rotations have become much more complicated,” Serhiy explains. FPV drones – small, fast, first-person-view drones –now make open movement on the battlefield extraordinarily dangerous. “Ground robots allow us to supply units with everything they need and hold positions for long periods.”

Unit’s ground robots. Photo from the unit’s archive

Everything means everything. Not just food and ammunition, but water, drones and spare parts, antennas, communication equipment.

Every mission starts long before the robot moves. First planning and reconnaissance, followed by route coordination, loading, and securing the cargo. A single delivery mission, he says, can take anywhere from three to ten hours depending on terrain, weather, and route complexity.

The terrain is a serious problem in itself. Mud, snow, water, and man-made barriers like tank traps and minefields – the robots are slowed or stopped by all of it. Electronic warfare jamming can cut the signal. Sometimes even a minor problem – a connection knocked out by rough terrain – can delay a mission by hours or derail it completely.

Soldiers unload cargo delivered by a ground robot. Photo from the unit’s archive

The unit has also used robots to evacuate more than 50 wounded soldiers so far – Serhiy mentions with emphasis that casualty evacuation remains one of the most crucial things robots can do.

In fact, casualty evacuation on the battlefield has become brutal. Traditional medevac has grown far more costly – in lives and equipment – over the course of the war. Before ground robots, retrieving one wounded soldier often meant sending several others into the same danger, risking more casualties in the process. “Ground robots allow evacuation without direct human presence in the most dangerous areas,” he says. “That significantly increases the chances of survival.”

Combat use is growing too. The robots are deployed during assaults, clearing operations, and to escort infantry groups. “They hold up reasonably well, though there is still work to be done on the manufacturing side.”

Losses happen too, as Russian forces wage a separate operations against the robots. They hit mines, get taken out by Russian FPV drones, or fixed-wing strike drones, drops from copters, and small arms fire. “It is a full-scale effort to defeat not just the machines but the control systems behind them,” says Serhiy. But that, in a sense, is the point.

Training an operator takes up to four months – and it starts with a question that has no easy answer. Asked what is easier to learn – an aerial drone or a ground one - Serhiy says it’s not easier or harder. “It’s a different skill. Different experience, different challenges.”

Soldiers load cargo delivered by a ground robot. Photo from the unit’s archive

The four months break down into basic military training – in Ukraine that’s around one and a half months – then specialist UGV training, then unit-level integration. Operators are not cleared for combat tasks immediately after; training continues even beyond that point. Interestingly, Serhiy says soldiers with infantry backgrounds often adapt fastest – they understand the stakes in a way that translates directly to operating a machine in their place. People from completely different civilian backgrounds make it work. His unit includes IT specialists, drivers, mechanics, entrepreneurs, students.

On whether robots will eventually replace soldiers, the ‘Tryhlyav’ commander doesn’t hesitate. “Our goal is to replace humans wherever possible, especially in dangerous areas. I’m convinced that in the coming years, most combat functions will be performed by unmanned systems – both ground and aerial.”

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Russia keeps pouring drones and missiles in Ukraine. Dnipro, in southeastern Ukraine, is grieving again. The city declared April 24 a Day of Mourning – one more in a countless series, after Russian strikes killed 8 civilians over the past ten days.

"My wife was killed – she never had a chance," – those were the words a young man told local media right after a Russian drone strike on a residential building in Dnipro took the life of his young wife. The couple was sleeping, as local media reconstructions of the events show. Oleksandr survived by chance, as the drone hit the side where his wife was sleeping. The man said that after the impact, the floor collapsed under his feet. He climbed out onto the balcony, then pulled himself up onto a satellite dish, and then squeezed into the gap between two stairwell entrances, where he hung until rescuers pulled him down. He waited about 20 minutes barefoot and in the robe he had been sleeping in. “I was supposed to die there too,” Oleksandr told local media Suspilne. The night raid left 3 killed and dozens injured.

These last weeks Russia ramped up its attacks on Ukrainian homes. It’s not as though Russian forces hadn’t been attacking civilians in the weeks prior - it happens almost every day, particularly along the front line, in cities like Zaporizhzhia, or in Donbas area, where artillery and aerial bombs add to Russia’s bloody daily death toll. Yet in April 2026, Ukrainians deal with a rapidly growing grim body count. The data from April 16 to April 26 clearly shows the human cost of Russian air raids over ten days.

33 killed, 153 injured from April 16 - 24. The chart only shows days where deaths were recorded — injuries alone are not included. Data source: State Emergency Service of Ukraine

An apartment in Odesa after another Russian strike. Photo: State Emergency Service of Ukraine

Yet outside Ukraine’s borders, not all actions seem aligned with stopping Russia’s war machine. Behind each strike is a supply chain of weapons, of political decisions, and, primarily, of money.

Just days ago, the US eased sanctions on Russian oil again, rolling back an initial full ban in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz blockade. It doesn’t take much to see that oil and gas revenues remain Russia’s primary bankroller for its war on Ukraine and hybrid warfare across Europe. And that’s not all. Ukrainian intelligence has warned that Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran, while European intelligence believes Moscow is supplying Tehran with drones – a development that came as no surprise to US intelligence either. CNN earlier reported, citing sources, that Russia had been feeding Iran intelligence on the locations and movements of American troops, ships and aircraft. Even so, Russia’s backing of Iran did nothing to delay sanctions relief for Russian oil already at sea. Russia is reaping up to $150 million in additional daily budget revenue from oil sales, according to media reports. Earlier, Volodymyr Zelensky said that more than 110 vessels from Moscow’s shadow fleet are currently at sea, carrying over 12 million tons of Russian oil that can once again be sold without consequences thanks to sanctions relief. “That’s $10 billion – resources that convert directly into new strikes on Ukraine,” he said.

Ukraine has taken on this counterbalance largely on its own – and has been doing so at least since last summer. The country has stepped up strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure as the Kremlin keeps cashing in on the oil price surge that followed the war with Iran, and on sanctions relief. Refineries and terminals inside Russia are being systematically targeted by Ukrainian drones, disabling at least 40% of Russian exports, alongside tanker seizures from other countries.

Ukraine struck the Tuapse oil refinery in Krasnodar Krai, in southern Russia, for nearly a week – and the site is still burning. The attack dealt a serious blow to Russia’s oil industry, as the Tuapse refinery, oriented primarily toward export, has effectively shut down. According to media reports, the smoke plume stretches more than 300 kilometers. A “black rain” is falling on the city, and local residents are complaining that Putin has said nothing, while local authorities are pretending nothing is happening.

Even more counterbalance is also expected from the EU’s 20th sanctions package. It has already shown some bite – targeting Russia’s energy revenues and the third-country channels Moscow has long relied on to circumvent restrictions. One of the package’s main focuses is Russian oil income and the shadow fleet: 46 tankers have been added to the sanctions list, barred from EU ports, bringing the total number of sanctioned Russian vessels to 632. Operations with the ports of Murmansk and Tuapse – already knocked out by Ukrainian strikes – are now prohibited, along with an Indonesian oil terminal that had been helping Russia skirt the restrictions.

But will any of this stop Russia? With sanctions tightening on one side and easing on the other, the Kremlin is receiving no clear signal that there are any real obstacles to continuing its war on Ukraine. Russia has even started floating the idea that the US invited it to rejoin the G20 – and Trump told reporters it would welcome that. So far, the message of serious consequences for Russia remains undelivered. Meanwhile, Russia keeps launching missiles at Ukrainian homes, as it has throughout these past ten days – and the more time passes, the more opportunity it has to erase the evidence of its war crimes.

Just recently satellite images, cited by Mariupol officials in exile, show that a mass grave site near the city has been destroyed – disguised as road repairs. The site held victims of the 2022 siege, when at least 22,000 civilians were killed, though the real toll may be higher. With the city still occupied, the evidence is being erased faster than it can be documented – and the chances of identifying victims or holding anyone accountable are fading with it.

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It is not only drones dominating the skies. Ukraine has expanded its use of ground robotic systems in a development that signals a new phase in modern warfare. Just days ago, the country reported the first confirmed instance of a battlefield position being fully captured using only unmanned systems – and no infantry involved.

According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the operation took place “for the first time during the war,” marking a fundamental shift in how frontline assaults can be conducted. Ukrainian forces deployed a coordinated mix of ground-based robotic systems and aerial drones to seize a Russian-held position.

So a robot entered the most dangerous zones in place of a soldier and took the positions – the areas traditionally considered too dangerous for soldiers.

Military officials said the operation concluded without deploying infantry and resulted in zero Ukrainian casualties. The systems involved included remotely operated ground vehicles capable of navigating contested terrain, alongside drones providing reconnaissance, targeting, and strike capabilities.

An Ukrainian combat or armed type UGV / Telegram channel of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), have by now become a common presence on the battlefield in Ukraine. A ground robotic system is emerging as one of the more consequential adaptations of the war – a machine designed to go where soldiers increasingly cannot.

The underlying logic is clear and straightforward – shift the highest-risk tasks from humans to machines. In a war where visibility on the butterflied is constant, due to staggering use of surveillance drones, and chances of survival are narrowing, ground drones offer a way to preserve manpower without slowing operational tempo.

At its core, a UGV is an unmanned mobile platform – either wheeled or tracked – operating without a crew on board. It can be controlled remotely by an operator or, in more advanced configurations, navigate with a degree of autonomy. That combination allows it to function in environments defined by constant Russian drone surveillance, artillery exposure, and dense minefields – conditions that have made traditional movement on the battlefield exceptionally dangerous.

The Ukrainian unmanned ground robotic system DODGER, which can be used for a wide range of logistics tasks – including evacuating wounded soldiers from the battlefield – as well as for operational support missions such as laying mines in designated areas / Photo and info ArmyInform

Now, the expanding role of UGVs has elevated them into one of core element of Ukrainian military. Initially used for reconnaissance, logistic and evacuation, UGVs are now being adapted for a wider range of missions. They can provide fire support, carry mounted weapons, and engage targets while keeping operators at a distance. In logistics roles, they move ammunition, supplies, and equipment to forward positions, reducing the need for soldiers to make high-risk resupply runs. They are also increasingly used in mine warfare – both for laying and clearing explosives – as well as casualty evacuation, retrieving wounded personnel from exposed positions where medics would otherwise face immediate threat.

However, the trend of battlefield use is only growing, and as a result, a significant reduction in the burden on combat personnel is expected. As Defence Express reports, by November 2025, UGVs were being operated by 67 specialized units within Ukraine’s Defense Forces. Just four months later, by March 2026, that number had surged to 167 dedicated unmanned systems units across the Ukrainian military.

The scale of that expansion alone do not suggest a random experiment, but a focused military reorganizing around a new way of war. Against this backdrop, tracking the pace and depth of adoption becomes essential to understanding how the battlefield itself is evolving.

In Defence Express analysis data cited by the German defense outlet Hartpunkt helps put that trajectory into sharper focus. Over the first quarter of 2026, Ukrainian forces carried out roughly 20,000 missions involving UGVs – a figure that suggests a steady increase in operational tempo, as ground drones move from niche deployments toward routine use across multiple fronts.

The growth is even more striking when viewed month to month. In March, unmanned ground vehicles were used in more than 9,000 combat and logistics missions along the front line, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

As Defence Express noted, this is no longer about experimenting with new gadgets on the battlefield. Ukraine is moving to make ground drones a normal, everyday part of how it fights – ramping up production, deploying them at scale, and building them into how operations are planned and carried out. The shift is toward systematic integration, a sign that robotic ground systems are becoming a core component of Ukraine’s evolving warfighting doctrine.

The Ministry noted that such units have already demonstrated results on the southern front, where they helped liberate significant territory.

The use of aerial drones has already become a defining feature of the war, with Ukraine relying heavily on drones for surveillance, precision strikes, and intercepting Russian drone attacks – though Russia deploys them massively as well.

The integration of ground robotic systems into offensive operations – and their use as the primary assault force – can be another Ukraine’s technological adaptation.

The 113th Separate Brigade of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces uses ground drones in combat operations and casualty evacuation / Photo: Facebook page of the 113th Separate Brigade

Analysts suggest such tactics could reduce battlefield casualties while allowing Ukrainian forces to probe and capture fortified positions at lower risk.

At the same time, the approach depends heavily on reliable communications, electronic warfare resilience, and the ability to coordinate multiple unmanned platforms in real time.

Ukraine has increasingly invested in domestic drone production and robotic technologies to offset manpower constraints and counter Russian offensive tactics. Many Ukrainian manufacturers produce these ground drones – companies such as Tencore, or Ratel Robotics, which before the full-scale invasion manufactured street lighting. There are many such companies, and as with the broader drone production story, they started small – funded by Ukrainian people donations – before scaling up.

Officials have framed these innovations as part of a broader strategy to transform the nature of frontline combat. Russia, too, has deployed ground robotic systems in the war, though at a considerably smaller scale than Ukraine.

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Read the guide to living in a city during war.

When war breaks out, in today’s world it’s not fought only with drones bombing, or ground offensives. Information warfare kicks in too - and it’s a powerful tool for the attacking side, usually an authoritarian one.

In Ukraine’s war case, Russia is still running a large-scale influence campaign alongside its military operations – through disinformation and manipulation, trying to stir up as much conflict as possible within Ukrainian society, turn global public opinion against Ukraine, and, step by step, erode Western governments from the inside.

The internet is another battlefield. And the rules of how we behave on social media change drastically the moment the wartime begins. So what do you do when war suddenly starts – and how does it change what we post?

This is the second in a series on how to live in a city during wartime – each issue drawing on Ukrainian experience to gather as much practical information as possible

The first days. The psychological warfare

I remember how in the first days of the all-out war, in 2022, I was getting manipulative messages on Facebook from fake accounts trying to make me distrust the Ukrainian government and the sense of self-defence.

These messages were sent out in bulk, with different angles but one goal – to put psychological pressure on Ukrainians in those early days of the invasion and spread mass panic. Because panic is a weapon – a scared person thinks worse, trusts authority less, and deep down just wants the pressure to stop at any cost.

So what do you do in the very early days of an arm conflict? First – wait for official sources. The government, police, local volunteers and organizations. Everything you can trust. Don’t panic. Wait for official updates on evacuations if they’re happening, shelter locations, the actual situation with food supplies and general situation on the ground.

If someone posted on social media about a shelter or other vital info – but there’s no confirmation – that need to be crosschecked.

That said, in critical moments people organize themselves fast, the way Ukrainians did and still do. So you can actually lean on trustful local communities, but still think carefully about who you can actually trust.

Second – be skeptical of anything sensational, anything designed to trigger an emotional reaction. Better to wait a few hours, and if there’s official confirmation, then share or react. Or immediately try to verify the story through other credible sources.

Panic, disinformation, and emotionally loaded arguments on social media are fueled by bot networks – and that alone creates a toxic, dangerous atmosphere. Anything online that triggers a strong emotional response deserves a careful second look.

People generally become more suspicious during wartime. And that’s a healthy response to an environment where danger suddenly becomes part of daily life. During war, sabotage and intelligence groups become active. Simply put – these are enemy units, or locals who’ve been paid, that slip into the rear with various objectives – destroying infrastructure, gathering intelligence like troop movements. They might not know the area, or they’ll be taking photos, asking for directions, asking about military convoys. If you notice something, if you get a photo or video – don’t post it on social media. Call the police or other authorities immediately.

Ukrainians would identify Russians by their accent, specifically by how they pronounced the Ukrainian word “Palianytsia” – Ukrainian round loaf of bread.

Russians can’t pronounce certain Ukrainian sounds – it comes down to phonetic particularity of Ukrainian language. They struggle with Ukrainian words ending in “-ytsia” because the sound “ts” doesn’t soften in Russian the way it does in Ukrainian. That became a kind of litmus test for Russian saboteurs entering Ukrainian cities – people would ask them to switch from Russian to Ukrainian and say “Say Palianytsia.”

Another example from Ukraine – Russians would translate phrases into Ukrainian using Google Translate and post them on social media, but machine translation exposes non-native speakers fast. Sometimes the output is completely absurd. That kind of attention to detail can go a long way. The point is – learn to spot what gives saboteurs away in the wartime. Still, be mindful – not everyone who seems suspicious is actually a saboteur. Some people are just panicked, nervous or whatever. So don’t take matters into your own hands. Call the police.

What else you should never post during war

Every source agrees on this – don’t post photos or videos of troop movements, military locations, or equipment – including unit insignia and markings. It might seem obvious, but when a country enters a state of war, not everyone immediately adjusts to restrictions that should be self-evident, and out of habit people keep filming and photographing.

Kyiv, 2022. Destroyed Russian military equipment on display in the center of the capital.

You also need to be careful about whether soldiers accidentally end up in frame – during a live stream, for example.

Don’t film checkpoints, fortifications, and don’t share coordinates or exact addresses of strike locations. All photos and videos posted online after a strike are used to adjust the next one. One careless photo can lead to a follow-up strike and casualties.

Separately – never post footage of air defense systems working. That information directly helps the enemy adjust strikes and locate air defense installations. One careless photo can lead to a system being destroyed, leaving part of a city without air cover.

Even a text post without photos can help the enemy – if you write in real time that there’s air defense in your neighborhood, your previous posts can be cross-referenced to figure out your location and narrow down the area.

Landmarks on the horizon that could help identify military or strategic targets – like power stations – also matter. Within 24 hours, the view you’ve been casually photographing and posting for years can become a sensitive location, and showing it publicly plays right into enemy hands. And keep in mind – under martial law, the rules of accountability change too – this can become a criminal matter.

One more thing worth calling out specifically – don’t post soldiers’ faces. A person can easily be identified through social media, and existing data can reveal even the location of their unit. If you have a family member serving - a husband, brother, son - it’s better to delete old posts.

The same goes for other vulnerable groups – journalists, first responders, police. Journalists during wartime need to carefully monitor what personal information ends up online – home address, regular routes, other identifying details. In Ukraine’s case, Russians actively hunt journalists, especially in occupied territory, and go after their relatives too. One small detail can become very significant.

Strip metadata from photos and videos. Turn off geotags. If you have older relatives, keep an eye on what they’re posting too – even if you’ve scrubbed all identifying information about yourself.

Your digital footprint is something you have to actively control during armed conflict. One post, checked at a checkpoint, can cost you – in the worst case – your life. Or give enemy forces grounds to detain you and do far worse.

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Read the part one: Drone and missiles attacks – what to do? The two-wall rule.

With the war in Iran, the world’s attention turned to what modern warfare has become – the war of drones. That transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum. Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine in 2022 was where the drone war truly started – first on batterfields, and shortly after arrived as a mass civilian reality – and Iran helped make it possible, supplying Moscow with the Shahed drones first, and handing over the technology later, ensuring that kamikaze drones have been falling on Ukrainian cities ever since.

With Russia showing no signs of stopping, and growing evidence about its ambitions toward the rest of Europe, more people are starting to ask what to do. Nothing seems impossible anymore, and an attack on any country can happen at any moment.

Not only drones, but missiles too. Ukrainians have been living under constant strikes long enough that most have developed their own personal protocols – and official bodies, from police to emergency services to civil defense training centers, have compiled detailed guidance on how to act.

This is the first in a series on how to live in a city during wartime – each issue drawing on Ukrainian experience to gather as much practical information as possible

So what do you do when kamikaze drones start falling on your city?

An incoming drone has one unmistakable indicator – sound. As one approaches, a distinctive noise fills the air – resembling the motor of a lawnmower, or the engine of a moped. That’s why Ukrainians sometimes simply call them “mopeds.”

They carry between 40 and 50 kilograms of explosives, fly low, and travel at roughly 150 to 185 kilometers per hour – fast enough to close a city block in seconds, slow enough that you might just hear them coming.

If you hear that sound overhead and it keeps growing, that’s your signal. The deadly “lawnmower” is somewhere very close.

There’s no use in panic. Even when they’re close enough that it feels like the drone is heading straight into your apartment. Keep your head, it safes your life. What you do next depends entirely on where you are.

The safest option is always to reach shelter and wait out the attack. The metro is one of the best. But shelter isn’t always nearby. That said, when attacks are sudden, may not even be prepared. From personal experience, drone strikes catch me – like most Ukrainians – at home, at work, or somewhere indoors.

Beyond the most direct danger of a deadly hit, the real threats are shrapnel and the blast wave. Both are serious. The blast wave travels instantaneously – and no, you can’t outrun it the way they do in movies. In reality it destroys buildings, cars, rooms and drives debris into bodies.

So when you’re indoors and the sound of a Shahed is already very close and you have nowhere to go, the two-wall rule is the mostly advised option.

It applies to missile strikes and other types of attacks as well, in case there’s no way to go to a shelter.

What is the two-wall rule?

I asked Claude to research and visually illustrate the rule. This is the illustration the AI came up with.

So what is it? Shortly, it’s a space that sits behind two load-bearing walls from any window or exterior wall. In the typical Ukrainian apartment, that’s the bathroom or the hallway. The logic behind this is simple – the first load-bearing wall absorbs the pressure wave and the shrapnel flies into the space behind it. The second wall stops it – or at least reduces the damage.

So what next? A civil defense training center in Vinnytsia, a city in west-central Ukraine, published a step-by-step guide on surviving a Shahed attack. Once you’ve moved to the hallway or bathroom, it advises getting on the floor and covering your head. “Shrapnel travels in an arc – you need to be below its trajectory,” the guide explains. Other authorities recommend covering your head with your hands or with something dense. In the early days of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian social media filled with photos of families who had simply moved their beds into the hallway.

I usually go to the bathroom. Mine has a glass shower partition, so I keep my back to it and wrap myself in a thick terrycloth robe. If I hear an explosion, I don’t move for several minutes. A second Shahed can follow in the silence right after the first – usually they come in waves, from one direction or several.

In general, it’s crucial to stay away from windows – glass fragments from a blast wave are essentially full-fledged blades that can cause serious harm.

Why can the two-wall rule still be very dangerous?

That said, the two-wall rule doesn’t guarantee your life. It may offer some protection against shrapnel from a nearby blast, but it is not a solution. Missiles can destroy entire sections of a building on direct impact – as a Russian Kh-22 did in Dnipro on January 14, 2023, obliterating an entire building entrance and killing 46 people, or as happened in Kyiv on June 17, 2025, when a Russian missile tore through part of an apartment block and killed more than 20.

Left, the aftermath of the attack on Dnipro, January 14, 2023. Right, a residential building in Kyiv hit by a Russian missile on June 17, 2025. Photos / State Emergency Service of Ukraine.

After a rocket strike, walls don’t just fall horizontally – they collapse vertically, burying entire floors. A direct Shahed hit ignites everything within minutes. And the drones keep getting upgraded, with larger warheads each time. There’re no such two walls that will protect you from the direct impact or collapsing building.

The two-wall rule was recommended more heavily at the start of the Russian invasion. Now even emergency responders are candid about its limits. “Every spot in an apartment is dangerous, including the bathroom,” Oleh Stovolos, a senior official with Kyiv’s State Emergency Service, told Ukrainian media.

“It has tiles and mirrors that can come apart from the blast wave. Structurally it’s also dangerous – bathrooms collapse in blocks. I wouldn’t consider apartment sheltering an option at all.”

The best option remains going down – a metro station, an underground parking garage, if you can get there. During mass strikes on Kyiv, people sleep in the metro or sit out the night in their cars in underground garages.

People sheltering at night in a Kyiv metro station during a massive Russian air raid, November 2025.

What if caught outside with nowhere to go?

If there’s no time to reach shelter, find any kind of hollow in the ground – a ditch, anything lower than the surface around you. Get down, cover your head with your hands, and turn your feet toward the direction of fire, as many guides advise.

And know where not to go. Building entryways, archways, basements of panel-construction buildings, anything near cars or fuel stations – those aren’t cover, they’re traps. Vehicles offer no protection from shrapnel and catch fire easily, Ukraine’s state emergency service warns. Overpasses and bridges can collapse after a strike.

The rescue service also warns against shopping centers – in Ukraine, Russia has targeted them repeatedly throughout the war. Office buildings and spaces with glass facades carry their own risk.

In Ukraine, most glass facades in restaurants, offices, but also in trains and public transport have been covered with protective film since the invasion began, and Ukrainians have been taping their windows – clear or colored packing tape, applied horizontally, vertically, or in an X – to keep shattered glass from flying apartment fragments minimising danger.

Taped windows in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia in 2022. Photos from personal archive

Basements that aren’t properly reinforced can be deadly traps. They often contain water, gas, and electrical lines, so any damage can trigger flooding, gas leaks, or fires. If the structure collapses, rescuers need time to clear the debris – and that delay can turn deadly, putting anyone trapped at serious risk of suffocation.

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Antonina lost her husband in October 2023 – he was killed by Russian forces during a combat operation on a river in Kherson region, southern Ukraine, serving as a marine. A year later she also lost her younger brother. Despite the grief, she organised an unconventional funeral on her own terms – not the kind her small town expected — with cremation, her own eulogy, and no black headscarf, breaking social expectations of how a widow should look and behave.

She is raising two daughters and says the pain does not get smaller – a person simply grows around it. Despite everything, she remains active. She has volunteered at a hospital, takes part in art projects, and speaks openly about the experience of widows to make them visible.

“Don’t worry,” he wrote.

Antonina Fedorovych, 33, joins me on Zoom on a Friday morning of 10 January. It’s almost a miracle we have electricity and internet – me in Kyiv, she in Lviv area, as Russia has just struck Ukraine’s energy infrastructure again. She lost her husband in October 2023. The following year, in 2024, she lost her younger brother.

Antonina’s husband Yurii Khaletsky was 37 when he was killed by Russian troops. He chose to go to the marines, specifically to reconnaissance, turning down a safer posting in headquarters. He said: “I feel needed there.” He was a person of great honour and courage, as one of his commanders would later tell her.

His unit completed their mission on the left bank of the Kherson region, on the Inhulets River. While returning by boat – six men, Yurii sitting at the front – they came under fire. He was killed. The other five survived.

During the operation he had managed to send Anonina two messages. The last one said the team needed to stay a little longer, to complete some tasks left. “Don’t worry”, he wrote. These were his last words to her.

At the time, Antonina was in Poland with her daughters. “Yurko was killed on a Monday”, she says through the screen. The very next day she gathered the children and left for Ukraine – by night they were home.

Six days of organisational waiting followed – no sleep, coffee, cigarettes, and a phone that never stopped ringing. The deputy mayor called. Military officials called. Friends, parents. They all had the same message - cremation wasn’t done here, there was a proper procedure.

“I couldn’t care less about your procedure,” she told them. “I am his wife. Legally, this is my decision – not his parents’, not his friends’.” She stood her ground.

Koval, a small town in Volyn oblast, where she and Yurii are from, is one of Ukrainian cities that takes military funeral ceremonies seriously – a public farewell on the main square, speeches, the national anthem, the traditional song Plyne Kacha, that became a symbol of national grief and a requiem for fallen Ukrainian heroes, then a military salute. But when she said she would deliver the speech herself, she was met with blank incomprehension. Wives don’t speak - there’s the first teacher, there’s a fellow soldier, Antonina was told. But she stood her ground again.

She had to find words – long sentences, explanations of things that seemed obvious to her – at a moment when speaking felt almost physically impossible. It was exhausting. But it also kept her upright.

Grief

After the funeral, something in her simply shut down. Antonina didn’t cry, didn’t break down – she drifted through her home like a ghost. “Every morning I made two coffees – one for myself, one for Yurii, in his favourite mug”, says Antonina.

She would hold his portrait and go to the balcony, sitting there for hours. “I went to bed each night hoping he would appear in my dreams.”

The grief didn’t crack open until about two months later. Her friends got it right without being told – they didn’t flood her with calls, they simply made sure she knew they were there: ordering groceries, taking the girls for a few days, showing up and sitting beside her without saying anything, cleaning her place.

A memorial evening for Yurko, on the anniversary of his death. Yurii Khaletsky was also a musician – a guitarist. Photo from Antonina Fedorovych's personal archive.

A few months after her husband’s death, the woman began piecing together the details of that night. That was how she learned that shortly after her husband was killed, almost no one from their group was left alive – because after Yurko, the next group went on doing military tasks, and they were all reported MIA.

“I grew around my pain.”

Antonina agrees with those women who lost their husbands who say the pain does not ease with time – you simply learn to live with it.

“I feel like I grew around my pain,”she says. “But the pain doesn’t get smaller at all. It’s just that with time you find more strength to live with it all.”

Living through war means a family can face loss more than once, and this leads to retraumatisation. In March 2024, Antonina’s younger brother, who served in Ukrainian military as well, was killed.

The young woman had to walk the same path that families of the fallen walk - the same rituals, the same notifications. It was the same town where she had buried her husband, the same morgue, the same mayor’s office, the same bench outside the morgue. “It threw me back into a very deep pit again, when my brother died after everything that had already happened.”

At some point she searched online herself and found a support group - in person, not virtual. She joined a nationwide community of women who had lost someone. Sometimes she needed company and conversation with them badly.

A photo of Yurii on the table in Antonina's home. Photo from personal archive.

“Despite having many close, intelligent, empathetic friends, it is still two different realities. They want to help, they try hard, but true understanding – the real kind – is not there. It is physically impossible to understand something you have not lived through yourself.”

That is why widows find each other. They meet rarely, but they talk about things they cannot talk about with anyone else.

Ukraine has initiatives offering psychological support and social protection for women who have lost their husbands in the war, as well as for mothers of fallen soldiers. Support communities often form as closed groups on social media – on Facebook, for instance – to ensure privacy. Women meet, discuss their struggles, and spend time together. In Kyiv, for example, there is an initiative called Zhyva (Alive), where wives and mothers of fallen soldiers gather and paint together.

Russia keeps waging war, and the number of wives and mothers of fallen Ukrainian soldiers keeps growing. There is no precise official figure for the total number of widows in Ukraine – data on military casualties is classified as a state secret under martial law. As of February 2026, according to a statement by President Volodymyr Zelensky, the official number of Ukrainian military killed in action stands at 55,000.

“Nobody taught us the ethics of grieving,” Antonina says. “Nobody taught us how to show compassion, what to say, how to simply be there.” Ukrainian society was not prepared for a war of this scale – let alone for its consequences, for losses of this magnitude. Pain has its own hierarchy. After the war, this will become a challenge for society as a whole. Bubbles of pain are already forming – and it matters to learn how to speak across them.

Antonina feels the gap between widows of the fallen soldiers and the rest of the society. “You still go out into the world, you work, you have a social life. But the feeling that you are somehow outside all of it – that you are not heard – never goes away. Even after all this time.”

Widows and social stigma

Antonina decided to move forward anyway, despite the stereotypes. That is why, some time after her husband’s death, she began going to concerts, doing the things people do not expect of a widow.

There is an unspoken script for widows – wear black for funeral, cover your hair with a headscarf – in Ukrainian tradition a near-obligatory marker of mourning, especially in smaller towns. Antonina broke it on the day of the funeral.

She wore a bright green coat, a beautiful dress. The necklace Yurii had given her for her 30th birthday. Then makeup, red nails and dark sunglasses. She refused the headscarf outright. Behind her back, people whispered – look at her – couldn’t even find something black.

“I could have,” she says. She just didn’t have a black coat with her. But the headscarf was a choice. “Yurii had loved me in green. He always said it suited me,” Antonina adds. And the way she looked that day was her way of being herself - beside him, one last time.

For months afterward she forced herself to do things that were supposed to feel good – not because they did, but because feeling nothing frightened her. A person who had always known how to find genuine delight, to be happy like a child – suddenly hollowed out. But she pushed through, trying to squeeze something out.

The couple had dreamed of building a house and planting hollyhocks beneath the window. After Yurii's death, Antonina planted the hollyhocks and had a hollyhock tattoo made on her forearm. Photo from personal archive.

“Grief became part of life – and alongside it, allowing yourself joy is both possible and necessary,” Antonina says. Some do it deliberately, some on autopilot, simply to keep moving.

Yurii and Antonina together. Photo from personal archive.

For her was memory of how much had been good between them to sustain her. “Losing a great love is a tragedy. But never having one is a greater one. This awareness of how much my husband loved me – they kept me together.”

Antonina volunteers at a hospital. Last summer she worked as assistant director on a Polish documentary about women released from Russian captivity. She is raising two daughters – Karina, 15, and Emma, 11. In those same days, her husband Yurii Khaletsky received a posthumous award.

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Ukraine just lived through the coldest winter since all-out war began. With temperatures hitting -20 outside, Russia was hammering the power grid with hundreds of drones and missiles, leaving entire cities with no lights, no water, no heat. Kyiv lived at the edge.

In this episode, I look back on the harshest winter ever, and the people who defined it - both for me personally and for the city as a whole. These are just a handful of stories that mattered to me.

From a young woman who lost her husband and her brother to the war, to divers who spent six days underwater repairing a pipe damaged by a Russian strike, a journalist who saved a four-year-old girl after a Russian Shahed strike - it all comes together into one big mosaic of faces who held this country together this winter.

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Today marks exactly 4 years since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine. I’ve been asking myself – what story captures just how much war can reshape a life? What story shows the weight of all that time?

And I kept coming back to one person – Nataliia, a teacher from Kharkiv, who refused to let war take away the one thing that defined her – her school.

She woke up to Russian missiles on February 24, 2022. She fled Kharkiv with her family and her little dog, Monica, to her mother’s house in the region, thinking she’d be back in days. Instead, she got trapped under Russian occupation for 42 days.

When she finally flee and made it home, her physical classroom in Kharkiv’s school was empty. Her students were scattered across Ukraine and different countries. The classes existed just online.

So she kept teaching anyway – in distance learning mode, through air raids, blackouts, and eventually from a different city entirely – first her class, then a new one, again with the smallest kids.

I’ve been following her story for three years. At one point, it seemed to me that she’d given up. But had she?

Listen to the full episode to find out her story.

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The weight of memory rests differently on different shoulders. For Vladyslav Heraskevych, a Ukrainian skeleton racer hurtling down ice tracks at elevated speeds, it sits on a helmet painted with faces. Ukrainian athletes who will never compete again because they were killed by Russia. With this gesture, the 27-year-old athlete chose to honor them while participating at the 2026 Olympics. Some of these athletes were his friends. “I race for them,” Vladyslav wrote on social media.

In a video introducing the athletes painted on his helmet, he says: “Among them is Dmytro Sharpar, who competed with me on the same team at the 2016 Olympic Games.” Dmytro, a Ukrainian figure skater, was killed in 2023 defending Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. “Among them is Maksym Halinichev,” he continues, “a boxer.” Maksym enlisted as a volunteer and was killed in March 2023 in the Luhansk region. “Among them, unfortunately, there are many children who were killed by Russian shelling,” Vladyslav says about the youngest Ukrainian athletes.

Vladyslav Heraskevych wearing the helmet with faces of killed Ukrainian athletes during training session. Olympics 2026, photo Suspilne

But, apparently, his helmet not sits well with The International Olympic Committee who banned the Ukrainian athlete from wearing it. Not during training sessions at the 2026 Winter Games, not during the upcoming competition. The rules, they said. Political neutrality, they said. But Heraskevych responded that he would wear it anyway.

Around six hundred Ukrainian athletes killed since Russia’s invasion began, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports. Some were Vladyslav’s friends. There’s a long list of their names and photos, in the memorial website of the Sports Committee of Ukraine “Angels of Sport”.

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There is something almost absurd now about the insistence on sport’s political purity, as if athletes arrive at competitions scrubbed clean of context, as if the act of racing or jumping or throwing exists in some hermetic sphere untouched by the world that produces it.

The IOC called the Russia’s invasion a conflict. “And, by the way, in many many other conflicts around the world. As we said, there are probably 20 or 30 conflicts going at any time,” that was the words of the IOC’s spokesman Mark Adams.

That word suggests two parties with a dispute that might be somehow arbitrated or negotiated, but it does not capture the scale – the bloodiest war in Europe, with the Russian army crossing internationally recognized Ukrainian borders, cities wiped out and endless nightly air assaults. The Olympic chiefs speak of neutrality as a founding principle, a way to keep the Games away from international wars. But this framing assumes a symmetry, a balance, that does not exist. It treats remembrance of those killed by Russia as political, while trying to soften restrictions on Russian athletes. It creates a moral blur where clarity is desperately needed.

Then, how honouring the dead is “too political?” When Heraskevych put at those faces on his helmet, he is insisting that these people existed, that they mattered, that their absence means something. If this is political, the problem isn’t the helmet, guys.

And let be honest – sport has never actually been separate from politics, however much we pretend otherwise. The 1936 Berlin Olympics were a propaganda showcase for Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union used sports as propaganda then, so Russia does it now. Very successfully, by the way.

Athletes have raised fists, taken knees, worn symbols, made speeches. The question has never been whether sport intersects with politics, but whose politics get acknowledged and whose make people uncomfortable enough to get erased in the name of neutrality. And which ones get ignored entirely, like in 1936.

Neutrality itself is a political choice in the modern world. It’s a decision about what matters and what doesn’t, about which suffering gets recognized and which becomes background noise. And very often, it’s deeply political itself. When the IOC lets athletes from an aggressor nation compete under a neutral flag – athletes who often support the Russian invasion – while banning victims from honoring their dead, it hasn’t escaped politics. It has simply chosen a side quietly and called it neutrality. And some even call it the “sports out of politics” thing.

The same pattern repeats in music, in art, in every cultural form that claims to transcend the political. Some Russian musicians perform in Western concert halls while Ukrainian musicians sleep in subway stations doubling as bomb shelters.

Perhaps what makes people uncomfortable is not that Heraskevych helmet is being political, which is clearly not, but that the message on it is being specific. General calls for peace are acceptable because they offend no one and commit to nothing. Same goes to pacifism. Naming the dead, showing their faces, insisting that a child who loved sports and is now gone deserves to be remembered even here, especially here, in the venue where they dreamed of competing, this specificity breaks the comfortable abstraction. It forces a choice between remembering and forgetting, between witness and erasure.

Heraskevych is twenty-seven years old young Ukrainian athlete. He said he will wear that helmet that depicts victims of the war with Russia despite the ban. Used in trainings, he said he’ll use it during races. Because he promised he would race for them.

The Olympic movement, built on ideas of creating a peaceful and better world and educating youth, tells him that remembering the victims of the bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War is inappropriate. There’s a dark irony in that reversal, in the spectacle of international sport defending its neutrality by silencing humanity. And worse still, pretending that the carnage Russia is inflicting doesn’t exist and concerns no one. Instead of keeping focus and really educating youth – look, we said never again, and it’s happening again. And here’s an aggressor that must be stopped and held accountable. That would actually match the Olympic movement’s promises about building a better and more peaceful world. But everyone pretends the elephant in the room doesn’t exist and clings to the idea of neutrality, which might work in peacetime but not during a brutal war.

But the war in Ukraine continues. Training facilities remain destroyed. Electricity scarcity, as Russia ramps up its attacks, limits athletes’ capacity to train. They work around shelling schedules, if they work at all. Around 3,000 representatives of the Ukrainian sports sector are enlisted in the Ukrainian Army.

And somewhere in all of this, one brave skeleton racer prepares to race wearing a helmet with faces he cared about, some of them killed defending his country. A helmet the IOC would prefer he leave behind, as if memory itself were a violation of the rules, as if the faces of the dead were somehow more divisive than the reason for their deaths.

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There’s something deeply satisfying about the 1993 film Groundhog Day. You all probably watched it and know the premise very well.

Phil Connors, an arrogant, self-absorbed weatherman played by Bill Murray, wakes up to find himself trapped in a time loop, forced to relive the same day over and over again. February 2nd in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania becomes his prison, his purgatory and, first and foremost, his chance at redemption.

The concept works beautifully, because Phil is, frankly, an asshole. He’s dismissive, overall unpleasant and treats everyone around him like they’re inferior. Watching him get his punishments day after day after day – is cathartic. He’s stuck and can’t escape until he learns and changes. Until our Phill becomes a better person.

Sure, the repetition is pedagogical and is the point. The universe won’t let him move forward until he earns it.

The concept is amazing precisely because it has logic, and a strong moral arc. Phil learns to genuinely care about the people in his life. And when he finally does, the loop breaks. He wakes up to February 3rd. The lesson learned, the “loop” broken, and his life moves on. He grows and there’s an exit.

But what happens when the loop continues not because one person is stuck, but because the world’s most powerful leaders are stuck? What happens when Groundhog Day isn’t a path to redemption – it’s a trap with no exit? Welcome to the endless cycle of peace talks to “end the war in Ukraine.”

The real picture

Since February 2022, the calls for negotiations and ceasefire have been constant. Now, with the recent U.S administration, the rounds of peace talks dominate the narrative again. The proposals are presented as pragmatic and push Ukraine to be “realistic.” And then, inevitably, it all goes nowhere.

On one hand, Russia dismisses it, or presents maximalist requests, or agrees on some principles while continuing to bomb civilian infrastructure. And once again, the negotiations stall. On the other hand, the Trump administration sends envoys that lack basic knowledge about Ukraine and the origins of the war, and, let’s say it, doesn’t fully grasp the nature of this war and what’s really driving Russia. So, the effort doesn’t match the reality, and it’s pointless.

The war continues and Ukrainians keep suffering. And a few months later, there’s another attempt, following the same pattern, with the same approach. The cycle repeats. It’s Groundhog Day, but we don’t have Phil Connors and nobody’s learning the lesson.

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So what’s the point?

Here’s the point that some leaders seem determined to avoid. Russia is not interested in genuine peace. Or rather, Russia is not interested in any kind of peace, except one that serves its imperialistic views.

In Russia’s view, there’s no possibility of a peace that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and international law, withdraws from occupied territories, ends the bombardment of cities and energy infrastructure, and pays huge reparations.

Russia’s version of “negotiation” has always been about one thing – getting the West to pressure Ukraine into surrender while Russia keeps what it has seized. Once the occupation is normalized, from Russia’s point of view, it can start another war in an attempt to finish Ukraine’s statehood. This is why every peace proposal comes with impossible preconditions from Moscow. Every “peace plan” involves Ukraine giving up land, giving up NATO aspirations, giving up its future. The hardest lesson some world leaders need to learn, to break this pattern and exit the Groundhog Day, is that Russia wants Ukraine to cease to exist. Or to become its colony again. No “peace plan” in its current form can prevent this in the future.

This isn’t speculation, but historic pattern. Look at Russia’s history of recent invasions – Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas. The script is always the same. Invade. Spin the narrative and deny responsibility. Let the outside world normalize what can’t be normalized. Then repeat. And yet, certain leaders keep acting as if this time will be different. As if this call to Putin will unlock some hidden reasonableness. As if the problem is simply that the right diplomatic formula hasn’t been found yet. It’s maddening. There’s no magic formula with Russia. So it’s Groundhog Day without the character growth.

Who needs to learn?

Many genuinely want the war to end. But wanting something and understanding how to achieve it are different things.

Some are motivated by fear – fear of “escalation”, fear of what comes next if the war drags on, fear of Russia. Some are driven by electoral concerns, by voices tired of supporting Ukraine, by political pressures to “do something” even if that something is counterproductive. Some think that if they give Russia some land, Putin will stop. Some simply can’t wrap their heads around the reality that Russia operates by different rules. They approach Putin as if he’s a rational actor in a rules-based international system, when in fact he’s a man who has spent decades dismantling that system from within. He follows no rules, at least not the rules known by the West.

This is why Trump’s peace efforts keep failing. These leaders need to learn what Ukrainians already know – Russia doesn’t stop because you negotiate. Russia stops when it’s forced to stop. And, given the fact that Putin is devoted to making Ukraine disappear as a state, that reality should be taken seriously. But instead of learning this lesson, they keep replaying the same failed approaches. And while they’re stuck in their diplomatic time loop, Ukrainians are trapped in a very different – and far more deadly – one.

Ukraine’s Groundhog Day – bombs, blackouts and harsh winter

While world leaders cycle through “peace proposals” and hesitance, Ukrainians wake up every day to the same brutal reality. Air raid alerts at night, followed by missile strikes, followed by attacks on power grids and heating infrastructure. Blackouts that last for endless hours, and sometimes days, while outside is freezing. Checking that family and friends are alive. Going to work anyway. Coming home – if there’s electricity to cook food. Doing it all again the next day.

This is Ukraine’s Groundhog Day, and there’s no moral lesson embedded in the repetition, except perhaps one of endurance. Day after day after day. With one purpose – not to surrender, not to disappear as a country.

And the endless cycle of failed negotiations makes it worse. Every time a “peace talk” go nowhere, with words, not decisive actions, it sends a signal to Russia – keep going, there’s no punishment.

Every time Ukraine is pressured to make concessions for the sake of a deal that will never materialize, it demoralizes those fighting on the front lines. Every time the international community treats this war as a “conflict” that can be managed rather than an invasion that must be defeated and Russia held accountable, it prolongs Ukrainian suffering. The groundhog sees its shadow, right? And winter continues.

Kyiv, 2024. Photo by Nastia Petruk on Unsplash

Breaking the loop

Groundhog Day the film works because Phil Connors eventually gets it. He stops being such a selfish jerk. He stops trying to manipulate his way out and changes, so the loop ends. But this isn’t a movie. And the people leading this “negotiation loop” aren’t learning. So what breaks the cycle?

For Ukraine, the answer is clear – it just needs to keep fighting. Keep showing the world that this can’t become a “frozen conflict,” but this is a war of survival that must be won and Russia must be brought to justice. Because the alternative – capitulation disguised as compromise – isn’t peace. It would give Russia an opportunity to prepare for the next phase of the war. It’s just a longer, slower death.

For the world leaders trapped in their own version of Groundhog Day? They need to learn what should have been obvious from the start – you cannot just negotiate with an aggressor on this scale, who has no interest in peace. You can only stop them. The Trump administration needs to amplify pressure on Moscow, and pay attention to the double games the Kremlin conducts. That means providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs. It means sanctions that actually hurt, but really hurt. It means holding the line on Ukrainian sovereignty, not bargaining it away for the illusion of stability. It means simply punishing a country that destroys energy infrastructure in harsh winter, freezing elderly and kids, without pretending it doesn’t happen.

And it means understanding that some loops don’t break because you learn to be diplomatic or make a “good economic proposal.” Some loops only break when you stop playing by the rules of Russia’s game, and abide by international law and justice.

The day after

In Groundhog Day, Phil wakes up on February 3rd to a changed world – or rather, to a world he now sees differently. The old pattern gone forever. He’s free now.

Ukrainians dream of that day. The day the bombs stop. The day they can plan a future that isn’t just a survival instruction. But that day won’t come from another round of empty negotiations, done by people who don’t understand the enemy they’re dealing with.

It will come when the world stops pressing repeat button. When leaders learn the lesson that Ukrainians have already paid for in blood – Russia doesn’t negotiate. Russia only understands force. Until then, the loop continues now, or in the future. And every day it does, Ukrainians pay the price. The groundhog sees its shadow. Winter goes on.

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23.01.2026. Inside a small orange tent in one of Kyiv’s residential neighborhoods, it’s crowded. Tables with benches are set up in two rows. People of all ages are trying to hold on to – let’s call it – ordinary things, like eating, charging their phones, or just warming up, as Kyiv is still without electricity and heating. In one corner, a World Central Kitchen table is serving hot food. They’ve been operating in Ukraine since the very beginning of the full-scale war. Across from it, another table offers tea, hot water, and cookies. At one table, a family with a little girl is playing board games. The warmth is making some people drowsy. Next to me sit two boys. One of them is doing his homework on his phone – reading the assignment on the screen and writing notes by hand in a small notebook.

Every table is packed with power banks and chargers. People are resting, talking, just trying to get warm. A boy’s mom calls another warming center to see if there’s more hot food available. She needs it for her family.

This is one of thousands of tents the city authorities have set up because of severe shortages of heat and electricity caused by nonstop Russian missile and drone attacks. It helps. Not just with food. In these tents, psychologists are on duty, offering extra support for children.

Outside it’s minus eight, and it’s clearly a snowy day. A message from several local monitoring channels pops up, warning that Russia is moving its bombers. Kyiv took a massive barrage on the night of January 20, and now we’re expecting another one. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what comes next. And it does.

24.01.2026. Night. Around 1 a.m. I wake up gasping. Loud explosions over my apartment. It’s obvious – Russia is attacking Kyiv again. I grab my phone and check it. Telegram channels are already buzzing. Official monitoring sources say Russia is firing ballistic missiles.

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I move to the bathroom, hoping I won’t have to go to a shelter, since it’s freezing outside. Monitoring channels report cruise missiles inbound. And drones too. Outside sounds hellish as air defense is working. Then comes hypersonic cruise missiles – Zircon. After a while I see the message: “Two Kh-32 toward Kyiv region.” For those who don’t know, Kh-32s are anti-ship missiles, extremely destructive. One hit can wipe out an entire residential building in seconds. Going down to a shelter wouldn’t have been such a bad idea, I think. But it’s too late, and I don’t like the idea of getting stuck in the elevator, just in case. Then it’s ballistic missiles again. Then drones again. Someone on that online sources jokes grimly , while trying to keep everyone posted: “What else haven’t the Russians thrown at us yet?”

I wait it out in the bathroom until the missile threat is lifted, even though safety is always relative. I know it’s time to move and urgently prepare food as soon as I see warnings about possible water shortages. Everyone understands this is a massive attack, and the energy, heating, and water systems are still fragile after the previous strikes. I leave the bathroom, even though dozens of drones are still over Kyiv. Outside my window, air defense is busy working. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. I walk up to the window. The drones are far enough away – you can tell by the sound. Over time, you more or less learn to judge distance by the buzz. When a drone is really close, it feels like it could fly straight into the room any second. Right now, they’re far.

Sleepy, but livid with rage, I start cooking. Usually electricity stays on at night. I make breakfast and coffee for the morning. Store water. Load the dishwasher, hoping it will finish before a full blackout. When I’m done, I go to bed. Outside, air defense is still working, but I’m completely exhausted.

Drone and missile directions during the Russian air assault on 24.01.2026. Graphics from various Ukrainian monitoring channels

24.01.2026. Day. I open my eyes and the first thing I do is check the air conditioner in the corner of the room. Or rather, its little indicator light. If it’s red, that means we have electricity. No. No luck. After an attack like that, it would be naïve to expect otherwise. I go to the bathroom and check the water. No luck there either. If there’s no water, there’s no heating. The temperature has gone up a bit, thankfully, but it’s still minus ten. The morning feels uncomfortable. Still, the breakfast I made at night and coffee help set the tone. It’s – already cold - frittata with tomatoes. They say protein-rich food help you de-stress, but still would prefer starting my morning with light and heating.

I start scrolling the news, trying to understand how bad it is. Kyiv already doesn’t have enough energy supply to meet demand, so how much damage did this latest air assault add? The news is bleak. All but 6000 residential buildings are without heating again, and many of them were already without it after previous attacks. From all sides I’m reading that this was a serious strike, and no one knows how long the power and water outages will last. I start doing the math in my head, figuring out how long my water supply might hold. At some point another warning from Kyiv’s mayor comes out – store water, store medicine, store food, or leave the city for a while. Not encouraging at all.

Then I get a message from my friend Anya, whose birthday is tomorrow. She suggests a format – one hour per friend – and says that our favorite places have either closed until spring or shut down for good. It really is hard for businesses right now. Against that backdrop, I catch myself thinking I should go buy more food and meds and order more drinking water for delivery. I feel off.

At the supermarket everything is calm. People are shopping at a normal pace. I notice a young, good-looking guy heading to the checkout just with four cans of beer. I can’t help but start smiling. Sometimes just brushing up against the collective energy is enough to calm down. I grab one fresh salad - vitamins are everything - fresh cherry tomatoes, cheese, and for backup a can of sprats, whole-grain crackers, and cheese-flavored chips. Somehow, we’ll manage. I skip the pharmacy on the way home; I’ve got enough meds stocked already. I mean, not our first rodeo.

Around 8:00 p.m., the water and power suddenly come back at the same time. The miracle lasts just 15 minutes. In that short window, an apartment in the neighboring wing starts flooding because someone had opened a faucet when there was no water and forgot to close it. Outrage in common chat. “So are you coming tomorrow?” Anya texts me. “Because I still want to celebrate.” Life as it is.

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This year, winter in Ukraine arrived at full pitch, with hard freeze, snow, and the kind of swirling snowy storm that covers the city into white. Kyiv feels like a frozen island now, with slick roads and trees sealed in ice. Temperatures have dropped to around minus 15 across the capital and much of the country.

Winters in Ukraine here can be harsh, even brutal. Bad weather, though, has never slowed Russia down. On the night of Friday, January 9, Russia launched another large-scale attack on Ukraine, with the sole purpose of damaging the country’s power grid. I woke up to electricity still working and, by sheer luck, the electricity held for a few hours, long enough for me to get things done. Then the blackout came. When strikes like this hit and energy workers scramble to repair the damage, the system shifts into emergency mode. Scheduled outages collapse, and no one knows when the electricity will return.

That day, I was, though, prepared. I cautiously followed warnings from the Ukrainian government and various monitoring channels, all signaling that a major air assault was imminent. The day before, I had been filming on the other side of Kyiv, and getting home was its own lesson in how harsh the weather had become. Trees, roads, buildings – everything was coated in a thick layer of ice. You moved slowly, like a turtle, just to avoid falling.

Kyiv, January 8. Trees covered in a thick layer of ice

Back home, hoping electricity would briefly return according to schedule, I started preparing for the strike and its aftermath. We are always prepared, but a major attack during a harsh winter demands extra effort.

I cooked in advance –eggs for breakfast, main meals, side dishes, made coffee, filled a thermos with hot water. That day, something told me to store technical water too, so I did. Everything that could be charged was charged.

The day after the strike, all my preparations paid off. We went hours on end without electricity, but at least my residential complex has several generators, and the heating was still working, pumping hot water through the system. Across Kyiv, though, thousands of thousands of families were left without both power and heat.

By Saturday, January 10, the situation worsened. Large parts of the city suddenly lost water supply, my area included. Instability in the power grid led to widespread interruptions to water and heating services. Electric transport stopped running as well.

Without water, there’s no heating. Within an hour, my apartment had grown noticeably cold. Bundled up as best I could, I started preparing for a long night. The water supply was fixed, but generally sleeping became cold. I pulled out two blankets and a sleeping bag and filled bottles with water whenever hot water was available. On days like this, you have to sleep fully dressed. During the day, I wear thermal underwear, my personal lifesaver.

Another strike followed on the night of January 13. Russia struck Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other regions once again, deliberately targeting the energy system. Yes, on purpose. In Kyiv, emergency power cuts returned. Someone joked on social media: night air raids, blackouts, freezing weather – all that’s missing now is Godzilla. That’s just a bit of dark humor to capture the mood. One of Ukrainian’s coping mechanisms, that help people to manage the belak reality.

After four years of relentless attacks on the energy system, Ukrainians have developed a kind of analytical instinct, kind of predicting the imminence of strikes and following a knd of collective script to overcome difficulties.

In Kyiv, there are up to 1,300 heating points right now – points of invincibility – as Ukrainians call them. The government sets them up in kindergartens, schools, and even tents. There, people can charge devices, drink free hot beverages, use the internet, and simply warm up.

People in Kyiv entering in tents to warm up, get gadgets charged, drink hot beverages. Photo SES of Ukraine

Yesterday, after eight hours without electricity in my area, I went to a nearby heating point in a local school to get some hot water. A supermarket near my home had stopped working – its generator simply couldn’t keep up. Low temperatures push them past their limits – several supermarkets were stopped working because of heavy load. Many residential buildings have no generators at all. After last attacks, windows have been blown out, leaving families not only without electricity or heating, but without glass, sealed off with temporary fixes against the freezing air. Some people even left the city, disclocating temporarily somewhere else.

As I walked to the heating point, snow kept falling, thick and steady, a reminder of the harsh winter that’s here to stay. I didn’t stay long, though, because I received a message from the alert bot in my residential complex – power was finally back. Like many neighbors, I could finally get things running again, and the supermarket reopened.

People in Kyiv standing in front of heaitng tents to warm up, get gadgets charged, drink hot beverages. Photo SES of Ukraine

Despite everything, Ukrainian services continued to function almost impeccably. In some districts of Kyiv with the most serious power supply problems, high-capacity generators are now being deployed. Yet, the situation this time feels more difficult. Some areas were without electricity for up to 24 hours, and others will most likely be hard to get power back to in the coming days. And for the first time, supermarkets – though there were very few of them – shut down their doors.

Russia has recently intensified its strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, aiming to cripple power supplies during the harsh winter months. As in previous winters, these attacks are deliberate, designed to freeze and wear down civilians, growing more relentless as the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and everyday life becomes colder and heavier.

At a minimum, six major air raids have hit Ukraine this winter, not counting smaller strikes. On January 13, thousands of households in the Kyiv region were left without power, and around 500 high-rise buildings had no heating, according to the city’s mayor. The same scenario is unfolding across Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and other regions. The latest overnight assault combined roughly 300 drones with up to 25 missiles of various types, all targeting the energy system.

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Previous issues on this topic

I’m wrapping up my Substack year with a podcast about rituals during the war and how important they are. From Christmas tree decorations to memes and beauty routines, Ukrainians stick to them, as for many they are a kind of support for the psyche, because they are about certainty, about something familiar. Listen to it in my fresh new episode.

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Listen to the previous podcast episode

I decided to go into this topic after someone asked me what it means to cover a war in your own country. I was thinking about it from a psychological point of view. And at some point, I got stuck. Not because I had never thought about the impact it would have on me, along with hundreds of other colleagues. I had. I still do, constantly. What really still shakes me is that we don’t just cover it – we also live inside it. With daily attacks, blackouts, loved ones in danger, friends killed in action or missing on the battlefield, and, in general, that omnipresent, sticky feeling that your own future has been smashed forever. At least the version of it you once wanted for yourself.

In this issue, I’m telling my personal story. This is just my personal journey – some episodes from my professional path, mixed with a few passing emotions. Maybe you recognize this pattern too, when life throws things at you whether you’re ready or not.

Just to start, let me tell you this little episode. In January 2022, a month before the invasion, all the spotlights were already on Ukraine. Russia had built up thousands of troops on the Ukrainian border, and this strange sense that something big was about to happen, mixed with disbelief, had been hanging in the air for weeks. I was doing a mix of reporting from border cities and, in between, trying to distract myself from all the tension of those days. So, as my first line of defense, I binge-watched all the serial killer series on Netflix. Now it feels chilling that I would need to watch macabre hunter-and-prey stories to calm down.

One night I woke up with a jolt because of a loud, threatening sound in my dream. It felt like an explosion or something similar. It turned out to be just the night glass recycling truck, so when they were emptying the container with glass, it made that rumbling noise. If only I had known what was ahead.

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Then the big war exploded. In the beginning, it felt quite awkward. The invasion caught me on the road, while I was working as a local producer for my colleague from Italy. You know how it works in journalism: when a big event happens – and we all agree that war is an extraordinary, massive event – it sucks in all the resources, all the attention. You just have to keep covering it, no matter what. Imagine this: you’re on the road, in the city of Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, doing your job, war breaks out in your country, and technically you’re expected to devote yourself to it coverage entirely. It was a state of external emergency, and that was the right thing to do. But deep inside, an internal emergency was activated at 100%, too.

From a psychological perspective, I was frozen. My entire life, like the lives of millions of Ukrainians, had just crumbled apart. My mom was in a frontline city, along with my brother. I had an apartment, my belongings, my friends in Kyiv, with Russian troops in its suburbs. My relatives were trapped in Kharkiv, with bombs falling over their heads. Where was my focus supposed to be in those first insane days - on work or on my life? I was nervous, irritable, unable to concentrate. At night in the hotel, I couldn’t fall asleep, just scrolled the news endlessly.

Of course, I chose work. And then I kept choosing work again and again. In 2022, during one of my reporting trips, I ended up in Odesa. And my grandmother still lives there. And you know, I never even went to visit her. I was recording something, meeting someone at the last minute, rushing somewhere else. And then I left. We still haven’t seen each other since the invasion began. And during the war, this kind of choice feels painfully personal.

But back to reporting. I personally believe that the difference to report on your own country in flames is in how you let reality pass through you. You read everything with these tiny feelers – past, future, what stands behind a person’s words. The so-called cultural backdrop, invisible. What unites us. That invisible, aching shared experience. I’ll tell you a short story. In 2022, I met a man. He was from Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine, and he had a small patch of land. Just a tiny piece where he grew things. Tomatoes, a few cucumbers to preserve for the winter. Another strip of land with potatoes and sunflowers. A classic Ukrainian setup. And then everything burned because the Russians shelled the area, and all of it was destroyed completely. I was helping a foreign colleague with this story, continuing the interview, and he focused on different aspects – no less relevant, of course. That’s normal. But in that moment, emotionally, I was attached – just and only – to that little patch of land, and for me that was the most relevant focus of the story. Because that was the most painful thing for that man, who lost everything. Because it would be the most painful thing for my family, for many Ukrainians, since that damn little piece of land is everything to us. I’m saying this because I sometimes have this cognitive gap. It means being inside an event that you have to write about as if you were outside it.

No doubt, Ukrainian journalists, my colleagues, work very professionally during the war. It’s just that when the moment comes, you distance yourself, detach. You don’t stay inside the event, you don’t rise above it – you simply step aside and tell the story. But still, sometimes it takes a titanic inner effort, like with that man’s story, to tear yourself away from the shared pain.

When Russia invaded, every journalist in Ukraine became a war reporter. We didn’t ask for it – this is just how it works when war comes to your country. You are never prepared or trained enough. You simply do the job with whatever you have. First, I bought protective gear and a medical first-aid kit. Then I started going to frontline cities – Kharkiv and its region, Zaporizhzhia. The first time I found myself in Kharkiv was in May 2022. Russian troops were still on the outskirts, pounding the city with artillery. The northern districts were literally within range, and I remember walking with this constant weight of fear – artillery fire is faster and more unpredictable.

My first story from Kharkiv was about people who had been living in the metro for three months. There I met a family who had lost their home, a woman who had been assaulted by a Russian soldier, a local volunteer who had witnessed people burn alive after massive shelling. One day we went with him to a location to do interviews, and just ten minutes later a missile hit a building right next to the spot where we had been waiting for a taxi. Oh Gosh, I thought. That could have been me.

On my way back to Kyiv, which was considered a safer place, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I simply couldn’t leave those traumatic stories behind. Surreally, I wasn’t even returning to a truly safe place – just to another war-torn city. It all got bottled up inside me somewhere. At first, I thought that just absorbing it was manageable. But over time, this emotionally heavy material kept piling up. Reporting on traumatic events often pushed me into a constant “work mode,” where I suppressed my emotions. Sometimes it became so depressing that I would just quit for months. Did I have the moral right to give up on my work and my duty and switch to something else instead? Egoistically, I think I did. There is no right choice, really. Sometimes I also feel this heavy loss of a sense of purpose. But in the end, I keep doing my job. I calm myself with the thought that I can always stop. That’s exactly why I also have a few parallel work activities, my side hustles, that have nothing to do with journalism.

When it becomes unbearable, I run there. Then I come back. Because I love this work more than I love my own peace. And you know, people often ask me what keeps me going. I ask myself the same thing. Honestly, I don’t know. Probably around 30 million people who continue to live here.

People also ask me about the psychological consequences. In the summer of 2025, I began waking up to a sound of violent explosions. My heart was racing like crazy. The first time was genuinely shocking. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to a blast so powerful and realistic that I jumped up, thinking I needed to head for a shelter, or at least move to the bathroom. Which is exactly what I did, grabbing my phone on the way. Imagine my surprise when I checked for information about an attack and realized there had been no attack at all. The explosions existed only in my head. I had up to five more of these episodes, and then, fortunately, they stopped. But ever since then, whenever I wake up to the sound of explosions, the first thing I do is check whether I imagined it. And it’s a kind of surreal nonsense to have to determine each time whether I’m losing my mind – or whether it’s the world outside my window. That’s my personal side effect. Loud sounds in general have become hard to deal with – because the noise of cars, motorcycles, and any kind of exhaust makes you think of a missile or a Shahed drone. Someone even put up a sign on our floor that says, “Neighbors, please don’t slam the doors.” But in Ukraine, loud sounds don’t trigger me as much as they do when I travel abroad. There, they’re everywhere – planes, motorcycles, all of it. And it’s deeply unpleasant to hear. In that moment, my mind travels in one direction – danger is near. And I don’t know how deep the psychological consequences will be for me, for all of us, after the war.

Still, I’d like to end on a positive note. A kind of professional deformation – when they teach you to end your reports on a high note. Or when they teach journalists who work with deeply traumatized people to finish an interview by asking about future plans. It works. It all works. So here is one episode that taught me a lot. In 2023, I went to the city of Izium, in the Kharkiv region, to talk to a schoolgirl. I got there in a very strange way - riding in a sausage delivery van with a driver, because I simply didn’t know how else to reach the city. That girl had spent seven months under Russian occupation, and, when asked about the future, she told that what kept her going was the thought that when it was all over, she would finish school and become a psychologist to help people survive traumatic events. Just like she did. And that is another thought that keeps me going. Sometimes I think taht there is no light in us without passing through darkness. At least, that girl taught me that.

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I got this new couple recently moved into one of the apartments near mine. I’m putting them in the newcomers category purely because of the new sounds they imported. Loud music, loud stomping, and loud loud sex. That last kind of “loud” always kicks in right when it’s our turn for a blackout. Makes you wonder if we even exist in this bleak – and very black – reality. They seem to be making love just fine.

Flexibility as a survival mechanism is pretty much the defining trait of Ukrainian society. It comes from our long history of political, social, and historical instability.

Ukrainians got used to systems that don’t work and need to be “finished” manually. Take the 90s, when we had food shortages. That special moment when stores have nothing. No bread, no groceries, no candy. You walk in, and the entire display is a long, long line of one type of canned fish and one type of tea. My family baked bread at home, because buying it meant standing in endless lines. And pancakes, too. A sort of avant-garde Ukrainian adaptation style.

And when the 90s came with all those technical and economic failures in the energy sector, we spent more than one winter with scheduled outages. I’d sit with my grandmother by candlelight, playing board games or doing school homework. There was no internet, no power banks, no eco-flow gadgets or rainbow flashlights. Just candles. I’m not comparing then and now – only pointing out how this habit of flexibility and adaptation forms.

Today the situation with electricity is different. Russia has been systematically hitting Ukrainian power plants and substations for the fourth year in a row. And yes, society has adapted again, thanks to that same flexibility and our social mirror effect. A few people find an effective solution, others copy it. That’s how this everyday survival culture appears – powered by extreme creativity.

I don’t remember how it all started in 2022, whether generators came first or we had an EcoFlow period before that. Whatever the order was, I just remember that after a short, shocking period of adaptation, generators became a steady part of our lives during late autumn and winter. That’s exactly the time of year when Russia usually starts hitting the grid. The colder it gets, the stronger their unyielding desire to freeze us, to intimidate us. But again, we adapt. It’s not our first rodeo, as people like to say.

So how does it all work? That’s the question I get the most. When the energy grid is hit, we go through what you could call emergency blackouts. Most of the power is knocked out at once, with no clear rolling schedule and some unpredictability. Usually it hits in the early morning after a night air assault. Payments and services might stall for a couple of hours.

I always say that’s when the magic happens. Every possible business or supermarket drags out a generator, and suddenly almost everything works again. My favorite example is Nova Poshta, the Ukrainian postal service. They always deliver on time, generators humming, every branch lit up. No parcel delays. You can even charge your phone inside if you need to. It’s a kind of everyday miracle that the postal service stays punctual during blackouts. That’s what necessity does – creativity becomes the only winning card. All Ukrainian businesses are playing that card to survive the winters.

But let’s get back to the blackouts. Once the system stabilizes, we usually get a somewhat predictable schedule for when it’s our turn to sit in the dark. After a massive attack, like these days, the electricity-free hours are endless. Right now in Kyiv, some areas get eighteen hours of blackout. I’ve had days with only three hours of power during working time. That tiny window is when you try to cram in everything – run the dishwasher, cook for the whole day, charge anything that depends on electricity. It’s impressive how much a person can pack into such a short burst of light.

As for how we know when it’s our turn, that part is easy. Ukraine is a highly digitalized country; we have an app for every emergency, and blackouts are no exception. When my area is about to go dark, I get a notification twenty-five minutes before shutoff. Same when the power is coming back. They also send the full schedule for the next day, so anyone ambitious enough can attempt to organize their life around it.

In Ukraine, late autumn and winter get dark very early. By three-thirty, if the weather is gloomy, you already need to turn the lights on at home. And when there’s no light at all, our evenings demand a lot of imagination and creativity to get through. Everyone finds their own way. Some friends have EcoFlows, so they can work calmly with internet access. Some escape to bars or coworking spaces. Many people buy small gas stoves so the family can cook. Big cities manage; small towns struggle much more, whether it’s heating a space or just getting around. And that demands even more flexibility and creativity.

My mom, even though she lives in a big city, used to go to our dacha during long stretches without electricity or heat. A dacha is that little patch of land with a tiny house that many Ukrainians have. In winter she’d stock up on firewood, heat the place, cook on the stove, and finally have hot food.

I’ll tell you a few more examples of how people adapt during blackouts. You might ask how kids study. That’s a long story, starting with generators in schools and ending with online classes in frontline regions. One teacher, her name is Yevheniia, from Kharkiv, told me that during outages her neighbor would hook the router up to a car battery, and that would give them internet. Then she’d sit nearby and teach her classes online. That’s just a drop in the ocean of how we sort things out here. Sometimes a phone is charged from power banks, the power banks from power stations, and the power stations from a car. The power chain is longer than the plot of any TV series. I know people who move their work meetings into cars or stairwells, wherever they can catch at least some mobile internet. Me, too! People adapt; every person is their own small story of adaptation.

At home, I set up a little space lit by tiny string lights. I have a lot of them, in different colors, and they replace candles for me. In the evenings I download something on Netflix or YouTube – and watch it even without electricity.

And meanwhile, life keeps going in this strange rhythm of darkness and improvisation. You learn to measure your days not by hours but by whatever slice of electricity drops into your lap.

You learn how to calculate electricity hours, cook food in advance, that meetings can happen in stairwells or a nearby caffe, and that whole cities can function on horizontal organisation alone.

And, if you want, a couple of pieces of advice. Always have cash with you, in this crazy world. I learned the hard way. Never take mackerel out of the fridge before checking the blackout schedule. You never know how long that smell will stay in your apartment.

And there is one part that still surprises me. In all this mess, people somehow manage to stay human. They study, they joke, they run business on generators, they share something with neighbors they barely know. And yes, some newcomers even manage to have very enthusiastic blackout sex. Because life goes on until it stopped, right?

If the sound of actual humans speaking into microphones is your thing, this issue also exists as a podcast.

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A new couple moved in near my apartment and – hey – my reality immediately filled with the noise they imported – loud music, loud stomping, and blackout-timed loud sex.

Ukrainians live in a strange, contrasting war-time reality, darkened by non-stop blackouts. Flexibility has become our built-in survival trait, shaped by the past. Today’s blackouts come from Russia hitting our power plants again and again, and society responds the same way it always has – by adapting fast.

Generators hum, postal services almost never miss a beat and we take meetings in stairwells or cars. I personally did it a lot. Apps announce when the lights go off and when they return and people reorganize their lives following these tiny windows of electricity. And somehow, amid all this darkness and war reality, people remain human, helpful and inventive.

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Hi there! Hope everyone’s doing well. Julia here, coming to you after a long night in Kyiv, where Russia sent waves of drones and missiles at the city. Still, we carry on with the war and the strange rhythm of everyday life inside it. Not my first rodeo, as many Ukrainians like to say. Dark humor has become our shining spade in the darkest times.

That’s why I’ve decided to change the name of my newsletter and call it War-life balance with Julia, because it feels like the most fitting description. The old title was Ukraine: The Story Chronicles by Julia.

So here we are with a special edition of my newsletter, in podcast form this time, essentially the previous issue but in audio form this time. We’re still talking about hope. If you have something to add or share, I’d love to hear your voices in the comments.

That being said, I want to thank every one of you for being here with me and helping me bring more of Ukraine to the world.

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If you’d rather read it, you can find the Anatomy of Hope issue below

Don’t miss a story about what’s in a Ukrainian grab-and-go bag

Russian forces have carried out countless war crimes in Ukraine. One is the so-called “human safari” in Kherson. Read this story to understand what’s going on

Mariupol Chronicles. Voices and stories from those who survived the hell

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I know a teacher, Nataliya, from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, just thirty kilometers from the Russian border. You’ve probably heard of it, from the bleak news and the resilience stories. There’s nothing she’s more devoted to than teaching.

Back in 2022, she found herself under Russian occupation, in a small town nearby. For forty-two days, her only hope was to see her pupils again. The road back to Kharkiv was hell – and that moment she hoped not to be shot by Russian soldiers. When she finally made it home, and her school resumed online classes, her hope shifted again – to see her students, scattered all over Ukraine and the world.

A year later, she met them in person, even if just for a few hours. That day, she hoped to teach face to face, one day in the future. Now she’s in Kyiv, still teaching remotely. With all the ups and downs, her hope remains the same – to teach again, properly, in one place.

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Hope isn’t a light that stays on. It’s a battery. Sometimes it drains completely. Sometimes we manage to charge it, alone or together. But what is hope, really?

What’s its anatomy when life caves in, in war, or any other disaster? We all have it, don’t we? No matter where you’re from or what you’ve been through, hope is built into the wiring. The dictionary calls it “a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.” I’d call it an optimistic loop – the brain’s trick to keep you moving when everything around goes awry, or falling apart completely.

Even in war, that loop keeps spinning, stubbornly, against reason. Like many Ukrainians, I’ve learned to tell apart false hope from pragmatic hope – or, if you want, pragmatic optimism. For instance, when Russia says it wants peace, believing that would be false hope. That’s when desire outweighs evidence. You don’t bomb residential buildings day and night, or cut power to millions, if peace is what you want.

In Ukraine, we break hope into small units. It’s literally to have a more now-focused experience. You wish you wouldn’t be bombed tonight. You count on the lights to stay on after another long night of shelling. You pray the family member serving in the army will be okay. We say “when the night ends” more often than “when it’s all over.” In daily life, it sounds like this – I’m wishing my dishwasher finishes before the next programmed blackout. And hell, let the electricity just be there for that Zoom call, without me running across the neighborhood, searching for a spot with internet and a working generator. Pragmatic optmimism, mixed with the reality. We usually call it war-life balance.

Shelter for cats in frontline Kharkiv, set up for them in war times. Hope everywhere

Of course, in different life situations and under different conditions, we hope for different things. In peaceful times, my expectations were stretching far. It’s obvious that I, that we, were investing them in careers, love, stability, self-realization. It was long-distance hope – abstract, sometimes indulgent. In war, hope contracts. Everything becomes immediate.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still investing in my career and self-growth. What could be more “stable” than buying new home décor or fancy water glasses under air raid alerts? Oh yes, that’s Ukrainian dark humor for you. Since early 2023, I even converted myself into the yoga world, and biohacking keeps making me more and more curious. Who would want to live forever, in these circumstances? Jokes aside, one of the most fertile periods of personal growth in my life happened during the worst years of the war. And if not hope, what else would push me – and millions of Ukrainians – day after day to cope with it all?

Even now, as I’m typing this, air raid alerts are blaring across Kyiv and other parts of the country. The missile threat is high. Of course, I hope it passes and nothing happens – that’s my private thought. But Ukrainians have learned to hope collectively too. So I also hope this alert is “empty,” or if it’s not, that the missiles are shot down and no one gets hurt.

Peacetime hope is more individual. Wartime hope is collective – I hope we all make it. During the war, Ukraine proved to be a highly functional state. Almost everything here still works, and I think it’s a kind of miracle that it all keeps going in wartime. Sure, it comes with downsides – food prices skyrocketing, power outages raising production costs, endless shortages. But still, think about it – trains run on time, postal services deliver even faster, small businesses keep working, libraries and bookstores stay open, cafés and restaurants welcome people. Books are printed, clothes are made, schools and universities teach. Big and small supermarkets are full of food, and you can order pizza or sushi anytime before curfew.

Somehow, it all works in circles. The system functions because of individuals who keep hoping – for the war to end, for justice, for anything at all. That creates a chamber effect that activates collective hope. Just the thought that, despite the worst-case scenario, everything still functions around us – that alone gives us hope. People become more resilient, and this circle of hope keeps spinning. And it’s a universal formula, I think, built into human history. That collective functionality itself becomes proof of hope.

In the hardest times, music, humor, and art turn into a shared hope currency – something that circulates within a society, when nothing else does. But hope is a universal currency, too. Humanity has been trading in it through its darkest times. Just look back at the pandemic to remember how hope was driving societies to survive the dark stretch. Billions of people every day hope their loved ones will recover from illness, that those who disappeared in hurricanes will be found. Millions living through wars – not just Ukrainians – hope to survive, to see justice, to see the end come sooner. I think humanity, as a species, survives partly on hope, because something good still lives in us. That being said, if collective hope carries us through the hardest times, it’d be good not to forget about it once things calm down.

Think that it has immence potential. Even neuroscience doesn’t treat hope as random or mystical, but as a concrete brain process – a mix of motivation, goal-setting, and emotion regulation. When we feel hope, the brain’s planning regions – the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex – team up with the dopamine system, which fuels motivation and drives us toward goals. Some studies suggest hope strengthens our ability to cope with challenges, both individually and collectively, even if there’s still much to learn about how it truly works.

In this universe, humanity goes on under the umbrella of hope, always changing shape, split into billions of different destinies, yet sharing the same anatomy. Either way, we keep running on it.

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Russian soldiers turned Kherson into a manhunt

Kherson’s Telegram feeds have read like a metronome of fear - day after day, week after week. “FPV toward Antonivka.” “Molniya over Komyshany.” “Recon drone near the bridge.” The messages never stop, only blur into one another. A whole city has learned to live by the sound of propellers, hiding when the various monitoring channels display drones direction. Kherson has turned into a manhunt, where civilians are the moving targets for Russian forces.

Those very ones on the opposite bank of the Dnipro river, that use Ukrainian civilians as targets. To spread terror, for training troops to use drones, or simply for fun. The Russians themselves share videos of the strikes or announce new ones in progress. They call them “hunts,” and the area the “red zone”, and on Russian Telegram channels tied to the military, they’re referred to by an even darker term – “human safari.”

And this has been going on since at least the beginning of 2024. No doubt, it’s terrifying. It breaks every moral rule and every law, yet this inhuman practice continues, right under everyone’s eyes.

At least five or six Russian military-linked Telegram channels regularly post videos of these attacks. In one, you see a crosshair lock onto what looks like ordinary civilian cars driving down the road, followed by explosions. In another, the target is a man on a bicycle – no uniform, no weapon, just a cyclist on a street, struck by a drone.

We’re talking, of course, about FPV drones (first-person-view drones.) They are small, short-range military drones that can carry explosives to drop or crash into a target and have a camera to record the attack. Operators control them remotely and watch the target through that camera, which makes strikes on civilians a deliberate choice, not an accident.

Ukrainian FPV loitering munition with RPG-7 ammo. Photo by Армія Inform, under Creative Common licence

That’s exactly how Russian FPV drones from the left bank of the Dnipro attack Ukrainian towns and villages in the Kherson region, and beyond. Lately, these drones have started reaching some areas of the Dnipropetrovsk region, and some districts of Zaporizhzhia, though not in large numbers yet.

People in Kherson now live with their eyes glued to Telegram. Monitoring channels warn in real time where drones have been spotted, which streets to avoid, which neighborhoods are under flight paths. But even that’s often not enough to stay safe. Because these drones aren’t scouting – they’re hunting. And their targets are civilian cars, men, women, children, even animals.

A closed road somewhere in Ukraine. Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash , illustrative only

One only needs to open the National Police of Ukraine’s official Telegram channel and watch the video reports from Kherson to grasp the scale of it. For example, a police post shows that on October 13 Russian forces dropped explosives from a drone directly onto a woman, wounding her in the head.

There are plenty of such posts. Here’s a cyclist lying wounded on the ground – hit by a combat drone while simply riding through the city. And here’s another – a nighttime drone strike dropping explosives on an emergency medical crew in one of Kherson’s districts.

According to the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, drones have struck civilians at bus stops, in parks, and simply on the street – often while they’re on bicycles.

“The Russians use camera-equipped drones to locate victims, follow them for several blocks, and then strike”

explained to me Yuliia Kovalenko in the end of this summer, a lawyer with the organization.

“That’s why many of those hit describe it as ‘a hunt.”

The group also reports the use of a “double-tap” tactic: first attacking civilians, then striking again when rescuers arrive. Videos shared on Russian Telegram channels show drones being used to train operators on human targets – tracking pedestrians for several blocks before dropping explosives.

For months, various organizations, journalists, and Ukrainian soldiers have been warning that Russian military units are training drone operators on civilian targets, so they can later use those skills in combat. A barbaric way to practice strikes on women, children, and ordinary locals.

The evidence is right there, as we already knew. Countless videos posted by Russian invaders themselves on Telegram. In early October, Ukrainian journalists uncovered one such video showing a Russian drone operator deliberately attacking a civilian car in Kherson. A grim example of how Russia “teaches” its operators to kill.

And then came the story that shook the whole world last summer. Little Dmytryk, just over a year old, was walking in his yard in the village of Pravdyne, Kherson region, with his grandmother. It was when a Russian drone descended with surgical precision, and killed him.

Since mid-2024, Russian drone strikes on civilians have sharply increased, with attacks reported almost daily, according to multiple human rights groups. Human Rights Watch confirms this too. In its last report, the organization describes an attack on 23-year-old Anastasia Pavlenko, who was cycling through the city in 2024. The report notes that the assault on her was just one of hundreds of attacks on civilians and civilian sites in Kherson carried out by Russian forces since June 2024 – using small, “easily maneuverable quadcopter drones armed with explosives, including grenades, antipersonnel mines, and incendiary devices”, capable of striking with extreme precision. Human Rights Watch says the footage clearly shows identifiable civilian targets – evidence that the strikes are intentional.

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“It’s a crime against humanity”, UN Commission concludes

A UN Commission of Inquiry report released this year found that Russia’s systematic use of drones against civilians in the Kherson region amounts to crimes against humanity. The attacks followed a consistent pattern, using the same tactics again and again – planned, coordinated, and anything but random.

According to the Commission, Russian forces used violence and threats to terrorize civilians across Kherson, in open violation of international law. The strikes are relentless, widespread, and deliberately targeted at ordinary people, sowing fear in every corner. Videos and messages promising more attacks only deepened that fear. Investigators concluded these killings were not isolated acts of war, but part of a coordinated state policy.

Since July 2024, nearly 150 people have been killed along the right bank of the Dnipro River, many while walking, driving, or riding their bikes. But with time passing, this number now is defintely higher.

The Commission identified a grim pattern: drone footage showing clearly civilian targets, the intent unmistakable – to spread terror. The scale and persistence of the attacks, along with strikes on infrastructure and even rescue crews, have made many areas impossible to live in, forcing thousands to flee. The report warns this may also amount to the crime against humanity of forcible population transfer.

Talking with Ukrainians who lived under occupation is always difficult. Recently I spoke with a young woman who managed to leave. Fear runs through every such conversation. Name can’t be published, as her relatives are still there. Few details can be shared. It’s dangerous. Russians still send messages, threaten, and manipulate through family. It continues even now.

Instead, this story with O. I recorded back in 2023, for a piece that was never published. Today O. lives somewhere in Southern Europe. We don’t name the country for security reasons, of course.

Her story is about Mariupol under siege. It’s a testimony about leaving in March 2022 while Russian bombs fell, about fleeing through Russia and starting again from scratch. But more than anything, it is a story to remember what happened in Mariupol, once a bright city on the shore of the Azov Sea, destroyed by Russia.

A burned-out Russian tank in the Kharkiv region, April 2023.

MARIUPOL. THE START OF THE INVASION

O., 36, and her family woke at dawn on February 24, 2022, to unfamiliar sounds. At first, it seemed like thunder. But a stream of messages and early calls erased any doubt – these were the sounds of war. Russian troops were advancing. O. lived with her children near the airport, which doubled the fear. “Right away, I thought of Donetsk airport, and it was terrifying,” she recalls. Ukrainian troops had defended that airport for 242 days, from May 2014 to January 2015, making the parallel in her mind unavoidable. Yet a flicker of hope lingered in her mind – in the 21st century, this couldn’t be real. That morning, the family went to a store. Paying by card was impossible – bank terminals were frozen. They had little cash.

“We just grabbed anything. I bought a lot of meat, maybe 10 kilos, and canned food.”

At first, they didn’t think of leaving. No one could imagine the scale of destruction Russia would bring. Like many Ukrainians, O. hoped for common sense. With friends, she even posted photos of the bombardment under reviews of expensive restaurants on Google Maps in Russia, hoping to make Russians see what their army was doing. While there was internet, “we shouted in every way we could,” but responses from relatives and acquaintances in Russia were not what they expected. So, she discovered it was pointless.

At that time, they were still in a city half cut off by the siege. On March 4, the family had just made breakfast. As O. put a kettle on the stove, the air raid siren went off. She gathered her children and pets – a cat, a dog, and two rats – and hid in the only room without windows.

“We thought it was safer there. I realized the gas was gone when the kettle fell quiet, and moments later a shell struck our building.”

Then came the crash of breaking glass. A moment later, a soldier knocked on their door, warning them to move quickly to a shelter. “Our building had a semi-basement shelter, with damp soil and pipes.” The children panicked. O.’s husband rushed them out, dressed in whatever they could grab, while she carried the animals. “I always had a bag with documents ready,” she says – a habit since 2014, when Russians invaded another part of Donetsk region.

“I locked the door, turned back, and shouted, ‘We will come back,’” she remembers, tears visible on her face as we speak.

The stairwell was covered in shards and debris. She carried the cat, the dog, the rats, and grabbed a blanket. Soon, neighbors came down to the shelter too, some with small children. “We spent the night there. No one wanted to eat or drink.” People lay on doors taken off hinges, or on tables. The next day, neighbors walked the area, telling each other where shells had fallen – a nearby apartment block, a kindergarten.

“One building was my sister’s, and she was there alone with her child. But no one could give me details.”

The air was thick with confusion, panic, and no phone connection. O. remembers a woman carrying a five-liter bottle stuffed with bread. Her own family had chocolate, cookies, and water. “You can’t prepare for this properly.” After that, she only returned home twice, to grab food from the fridge. The rest of the time, they lived in the basement.

They stayed underground for 11 days. Hygiene meant brushing teeth only. Cooking was done over an open fire when possible. By March 8, it was impossible to cook outside near the entrance – Russian fire was too heavy. Still, they tried to hold on, even joke. “We searched for something positive, so we wouldn’t lose our minds completely,” O. says. Her younger daughter was 7, the older 12. The parents tried to distract them with books they found.

As days went by, and Mariupol sank further under occupation, information became harder to receive. Russian radio was part of the occupying forces’ information space.

“We didn’t know where to go next. Russian propaganda had been repeating from the first days that Ukraine no longer existed. But I didn’t believe it”

Sometimes, only an old, barely working radio picked up signals from Ukrainian-held territory. “These were fragments of information.”

Mariupol on the map of Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion, about 426,000 people lived in the city, according to official data / Projection map by Flourish team

MARCH 16, 2022. MARIUPOL DRAMA THEATER

On March 16, the family decided to move to relatives in another neighborhood that seemed safer, and see what to do next. On the way, they saw Russian crimes firsthand. From the Moryakiv district, overlooking the Azov Sea, they had already spotted warships on the horizon. Russian planes circled above Mariupol, dropping bombs seconds after passing overhead. “It was terrifying, knowing they were hitting the city,” O. says. Their plan was to reach the district where O. worked, take her company minibus, and evacuate as many people as possible from the besieged city.

“That was the day the drama theater was hit.”

Driving through the city center was impossible – enemy aircraft hovered constantly above. “Apartment windows flared with explosions.”

A memorial banner honoring Mariupol’s defenders. Kyiv, May 2023.

LEAVING THE BESIEGED CITY

Those scenes became a turning point – the family decided to leave Mariupol immediatley. Fuel was running low, too. With no communication, they didn’t know whether nearby Berdyansk or Zaporizhzhia were under Russian occupation. Still, they took the risk and headed toward Berdyansk.

The road was hellish. Endless enemy checkpoints. Mines scattered along the roadsides.

“It was terrifying. At first I thought they were just big tin cans from herring, because they looked so similar. I even asked out loud who had thrown those cans around. But my husband said – those aren’t cans, those are mines.”

Cars clogged the roads in four lanes, some driving against traffic, as people tried to flee the burning city. On the way out, they saw fields packed with Russian military vehicles marked with the Z symbol, firing toward Mariupol.

“They pounded the city without pause,” O. recalls. Normally, the trip from Mariupol to Berdyansk would take about an hour. This time, it took the family more than a day. At the last checkpoint before Berdyansk, they were held for seven hours and interrogated by Russian soldiers.

The next day, as they neared Berdyansk, mobile connection finally returned. That’s when O. learned the city in Zaporizhzhia region had already been occupied since February 28. Her sister, who was traveling with them, had acquaintances there who offered a place to stay. The family spent a week in Berdyansk, trying to find fuel.

Around that time, news began to spread about “green corridors” to evacuate civilians to Ukrainian-controlled territory. O. felt a flicker of hope – until new reports came that Russian troops were shooting at evacuation convoys. “We had no idea what to do. We were terrified, scared.” So then the family decided to leave through Russia.

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“WE HATE YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE FREE”

They contacted a friend from Mariupol who was living in Russia at the time, and somehow made it to Anapa, in Russia, where they were promised a place to stay. “We just needed to stop, to breathe, to understand what was happening,” O. says. She remembers feeling frozen, detached from the trauma.

“The first three days, we just slept.”

Then something shifted. “It was like rejection started setting in.”

The friend and her husband began acting strangely – telling them what they could say and what they shouldn’t. At first, they asked what had happened, and the family told them. “But we quickly realized that our version wasn’t what they wanted to hear.” The Russians wanted stories about “bad Ukrainians shooting civilians,” while O.’s family were telling the opposite.

They had seen enough with their own eyes – how Russian planes flew over the city, how the city burned, how bombs fell from the sky. For O., her husband, and their children, those facts were enough to push back against the lies their Russian hosts believed. Then came a sentence O. still remembers: “Do you know why Russians hate you, Ukrainians?”, her friend’s husband asked. “What do you mean – hate us?” she asked.

“We hate you because you’re free.”

O. couldn’t make sense of it. If there was hatred underneath, why had they even offered to help? But soon it became clear – it wasn’t the true help. Her former friend lived in a reality of propaganda and false beliefs about Ukraine. The long-time relationship broke forever. O.s family felt trapped – their money ran out, the feeling of unreality deepened. Then, in that conditions, they were forced to get local basic humanitarian aid. “Imagine,” O. says, “you’ve lost everything because of Russians, and someone there, at the humanitarian spot, looks at you and says, “Now everything finally will be fine for you.” It felt infuriating.

“First Russians took our home, our work, our normal life – and now they tell us it will be fine.”

Burned-out Russian military equipment displayed on Kyiv’s streets, August 2022. In the background, a banner calls for the liberation of Azovstal defenders from Russian captivity.

Still, in Anapa, O. met a woman – an activist who owned a small hotel and offered them a place to stay for free. Later, that woman sold her hotel and left Russia, unable to accept what her country was doing in Ukraine. She gave O.’s family food and shelter. O. remembered those days as really hard ones.

Family tried enrolling the children in school. “We wanted to bring some sense of normal life back, at least for the kids,” she says. But that idea collapsed the same day.

“If not for my sister, I would have started a fight.”

The school’s deputy principal asked her in a condescending tone, “Do you think your children are up to our standards?” After a few tests, the woman said dismissively, “Your older one should really be in fifth grade, not seventh,” then criticized her for being left-handed and scolded the younger one for not writing in Russian. O. had no doubts – she wouldn’t send her children to a Russian school. She would teach them herself.

Money by that time was gone. Yet, the family didn’t want to settle there, even if living with uncertain status was hard. “When you’re down to just meeting basic needs – food, sleep – your choices shrink,” O. says. Still, they decided not to take Russian passports. Adding to the tension, the neighbors had painted the letter Z on their car one morning – the same symbol that marked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

FREEDOM

The family stayed with the woman for a month, then in May 2022, decided it was time to leave. “We weighed everything and decided – we had to run.” O.’s position was clear – it was better to go to another country, learn another language, start again – but staying in Russia was impossible. “Russia’s mindset was never mine,” she said.

Later, when the family was already safe abroad, they learned that Russian security services had kept watch outside that house for another three months and had searched the rooms where O.’s family had stayed.

O. remembers sitting down and writing out a list of countries that were accepting refugees at the time. She chose one in southern Europe, and the family began preparing to leave. At the Russian border, the line was unbearably long – they waited 27 hours. Most of the people there were Ukrainians, many from Donetsk region, even from Mariupol. Cars moved barely five meters an hour.

“It brought me to tears – we, Ukrainians, share everything. Candy, water, whatever we have. I felt proud – proud to be one of us.”

She recalled how Russian border guards treated Ukrainians with arrogance and humiliation in their tone. But once they crossed into Lithuania, everything shifted. The world suddenly looked right again. Ukrainian flags were everywhere. “The first days, I just walked around taking photos of Ukrainian flags,” O. says. “The support was enormous, and it lifted us up”.

A display showing train schedules from Kyiv to Ukrainian cities under occupation – a reminder that one day these routes will run again. Kyiv train station, April 2023.

Now O. and her family live in southern Europe. Her two daughters go to school, where they have been warmly welcomed. The younger daughter is still afraid of the sound of airplanes. The invisible scars remain – the pain of losing their home, their city, being uprooted so violently. Just a family from Mariupol, like thousands of others, carrying their home in memory and still holding onto that pair of keys, that became a mirage.

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