nebezpeka
on air raid sirens, adaptations, and how information helps people get through
A few hours after the longest one-night missile barrage of the war, I took a cab to my manicure appointment, which I’d booked the week before. Ukrainian women, by and large, keep impeccable nails, and in the interests of not being too visibly an unkempt foreigner, I’ve adopted the same habit.
That morning, the people of Kyiv shuffled out of their apartments and into the golden spring sun, bleary-eyed and smothering yawns. It had been a long and unsettled night. Even those who’d snoozed through the 1 a.m. air raid siren would have been woken up by the blast that rocked the capital nearly five hours later, when a hypersonic missile slammed into a power plant in the city’s Holosiivskyi district.
I’d heard that explosion from my bed, where I’d allowed myself to slip back into sleep, believing — after about an hour of no new information — that the night’s long aerial assault on Ukraine was finally coming to an end. The fact that I was home to hear it had left me uneasy. In most cases, when I know an attack is coming — more on how we would know that in a moment — I grab my backpack and head to the safe depths of the nearby metro station to wait it out.
But that night, I’d already been dozing when the siren sounded, and by the time I’d sufficiently recovered my senses it was, in my estimation, too late to make a run for the metro. Overall, you’re safest underground, and the next safest between walls: the risk of a direct hit on a random residential building is lower than the risk of being in the shrapnel radius of a blast out in the open, so at a certain point it’s best to stay put where you are. These are the calculations you make, during war.
So I stayed home, and watched news of the attack unfold online, from my bed.
This was not the first attack I’ve been present for in Kyiv, but it was the first I heard. The others, I’d either slept through (I can sleep through just about anything, which is a superpower at home but a liability here) or heard nothing. On those occasions Kyiv’s air defence — which has improved significantly in recent months, owing to upgrades from donor allies — shot most of the threats down with relatively little damage. Or at least, much less damage than the missiles and Shahed drones could have wrought.
The blast boomed through my bedroom, a thick percussive thud. Oh God, that’s not good. I grabbed a blanket and a pillow and curled up in my bathtub, which is said to offer some tiny protection from shrapnel and against being crushed, if the ceilings come down. Or maybe that’s not even true. Maybe that’s just a story you tell yourself to explain the impulse to curl up somewhere contained, like how my cat used to flee to the coat closet when she heard thunder. Some deep instinct in the ancient part of our brains to take shelter in a cave. Or else: in a womb.
By 8 a.m. the attack had ended, and I collapsed into a brief sleep.
When I woke up two hours later, I contemplated cancelling my manicure. It seemed so indulgent, even flippant: we just got bombed, is this not insensitive? Yet the nail salon was open, and the manicure masters, as they call them here, were waiting at their stations. In that light, not going to the appointment I’d already booked would have been a more indulgent behaviour: a performative display of trauma that isn’t mine to perform. Not going wouldn’t have helped anyone, but only hurt the workers that were expecting my business to earn their day’s wage. So I went and sipped green tea as the master dabbed my fingertips with a lavender shade: ready for spring in Kyiv, or a selfie, or a date.
We yawned a lot, both me and the master. We didn’t talk about the bombing.
The surreality of these moments — the collisions between unfathomable violence and the mundane pleasures of living — is the definitive character of wartime life in Kyiv. I am transfixed by that texture: I think it’s tremendously important, partly in the way it conveys something key about the character and resolve of Ukrainians, but also in how it reveals something more universal about resilience, and adaptation. Yet that texture is not often explored in most reporting on the war; understandable, since elsewhere in Ukraine is hell on earth. Bakhmut is more important than morning-after tea in Kyiv.
Yet when I talk to folks back home, I find they’re quite curious about those junctures, and about what it’s like to steer one’s life around the occasional attacks and far more common sirens. So in the wake of last week’s large strike, I figured I may as well take this week’s newsletter to share some minor observations.
First: to understand how Ukrainians make these adaptations, you must understand the sheer frequency of the sirens. Some days there are several, some days there are none, but most days are marred by at least one. There were two in just the first two hours I was working on this post on Monday morning; four more on Tuesday as I sat down to finish it. In addition to the physical sirens, which you may not always hear if you’re inside a building, there is an official app for your phone. (In yet another surreal twist, if you set the app to English, you’ll get the warnings read by Luke Skywalker.)
When a siren sounds — it blares for a few minutes at the start of an alert, and again to mark the end — there is no panic, none at all. After over a year of such regular alarms, Ukrainians are entirely used to them. There is also the fact that the alarms themselves do not mean you are in imminent danger: in Kyiv, you’re generally understood to have at least 20 minutes between a siren sounding and a threat, if there is one, arriving. So there is time to gather your things and decide where to go. (In cities closer to Russia or Russian-occupied territory, there’s no such small grace; if a place is within rocket or artillery range, the attacks can and do arrive too quickly for any siren.)
Overall, these days, few people in Kyiv or Lviv react to most alerts. The sirens wail, and people go about their business: they they go to work, they play with their kids in the park, they go shopping. Corner stores, coffee shops and shawarma joints tend to stay open. Some stores close, but from what I can tell these tend to be ones associated with large multinational corporations — in other words, ones with risk-averse Human Resources departments. McDonalds, for instance, has signs on the door noting that it will close during an alert. When a siren sounds, the crew shuts down the self-service kiosks, finishes the last orders in the queue, and locks the doors.
Why don’t people react more? It’s not that they’ve become “crazy” or “sleepwalking,” as one German journalist strangely described it on Twitter recently: it’s an entirely practical adaptation. They’ve learned how to judge risk. Most sirens do not represent an attack, and Ukrainians know this. The usual culprit is a MiG-31K, a type of fighter jet which can carry hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. Those weapons streak towards their targets at a speed of four kilometres a second; since the flight time to Kyiv or Lviv or anywhere else would be so short, and since Ukrainian air defence cannot intercept them, authorities raise an alarm every time a MiG-31K takes to the air. Just in case.
But most of those runs are just training flights, or pilots moving an aircraft from one base to another. (Russia did use Kinzhals in last week’s attack, but overall it has used them very sparingly in this war.) So the near-daily alarms triggered by a MiG-31K have become drily familiar, a momentary annoyance: there’s even an animated meme about the MiG-31K that is extremely funny to anyone here, but inscrutable to anyone else.
So the alarms are fully integrated into the daily routines of life in Kyiv, in a way that’s hard to imagine if you haven’t observed it. You might be out for a walk down bustling Kreshchatyk Street, in the heart of Kyiv, when a siren starts wailing; but people barely even pause their conversations, let alone flinch. Maybe they roll their eyes, or sigh, but for the most part, they carry on with whatever it was they were doing.
But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, there is a big attack coming, and on those days the metro stations and underground ukrittya — shelters — still fill up, as people file in carrying chairs and portable phone banks. How do they know? That brings me to another interesting adaption, and one I’ve come to rely on since returning to Kyiv.
When I first came to Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, there was not yet a way for most civilians to judge the threat of a given air alarm; or at least, not one that I was aware of. You had no way of knowing if something was likely to be bearing down on your head or not, and that uncertainty aggravated the tension. Now, there are many such avenues to suss out risk; among the most valuable are the many Telegram or Twitter accounts which share minute-by-minute information about a given alarm.
For instance, the Lviv-based Telegram channel Raketna Nebezpeka — or “Rocket Danger” — gives information about any alarm that includes the Lviv region, which includes the nationwide MiG-31K alerts; when a siren goes off, I check that channel to confirm. They’re always quick with the info, often announcing an alarm minutes before a siren even sounds, or announcing the all-clear before the official app does.
Sometimes, they even get a little saucy.
It’s unclear to me where these outlets get their information, and some of them seem to be a little more alarmist than others, but as long as I’ve been back in Ukraine, they’ve never been wholly wrong. When they say a siren is a MiG-31K on a likely routine run, the alert ends without incident an hour or so later. But when there is an attack, they provide remarkably granular details, such as how many drones or missiles have been launched, and from where, and when any “arrivals” — or strikes — are expected. The ensuing events play out roughly as expected; and when they start reporting that any bomber planes are landing at their bases, you start breathing easier.
So these sources provide an invaluable service in making the war, if not bearable for civilians, then at navigable. Because the reality is that for a city and a people to carry on, to make this stubborn claim to their lives, they cannot spend hours underground every time some Russian pilot is taking a joyride in Belarus.
In that way, being present during this war has shown me how information, above all else, can make the most profound impact on how we absorb and adapt to situations that seem otherwise unliveable. Another example is how, as Russian attacks brought Kyiv and Lviv’s electricity grid to its knees during the winter, the cities rigged up an online power schedule: you could plug in your address and see what hours you would definitely have power, what hours you definitely wouldn’t, and when was a “maybe.”
That innovation — I thought about how much sheer, boring work went into building such a service on an urgent basis — allowed people to plan their lives, which made the power crisis more manageable. If you knew the power would be off from 9 a.m. until noon, you could make sure to get your hot shower done before then. So Russia tried to bring down the civilian power grid, aiming to make Ukraine unliveable in the winter for millions of people; but access to information allowed those civilians to adapt and even maintain a routine that enabled them to persevere.
But back to the air alerts, for a second. The normalcy of them, their integration into daily life, and the lack of foreign understanding of that texture recently made for an interesting episode, and one that revealed something to me in the gaps between how news from Ukraine may be perceived differently, here versus afar.
On Feb. 20, when Joe Biden made his surprise visit to Kyiv, a siren started wailing at the moment he and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy were walking in front of St. Michael’s Cathedral. It did make for a striking video, and journalists naturally leaned into that symbolism.
I remember that siren; I was getting out of the shower, checked my phone, saw that it was the MiG-31K again, and went about my day. But when I checked Twitter later, I found that quite a number of observers, including some who would not ordinarily be conspiratorially-minded, were voicing suspicions that the alarm had been faked for the visit, as some kind of mass manipulation.
Some mused that authorities must have sounded the siren to “clear the streets” during Biden’s visit, not realizing that this type of alert is so mundane that it does nothing of the sort. Or else, they suggested the sirens rang out to make for a better propaganda video. When it came out that the Americans had communicated Biden’s visit to Russia in advance — in essence, “if you’re planning anything, you very much extremely better not” — that seemed to seal these hunches the morning siren couldn’t have been “real.”
I can understand how, to someone watching from afar, the timing would seem a bit too suspicious. Of course, I can’t definitively say that it wasn’t theatrics; only that to anyone here, it was the most minor of coincidences, nothing to make a big deal over. Just normal Ukraine 2022-23 things, happening at the normal times.
But it did make me think about just how much the gap between how a reality is lived, and how it can be externally perceived, shapes how we interpret the news we receive about the world. Something to be aware of, anyway.
That’s enough for this topic, I think. But before I go, several friends back home asked me something after last week’s attack that I would like to answer here.
Were you scared?
Yes, I was. It helped that the time difference with Canada meant that all my friends at home were awake, so I could text them from the bathtub. There was something in that lifeline — “I’m here, big explosion, I’m still here” — that felt like a declaration of life, a reassurance that, as they say in Ukraine, vce bude dobre: everything will be fine.
But I was also interested in the quality of the fear while I waited for the missiles, and after I heard that big explosion. It was less gripping, and more a tense resignation. It was the utter lack of choices in the matter, I think. Once you have made the decision of where to wait out an attack, there’s nothing more you can do. You are now helpless, unable to change what will happen, or not happen, to you.
This is true for all of us, when you think about it. It’s just that the shock violence of war forces you to look at fate square in the face, and come to terms with what is and isn’t in your control. You do your best. You make risk assessments. After that, all you can do is sit with the full knowledge that life, all life, is fragile and small.
Even the lives you cherish most. Even yours.
Something To Watch
The concept is pretty simple: someone strapped a camera on a stray cat’s neck, so that we could follow along with its adventures. What unfolds is the most delightful view on a whole cat society we know nothing about, all the very important missions they must undertake, and all the different little relationships they have with each other.
Just give this video an Oscar. I don’t know why we’d ever even want to see any other content. This channel has a multitude of these videos, and I intend to watch them all.
One Photo, One Story
Inside an old firehall in Kyiv’s fashionable riverside district of Podil sits the Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum. On Saturday, a friend took me there, and translated for me the contemporaneous handwritten notes of the crews that worked so frantically to gain control over the disaster; artifacts that make me feel a history, rather than simply learn it. You have to hear, in their words, how those present actually experienced it.
On the museum’s second floor, in a glass case, one exhibit drew my attention: a small section holding messages of solidarity and shared experience from Japan, which has known two kinds of nuclear trauma and so takes educating the world about nuclear dangers as a moral mission. All the museum’s video screens were donated by Japan.
One item in that exhibit stopped me in my tracks. I knew it, very well: it was an image from a book I have, of drawings by Hiroshima’s hibakusha, atomic bombing survivors. Their drawings — which you can browse online here — are one of the most powerful testimonies of the horror of nuclear war ever collected. They are viscerally disturbing in a way words cannot render. They show you how the nightmare actually felt.
So seeing that drawing got me thinking of Hiroshima, both the hell it was after the bomb, but also what it is now: beautiful, verdant, its once-stricken heart now filled with the green jewel of the Peace Park, and with people laughing and sipping sake under the cherry trees. Hiroshima, for me, is a powerful place, because it shows so clearly how all places can heal, when given time and space for life to grow.
Ukraine needs that hope now. Much of it lies in ruin, and the cities and villages near the front live in a near-relentless hell. Constantly brutalized, terrorized and shelled.
But the hope is still there. I saw it on the first floor of the Chornobyl museum, where there’s a small exhibit about the Russian military’s activities in the Chornobyl region during the occupation of early 2022. Along the wall, sunflowers popped out of spent weapon casings; the image was so striking, I had to snap a quick photo.
For now, images like this are just symbols; most of Ukraine’s healing still awaits at the end of a long and terrible road. There’s no telling what will is yet to be ruined on the way, no telling what lives and potentials will be thrown to waste. But each sunflower stuck in the debris of violence speaks to a collective determination to reach that time of healing, and it’s in that intention that Ukraine’s future is already won.