In Kharkiv, life threads through air-raid sirens as a city adapts to war’s long grind
Kharkiv moves with a calm that belies its proximity to the frontline. Air-raid alerts roll across the snow and concrete, their whirling tone carried by loudspeakers and phones, yet buses, trams and the metro keep time. Pedestrians navigate the city’s broad, winter-bright boulevards as if the sirens were just another layer of weather.
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Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv has become a study in endurance. City authorities say some 13,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed since 2022. More than 600 residents were killed by Russian shelling in the first three months alone. The front sits roughly 30 kilometers to the north by road—only 20 across open fields—and at night the faint crack of Ukrainian air defenses carries across the rooftops. Soldiers in fatigues pass through cafes and courtyards, rotating to and from the line.
Living with the alerts
Each morning begins with a check of the Ukraine Air Alert app, the digital metronome of daily life. In recent days, Russian drones struck three outer districts and separate bombardments wounded at least 14 people across Kharkiv region, local officials reported. When warnings lift, shops reopen their doors and residents step back into the light. Then the sirens return, and the cycle repeats.
At the edge of the city, war is visible in new infrastructure. Along a ribbon of highway just 20 kilometers from the front, construction crews have been stringing anti-drone nets overhead—lattices designed to intercept incoming Shaheds or force them lower where defenders can engage. “We’re fishermen laying nets,” one worker joked, shrugging beneath a hard hat as colleagues unspooled more cable.
The crews said they had laid some 18 kilometers of netting since the start of the year, beginning near the Russian border and working toward Kharkiv. Their urgency grew after what officials described as the first appearance of a Russian fiber-optic guided drone at the city limits—a tethered system that uses a thin cable to steer around electronic jamming.
Impact at the doorstep
In Saltivskyi, a northern district hit hard during the war’s early months, the scars are everywhere. Midrise blocks wear pockmarks from artillery and missile strikes. One tower’s flank is shorn away from a glide bomb that tore through the building in 2023; a woman’s coat still hangs from what was once a hallway wall, now exposed to the open air.
Before dawn on a recent morning, a Russian-launched Shahed slammed into another 14-story block there, carving a crater into the external wall and setting cars ablaze below. Miraculously, no one was killed. A few meters’ difference in the drone’s path, residents said, and it would have driven straight through bedrooms.
By midmorning the sidewalks teemed with high-visibility vests. City crews boarded shattered windows, and Ukrainian Red Cross workers moved floor to floor to check on residents. In one compact studio, pensioner Margarita Belkina picked glass from the sill and surveyed a room turned inside out. She said she lives on less than 100 euros a month. “The war made me a Ukrainian nationalist,” she said, her voice even but resolute.
Normality, rebuilt and improvised
Kharkiv’s center hums again. Cafes and restaurants that shuttered in 2022 now pull steady crowds; young people linger by broad panes of glass despite the risk, coffee cups between their hands and phones face down on the table. A shopping center flattened by a cruise missile early in the war has been rebuilt and reopened, though some international brands remain shuttered.
The change is not just psychological. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2022 pushed Russian forces back from swaths of Kharkiv region, moving artillery away from the city and easing the daily barrage. Attacks persist—drones and missiles still punch into neighborhoods, sometimes while people sleep—but the volume and precision of Ukrainian defenses have given residents space to breathe and to plan.
For families, the plan is literal and underground. Children attend lessons in adapted shelters and metro stations across the city. In one subterranean classroom, English teacher Kateryna Chyryk arranged paper cutouts for a vocabulary exercise as students filtered in under vaulted tiles. “We know that the situation is awful,” she said. “The most important thing is that the children do not think about bombs because the underground schools are really safe.” City officials count 21 dedicated underground schools, a network stitched together to keep education going under constant threat.
Security as habit
Safety here often amounts to habits. People sit with their backs to internal walls, not windows. They learn the short walks to the nearest shelter and which stairwells feel sturdy. They parse the air-raid tone and the rhythm of alerts region by region, and they carry on. In one cafe, an air-raid alert ended and the line at the counter resumed. A barista called out flat whites and cortados. Outside, municipal workers swept away the last of the morning’s glass.
Adaptation has not dulled Kharkiv’s politics. This once predominantly Russian-speaking city has grown more assertively Ukrainian as the war grinds on. Ukrainian flags drape balconies; street posters advertise Ukrainian-language theater and concerts. Many residents say their identity hardened under fire—not against a language, but in defense of a home.
Holding the line, and doubts
Few people in Kharkiv speak of the war ending soon. “People have mostly adapted to the war,” said Natalia Zubar, a local activist and war crimes investigator. She does not expect a lasting peace deal at this stage. “I don’t see any indication that Russia is ready to stop the war.”
That skepticism threads through daily choices. Parents weigh whether to keep children in the city’s shelters or send them elsewhere for school. Small businesses decide to reopen or relocate. Crews hang nets over highways because technology keeps evolving, and because there is no guarantee the next drone will miss. Soldiers move quietly through train stations, onto buses, and back to the line.
Kharkiv’s resilience is not born of denial. It is muscle memory. After years of air-raid alerts, residents know the routes, the timings, the blind spots. They know how to buy bread between sirens and how to fix a window by lunchtime; how to go to work, how to fall asleep. They want peace—most say so immediately—but few believe Moscow wants it, at least not yet.
So the city keeps time to its new metronome. Siren. Pause. Hammer. Broom. School bell, somewhere underground. A bus door hisses closed. On the horizon, the war’s low percussion continues, and Kharkiv, improbably steady, moves through another day.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
