Kharkiv, Ukraine — On a frigid Friday morning, as children climbed the steps from Lyceum No. 105 — an underground school purpose-built to shield them from Russian airstrikes — municipal crews were out in force. They hacked at ice, scooped slush, and scrubbed sidewalks clean. The joke among Ukrainians about Kharkiv’s devotion to well-groomed streets survives even here, under constant threat from the sky.
The city authorities have had little rest since February 2022. Vladimir Putin’s forces have pounded Ukraine’s second-largest city — population 1.4 million — with a vindictiveness that has reshaped daily life. With each strike on a residential block, crews arrive almost instantly, working alongside the Red Cross to board shattered windows and shovel out broken glass. They clear. They cover. They move on to the next address.
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Just 25 miles from Russia’s Belgorod, Kharkiv is a frontier city in every sense — culturally, historically, and now militarily. Its identity is complex and hard-won. “Kharkiv had never been Russian,” said Natalia Zubar, a Ukrainian activist and war crimes investigator. “It was always multicultural, almost like Odesa.” Established in the 17th century as a joint Cossack fortress against Tatar raids, by the 19th century Kharkiv had drawn European intellectuals and capital: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sat on the university’s board; British and Belgian investors backed mining and metalworking. Before the full-scale invasion, the city counted some 230,000 university students, including 27,000 from overseas.
Kharkiv’s modern story is entangled with the Soviet one. Designated capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic after the Bolshevik Revolution, it lost that title to Kyiv in 1934. Collectivization drove a demographic shift from two-thirds Russian to two-thirds Ukrainian, but Stalin’s abandoned policy of Ukrainization and the terror that followed scarred the city. In the Slovo Building — a purpose-built artists’ residence — Kharkiv’s poets and scholars, many of them loyal Bolsheviks, were imprisoned or shot. They are remembered as the Executed Renaissance.
After the Euromaidan uprising in 2014, pro-Russian activists — some suspected to have been bussed from across the border — tried and failed to seize the regional administration building and declare a “people’s republic,” as in Donetsk and Luhansk. Street fighting left several dead. At the time, the city’s loyalties were debated: the 2001 census showed 61% identified as Russian speakers. “People here were not pro-Russian,” Zubar said. “They were mostly indifferent, or pro-Soviet — which doesn’t mean pro-Russian at all.”
Everything changed on Feb. 24, 2022. Russian warplanes struck military targets around the city before dawn, and an estimated 20,000 troops surged from Belgorod, reaching the ring road within hours. Any expectation that Kharkiv’s Russian-speaking majority would welcome the invaders fell apart on contact. The Battle of Kharkiv raged for three months. More than 600 civilians were killed and elegant fin-de-siècle boulevards were gutted by bombs and artillery.
Back then, with a Russian capture still looming, Mayor Ihor Terekhov told The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov that Kharkivites had long regarded Russians as “our brothers,” but the bombardment shattered that belief. Four years on, he works from a reinforced bunker and says he rarely sleeps more than an hour a night. “If people talk about Kharkiv being a Russian city they’re wrong,” he said. “A Russian city is Moscow, or Saint Petersburg. Kharkiv is a Ukrainian city, and always will be.” His staff counts about 13,000 buildings damaged or destroyed, including 3,500 schools, kindergartens, medical facilities and public offices.
That toll shows up on apartment landings and kitchen floors. Margarita Belkina, a retired Russian-speaking Kharkivite who once worked for a South Korean company, fled to Kyiv after debris from a downed missile tore through her building in 2022. In December, with the capital increasingly under threat, her son urged her to come home. This winter, a Shahed drone slammed into her block. Now she lives on roughly €100 a month and cannot afford to rent elsewhere. “Before the war I wanted to work abroad while I still had my health,” she said, eyes fixed on a jagged pane. “But when the war started, something changed. I became a nationalist. I love my country, and if I die, I want to die here. I won’t leave.”
Yet Kharkiv’s cultural heartbeat endures underground. The National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre — a vast, postmodern leviathan nicknamed “the aircraft carrier” and completed in 1991 — staged Giselle the night before the invasion. In the months that followed, it lost almost a third of its professional staff. An unexploded missile still lies on the roof. “The first months were difficult, the city was under constant shelling,” said director Ihor Tulusov, 67. Two thousand square meters of glass blew out of the façade. He moved rehearsals four floors down, building a six-by-eight-meter stage in the basement.
By mid-2025, many of the 250 ballerinas who had fled to Slovakia and toured Europe had returned. The troupe reached roughly 70% of its prewar strength, and in May the company mounted a full performance to Chopin before a 400-strong audience hunkered beneath concrete and pipes. On a recent afternoon, a moonlit forest flickered against the wall as a full orchestra tuned up for a rehearsal of Giselle. “No matter what, we’ll keep going,” said ballerina Olga Sharikova. “When we see that the audience is grateful, when they’re inspired — especially now — we can help them step into a fantasy, if only for a while.”
Far from the footlights, another ledger of the war grows in a snowy field outside the city. There, Olexander Kobylev, head of the regional police investigations department, walks through rows of twisted metal, circuit boards and serial plates — the so-called “drone cemetery.” The heaps range from Soviet-era Tochka-U and Uragan rockets to fragments of Shahed and Geran drones. It is no junkyard. Investigators catalog every shard for a chain of evidence. For six months in 2022, Russian troops occupied about one-third of the Kharkiv region. When they retreated, they left behind a trail. “Investigators encountered a massive amount of war crimes evidence,” Kobylev said. “Air assaults, shelling, murder, torture, looting — each case was registered.”
Working with the SBU security service and prosecutors, his small team has opened about 25,000 alleged war crimes cases. On Kobylev’s screen, a 3D model of the Izium mass grave rotates in grim detail: of 448 bodies exhumed, 420 were civilians. “They know they’re hitting civilian infrastructure and that they’re killing civilians,” he said. “They don’t stop.” Nationwide, the Prosecutor General’s Office has documented more than 150,000 alleged war crimes and filed over 500 indictments under Ukrainian law; courts have sentenced more than 100 Russian military officials in absentia. Investigators in Kharkiv and elsewhere hope the dossiers will flow to the EU-backed International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, a step necessitated by Russia’s non-participation in the International Criminal Court.
For Zubar, the aim is as much moral as legal. “Ultimately our objective is justice,” she said. “It’s justice for the victims, justice for the country as a whole, because a democratic Ukraine cannot be built without the sense of justice, and no war can end without a sense of justice.”
Kharkiv has grown accustomed to a surreal equilibrium. Shops are open. Restaurants fill early and close early. Families return. Air-raid sirens moan almost hourly. The city endured 318 air attacks last year, and Russia’s arsenal now includes fiber-optic guided drones, harder to jam and increasingly long-range. Authorities are stringing tens of kilometers of anti-drone netting over key roads to shield civilian corridors. “Russian forces are now able to conduct fiber-optic drone strikes against Kharkiv city itself,” the Institute for the Study of War reported this week, adding that the increased range allows Moscow “to harass civilian populations in Kharkiv city” much as it has along the front.
The violence has also clarified identity. “We were a nation — and we remain a nation,” historian Yaroslav Hrystak told Ukrinform. “Before Feb. 24, 2022, somewhere deep down, we still doubted it. Today, that doubt is gone. In essence, we have moved from existing ‘in ourselves’ to existing ‘for ourselves.’ And that is a colossal change.”
Inside the theatre basement, principal ballerina Antonina Radievskaya hears the question that haunts every conversation in Kharkiv: What if Russia keeps coming until it takes the city? She brushes it aside. “I’ve never had such thoughts, neither then nor today,” she said. “Kharkiv is powerful. We won’t let anyone invade, we’ve already shown that. God forbid, if they invade, the people here will tear them apart with their bare hands.”
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
