“As I write, highly sophisticated robots are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” I was searching for a way to describe my first experience of an air raid, and this modification of George Orwell’s opening line from The Lion and the Unicorn seemed a contender. Too trite, though. The Shaheds are robots, yes, but there are people behind them, just as they are behind the ballistic missiles that fly alongside them towards Kyiv almost every day. After a few attempts, rummaging around in my head and turning up nothing but pastiche and cliché, I accepted defeat: it was hard to say anything profound about being in a city under bombardment. It is miserable, tiresome and, if you stay too long, it makes your hair grey.
On my first night in Kyiv, I hoped we were in for a quiet one. The night before, as I was chugging across the border from Poland on a sleeper train, Russia had launched a huge attack that killed 16. Surely they would lay off after that? But as I got to my hotel in time for midnight curfew, sirens sounded across the city. Unlike the sound of British police cars, designed to induce a primal urge to get out of the way, the air raid siren’s slow whine, punctuated by patient intakes of breath, encourages the sensible contemplation of the best available option. I looked around for the direction of the shelter and prepared to throw myself down the four flights of stairs to the basement below. “You staying for the fireworks?” asked a smirking Czech legionnaire in full khaki holding a jug of Lvivske lager. And then: bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Four direct hits to the city and the whole place was shaking.
The time from warning to impact has been getting shorter as the war and the technology of war has progressed, plus many of the American interceptor missiles have been sent to the Persian Gulf. Now Russia is hitting the Ukrainian capital on an almost daily basis and its citizens have minutes to get below ground. The psychological strain this exerts is not just a side effect of the bombing campaign, but also one of its major motivations. Raids are so regular that some habitually sleep in shelters or metro stations on camping mattresses.
In this city, people say terrifying things with a smile: “If you hear the missile exploding, it means it hasn’t hit you. So don’t worry: if it’s coming for you, you will be dead before you hear it.” I was reassured that, because I was staying in the historic centre of Kyiv, I was unlikely to be hit, as any such attack would be a major escalation (“And then we hit Red Square!”). Still, many of the hotel’s front windows were shattered after a close shave with a missile in May.
I soon escaped the city: a friend of mine who lives in Ukraine and runs a refugee charity offered to take me on a trip. In her 4×4 we ventured through the block posts, the army checkpoints on every bridge and major road in the country, and made for Vinnytsia Oblast, which is about 300km south-west of Kyiv.
We drove past seemingly endless fields shedding their crops in the middle of the harvest; saw the faded signs from the early days of the invasion (“Don’t flee! Fight!”) and the newer recruiting banners for different army brigades. Now and then on the hard shoulder of the motorway, there were conscription squads stopping male drivers to check their papers. The recruitment drive was a persistent feature during my visit, and I heard stories of young men who had not left the house for months. But martial law treads lightly on those who are not expected to fight. Apart from border checks on the train (“You like to smoke weed? You have a gun?”), I was stopped by the authorities just once, when three tense police officers on a quiet road in Kyiv asked for my papers. The flash of a British passport disarms almost all hostility in this country.
My friend’s charity, Kharpp, helps internally displaced people rebuild their lives. Housing is particularly fraught here. After Ukraine gained independence in the summer of 1991, all citizens were granted a Ukrainian passport and an equal stake in their country’s assets. Today, most of those unlucky enough to have lived in the war-torn east of the country have lost their home and often pay rent – a rarity here – to live in a property in the safer western parts of the country. Many internally displaced people have taken to buying barely habitable houses with the last of their money. Kharpp helps to repair and renovate these properties.
In Horodkivka, a village in the shadow of one of former president Petro Poroshenko’s factories, we met Olia and Oleksandr, foster carers who had fled their home in Avdiivka, the site of a major battle in 2023-24. The life they knew has been destroyed. They recently bought a dilapidated brick house on the edge of Horodkivka. In the warmer weather, they are able to live with the children they care for, but winter is on the way. As they discussed the repairs that are needed – running water, electricity, stairs to replace the ladders they currently use – Olia served us chicken and potato soup with dry bread, followed by jelly cake, while their dog Nora lapped at my leg, hoping for a bite. It was my first introduction to the extraordinary generosity of people in this war.
Back in Kyiv, I visited one of the best museums of Second World War history I have ever seen. It is centred around the Mother Ukraine statue, which towers over the Dnieper River. Until a few years ago, the shield in the statue’s left hand was emblazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. This has now been replaced with the Ukrainian trident. But the change is not such a drastic rewriting of history. While it was constructed at the height of the Cold War, locals note that the statue, on the right bank of the river and facing north-east, stands to defend Ukraine from threats emerging from Moscow in the east rather than from the west.
There was a sense of relief when the news came through that the Coalition of the Willing was preparing to meet in the city on Ukraine’s Independence Day. It was feared the celebrations would be disrupted by Russian attacks, but with a smattering of senior foreign leaders staying in the capital, Vladimir Putin would likely hold back. This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Kellogg Cover”, after Donald Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg. Whenever he was in the city, the air raids eased noticeably, presumably because the Russians didn’t want to attract Trump’s ire by killing one of his subordinates.
On Independence Day, we enjoyed Burnham Cover. The British Prime Minister, on his first overseas visit and during exquisitely high Anglo-Russian angst, briefly brought a fake world to Kyiv. A world in which President Volodymyr Zelensky could be seen in public without fearing for his life, and people could gather en masse in Sophia Square for the independence parade without keeping an eye on the skies above. (Large gatherings are heavily restricted and the only things that fly here are birds and bombs. In July, a drone conference in the city attended by hundreds of people was hit by a ballistic, killing 11 people and injuring many more.)
Andy Burnham also brought with him to Kyiv a deluge of British commentaria. When he arrived at Kyiv’s Vokzal station, the PM was wearing a navy polo shirt. Cue a deranged paroxysm from UK journalists and political commentators on social media. Some asserted, hundreds of miles away and without evidence, that Burnham’s attire would cause great offence to Ukraine. Obviously nobody in Kyiv cared. The only comment I heard was from a Brit who joked that, just as Ukrainian men wear their traditional vyshyvanka shirts on Independence Day, Burnham had arrived wearing his traditional northern dad dress. The UK’s fussing around Burnham’s clothes, as he visited a city under constant bombardment and promised them long-range missile blueprints, reminded me how lucky we are in Britain to be such an unserious country.
In war, dangerous objects become commonplace. In one apartment, I saw a shard of a Shahed drone repurposed for home decoration, as a taunt to those who flew it at a residential neighbourhood and missed. Meanwhile the long-standing souvenir stalls that line the Andriivsky Descent have expanded their inventories from the pre-war banalities – keyrings, fridge magnets – to include brigade patches. Some merchants peppered their stalls with war trophies. At one, I saw a stack of mud-splattered Russian passports. It would take a more war-hardened heart than mine to look at the headshots of those presumably dead men and think they would make a nice gift for the folks back home, notwithstanding the international prohibitions on such trade.
The old notion of “tourism” finds small ways to live on, in the hope that one day foreigners will come again. I met an Englishman who used to run tours to Chernobyl before the full-scale war. His business collapsed as the Russians swept down from Belarus in the opening months of the invasion; now he works as a war blogger. The Ukrainian army is reportedly laying mines in the area north of Chernobyl because of fears that the Russians could make a second attempt on Kyiv, or at least try to open a northern front to drain the country’s resources.
Even if this war ends soon, mines are likely to continue to make life difficult. A Ukrainian journalist I know was recently enjoying a day at the beach in Odesa. As locals swam in the Black Sea, a huge explosion in the shallow waters sent everyone into a panicked frenzy. It was a stray anti-personnel mine.
Ukrainians hope tourism will return if and when the war ends. Around the capital were posters that read, “Kyiv is waiting for you after the victory.” Through signs like these, I saw people contemplating a happier future, though I wondered if goodwill to the Englishman would survive a wave of stag dos arriving from Manchester Airport.
As the sun set on Independence Day, I got a tip-off from a plugged-in expat. At a bar in the centre of town, British Embassy staff were gathering in a reserved area stocked with pizza and wine; men in suits with earpieces had arrived, with songs by the Stones Roses playing. The clip of Burnham strumming the Smiths’ “Rusholme Ruffians” on a Ukrainian soldier’s guitar was circulating. He was coming. I arrived as the speaker system thrummed Ian Brown’s “Stellify”. Then the bad news came. An important meeting had overrun, and Burnham had to catch his train home. The mood deflated. Within an hour, the sirens were sounding again. Burnham Cover was officially over.
[Further reading: This was the summer that optimisation died]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentI flew 10 hours back two weeks ago from Munich to Denver with a couple from Kiev who now live in Austria and will never go back. As excited as the author is from his war experience, it is nothing like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea, Yugoslavia, Iraq where my friends and family fought and some died. It is no democracy and no republic like above, and Ukraine was and is a corrupt country.
Send Hunter Biden back to the front with a helmet and hand grenade. That would be news.