👇 daily life in a European capital
Kyiv
I was in Kyiv from 19 to 26 September. During those eight days, Russia caused confirmed strike effects in the city on seven days, including a ballistic missile attack, killing 11 civilians, including a 14-year-old kid, and injuring 129.
Those numbers are grim enough, but they still cannot convey what repeated attacks do to everyday life. Air-raid sirens tear through sleep, work, meals, journeys and conversations. People constantly check alerts, listen for drones and explosions, move away from windows, calculate where the nearest shelter is, and wonder whether the next strike will hit their home, office, school, hospital, shop or the street they happen to be walking along.
I saw a city trying to live normally under abnormal conditions: people going to work, having work meetings, catching up with friends, walking children to school, using public transport and sitting in cafes - while Russian drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles, repeatedly struck residential buildings, offices, infrastructure and other civilian sites across Kyiv.
The physical destruction is visible: shattered windows, damaged buildings, scarred streets and disrupted services. The psychological burden is harder to photograph. It is carried by Kyiv residents in the accumulated exhaustion, the broken sleep, the sudden silences after explosions, the fear that never fully leaves, and the knowledge that an ordinary moment can be shattered within seconds.
Kyiv is not a battlefield in the conventional sense. It is hundreds of miles from the frontline in Donbas. It is a European capital where millions of civilians are trying to live ordinary lives while being subjected to repeated Russian long-range attacks.
And that is perhaps the point that should never be lost. The effect of these attacks by Russia is to terrorise civilians - to make ordinary life feel permanently unsafe and to wear down Ukrainian society through fear, exhaustion and destruction.
Every ordinary act of living of Kyiv residents - going to work, taking a child to school, meeting a friend, riding a bus, browsing a bookshop, sitting in a cafe - takes place under that threat.