It only occurred to Iryna Yakymehuk to make use of the local bomb shelter after the Shaheed kamikaze drone struck her nextdoor neighbour’s fifth-floor flat at 2am on Tuesday, taking a messy bite out of the bedroom.
The 22-year-old had returned to her home in Kyiv’s Obolon district from the underwear shop where she works as an assistant at about 9pm. She ate macaroni while swiping through some funny TikTok videos before getting into bed at 11pm.
Russia has stepped up its aerial attacks on Kyiv in recent days. From the safety of Washington, Donald Trump had warned that Vladimir Putin’s response to Ukraine’saudacious Operation Spiderweb attackon Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers a week earlier “wouldn’t be pretty”. But Yakymehuk doesn’t look for that sort of content on TikTok.
Air raid sirens, and talk of drones and missiles, have been par for the course for Kyiv’s residents since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion three years ago.
A car dealership was destroyed by falling debris from a shot-down missile a couple of years ago, but otherwise the Obolon district in north Kyiv, 6 miles from the government buildings in the city centre, has avoided the worst.
“I am a deep sleeper, so I don’t normally hear the drones,” Yakymehuk said as she was queueing with others in front of a blue tent where police were taking down details and volunteers were giving out compensation forms to fill in.
“It’s just daily life, I don’t think about it,” she added, squinting up in the morning sun at the demolition workers dangling from cranes at the corner of the 25-storey apartment building as they sought to make the site safe. The window frame of her bedroom had been blown in, and was dangling at an angle.
On Monday the drones did wake her. They seemed to be on top of her, she said. And the persistent, nagging buzz of what seemed to be a large number of them was getting louder, as if someone was slowly bringing a electric shaver ever closer to her face.
Then the first massive explosion that made her heart jump. And a second. This one sent “sparks” flying across her bedroom window on the fifth floor, she said.
Yakymehuk ran down the stairs from her flat, as did others, out of the building and to the bomb shelter – a dusty cellar, in reality, below another building, 100 metres away. The door to it is not always unlocked. But it was tonight. There were hundreds in there already, “maybe 500 people”, she said.
Others in the queue outside the tent on Tuesday morning said they heard 10 explosions in all. Black smoke was still bellowing from the neighbouring industrial estate at mid-morning. This appears to have been the target.
One woman in the Obolon district had been killed. Across Kyiv, four were said to be injured.Seven of Kyiv’s 10 districtsreported being hit in one of the largest drone attacks on the city since the war started. Yakymehuk might not sleep so well in future.
Kyiv could be any European capital during the day. It is a far cry from the opening months of the war, when it resembled European cities during the pandemic. Then the streets were empty. The shops locked up. There was a nervous energy among the soldiers at checkpoints that would make everyone else anxious. And the Russians wanted Kyiv. They had been at the edge of the city and could come back.
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Today, the atmosphere is different. The nightlife is lively, restaurants full, and those with money flash it around. Some people are nervous as it gets dark. That’s when the Russian bombers and their drones come, increasingly so in recent weeks, even before Operation Spiderweb. The nerves are especially acute among those who live near factories and industrial estates, which the Kremlin suspects of playing a role in Ukraine’s war effort. They listen in their beds for the drones to drop, breathing a little easier as they pass by. But others, maybe the majority, ignore the air raid sirens and assure themselves that the drones won’t come for them. They get on with it.
It is only when an attack from the air comes to your own doorstep that the reality of the situation bites, said Elvira Neehyporenko, 34, whose red Honda, parked just below where the Shaheed drone struck, had taken a hefty blow, leaving it with smashed windows and a caved-in roof.
Neehyporenko lives in the same block as Yakymehuk but further away from the where the drone struck. She laughed as she admitted that when the explosions began, a little distant at first, it was her dog Molly, an American Staffordshire terrier, who had the sense to run into the bathroom. Neehyporenko, whose boyfriend is in the army and fighting in Kharkiv, followed the dog. She stayed there for a while on the cold tiles, before the biggest explosion forced her down to the first floor, where she stayed for fear of what she had heard was a Russian tactic of striking at people as they flee from damaged buildings.
Standing watching all the commotion outside the flats mid-morning on Tuesday was Oksana Kodynets, 23, who lives in the apartment block opposite where the drone struck. She was taking her 18-month-old daughter, Maria, for a walk. Her husband is in the army and had been working an overnight shift in the city. She had been alone last night and was a little shaken this morning, she admitted.
She had recorded the sound of the explosions, including the largest one, just over the way, and had been listening to them this morning. It was a kind of metallic sound, nothing like she had heard before, she said, as she played it from her phone. Does she worry? “I did last night,” she said with a half-smile. “I thought it was going to be the last day of my life.”