‘You’re Simply Forced to Sit Within These Four Walls’: Kyiv Residents Living Under Constant Drone Attacks

For much of the war, Kyiv’s air-raid routine followed a grim but predictable rhythm: Russian drones arrived at night, missiles struck before dawn, and the city dusted itself off to restart in the morning. That pattern has now been shattered by recent events.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Since Aug. 27, Russia has been sending waves of drones toward Kyiv throughout the day and night, including faster, jet-powered models and larger Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones, alongside frequent ballistic attacks. There was only a brief pause on Sept. 6-7, when Russia and Ukraine agreed to a temporary hold on strikes on Moscow and Kyiv as US President Donald Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff visited Moscow. For those two days, Kyiv briefly returned to something resembling normal life. Then the drones came back. The result is not simply a city under attack. It is a city where the line between an emergency and everyday life is disappearing. Air raid alerts can last for hours. The subway stops running across the Dnipro River. Bridges close to traffic. Schools move children into shelters. Kindergartens send toddlers into basements. Shops and cinemas shut. Public institutions suspend their work. Every alert carries an economic cost: delayed workers, interrupted production, closed businesses, suspended deliveries and disrupted public transport. Russia is also targeting the logistics networks that keep Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities supplied, with warehouses, delivery infrastructure, and gas stations increasingly coming under attack. Other Topics of Interest Russian Casualties in 2026 Top 300,000, Ukraine Says Three summer months accounted for 124,170 of the personnel losses, with July recording the highest number. For Kyiv residents, the consequences are deeply personal. “That is how we live every day” Viola lives in Kyiv with her nine-year-old daughter, Oleksandra, while her husband serves in the military in southern Ukraine. Her daughter started fourth grade in September. Viola says she feels safer knowing the girl is at school than she would on the first floor of their apartment building. But the school spends much of the day in its shelter. “There can be up to 10 air raid alerts a day,” Viola said. She works from home, which makes the situation somewhat easier. But staying in or leaving the apartment has become a calculation. Before going anywhere, she checks news channels and the Shahed flight map. If drones are not heading towards their area, she and her daughter leave for school, the store, the post office or wherever they need to go. The most frightening moments come when the warning arrives after they have already left. Recently, Viola and her daughter were returning from school when she received a report that a Shahed was entering their area. They were near a car wash, garages and a large shopping mall. “There were practically no reliable shelters and nowhere to hide,” she said. They simply walked faster toward home, listening for the drone and looking for somewhere they could take cover if air defenses began firing. “That is how we live every day.” At home, the family has adapted to the possibility of a major attack. Viola keeps an emergency backpack packed with documents, medication, masks, a flashlight, emergency blankets, tourniquets, spare keys, food and water. Shoes are kept nearby in case they need to evacuate quickly. So are carriers for the family cats. The car is kept fueled. Even ordinary household routines now require preparation. “We have to check that all your gadgets, EcoFlow, lamps and batteries are charged,” she said. Her daughter also has her own ways of coping. They play board games, read books, watch movies downloaded from Netflix, go for walks with friends and light candles and fairy lights. But the exhaustion remains. “You want to sleep through the whole night in your own bed, plan trips outside without looking at air raid maps, and have children study somewhere other than shelters and freely live their childhood,” Viola said. “For now, we are adapting to constant change.” ‘You Aren’t Able to Hear the Teacher’ For 15-year-old Maria, the disruption is most visible at school. She studies at the lyceum, where an air raid alert used to mean one thing: classes stopped and students went to the shelter. The shelter is small and crowded, its conditions are far from comfortable. “The toilet in the shelter is not great. It is dirty and always smells,” Maria said. A year ago, she said, there was no toilet at all – just a bucket and a curtain. Students are not allowed to leave school on their own during an air raid alert. Parents have to collect them. Maria now follows a blended schedule, spending one week studying remotely and one week at school. During remote learning, classes continue under a lower-level alert as long as students are in safe places. If the danger level rises to red, the lessons end. In-person lessons are supposed to continue in the shelter. Maria does not see how that can work. “Everyone is shouting and you’re not able to hear the teacher,” she said. The shelter is also hot and poorly ventilated. “Sometimes I feel sick if we have to sit there for two hours or more,” she said. ‘We Feel Guilty’ For parents of younger children, the choice can be even harder. Liubov, 34, is an English teacher and the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Her daughter has barely attended kindergarten over the past three weeks because children can spend almost the entire day in the shelter. Liubov’s daughter attends a private kindergarten where children have lessons, meals and activities even while sheltering. Compared with many other children in Kyiv, their situation is relatively good. But the parents still feel guilty. “We as parents still feel guilty about making her stay there all day,” Liubov said. Whenever they can, they keep their daughter home. Both Liubov and her husband work from home, so they take turns looking after their child and trying to keep up with work. “It’s hard because the work still needs to be done, and juggling everything is challenging,” she said. They also try to take their daughter outside every day, but stay close to home so they can return quickly if a major attack begins. When they hear explosions or air raid alerts, they try not to panic in front of the child – but they have also stopped pretending that the noise is simply thunder. The girl has begun to ask questions about what is happening in Ukraine. “It’s a difficult balance – trying to give her a sense of safety and normality while knowing that we can’t completely shield her from what is going on around us,” Liubov said. ‘I’m Already Running Out of Strength’ For Anastasia, 31, the past three weeks have been almost unbearable. Her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter attends kindergarten, but the facility does not have a properly equipped shelter. During alerts, the children cross the road to a residential building and shelter in its basement. That was manageable when it happened occasionally. It is very different when children spend four or five hours there at a time, which since Aug. 27, Anastasia said, has become the reality. When she realized the situation was not improving, she took her daughter out of kindergarten and began keeping her at home. That solved one problem and created another as Anastasia works full time. “Being with a child 24/7 and maintaining my functionality and effectiveness at work is extremely difficult,” she said. “So far, thank God, I’ve managed. But I can already feel that I’m running out of strength.” Her daughter is also struggling with being confined to the apartment. Anastasia cannot simply take her outside during the workday. Even after work, going out may be too dangerous when drones are moving over the city in large numbers. At home, she says, at least there are concrete walls between them and falling debris. Outside, there is nowhere to know for certain that you are safe. The disruption has spread into the most ordinary parts of life. Going grocery shopping requires planning. Going to a shopping mall has become difficult. Even ordering a package can feel risky as Russian attacks increasingly target logistics infrastructure. Sometimes, Anastasia said, the situation creates a feeling of absolute despair. “You see empty shelves in stores, you can’t take your child to kindergarten or any extracurricular activities, you can’t take her anywhere to have fun, not even to a children’s play area.” “You’re simply forced to sit within these four walls, look at each other and wait for all of this to end.” “And whether it will actually end – that’s completely unclear.” ‘Now Half of My Family Became Refugees’ For Mariia, 32, the constant attacks eventually forced a decision about where her family could live. Leva arrived in Kyiv on Aug. 23, initially planning to stay for about a month. The first few days were unusually quiet. She said the calm coincided with Russia putting on a show of restraint around the visit of foreign diplomats. Being back home felt good. She wanted to spend more time with her family and her one-year-old niece. She began considering staying longer, or even partially moving back. Then the attacks intensified. Her family has now left Kyiv for Uzhhorod, where they found an apartment and moved out within days. The family still owns an apartment in Kyiv. They want to come home. But they do not believe it is safe to raise a small child there under the current conditions. “It’s impossible to sleep here with kids because parents worry about their safety nonstop,” Leva said. The alternative, she said, is spending night after night in the metro or a dusty basement – and even that does not guarantee safety. Her brother and sister-in-law made the decision to leave with their young daughter. “They want to come back home,” Leva said. “Just because they like it here and because they want my niece to grow up with her grandparents, aunts and uncle, cousins around.” But for now, they are gone. “Now half of my family became refugees.” Her mother and younger brother left for Germany after the full-scale invasion began. Leva says there is something particularly painful about the fact that being able to leave is itself a privilege. “I’m supposed to be happy that my family can be in a safer place now. Because for most of the people there is no such an option.” “But I just want them to be home, because they want to be home.” A City That Cannot Stop The effects are not limited to families with young children. Myroslava, a culture correspondent at Kyiv Post, said a Sept. 2 Russian drone attack on the National University of Food Technologies came while classes were taking place. Some 160 students and faculty members were unharmed because they were in the shelter. But the attack reopened a broader question for Kyiv’s universities: should students continue attending classes in person when the city is under near-constant attack? The decision is left to individual institutions. For Myroslava’s family, the question was personal. Her daughter is a fourth-year architecture student at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture in Solomianskyi District, one of the areas facing a high level of threat. Until recently, professors had required students to attend in person. Only on Sept. 9 did the university administration decide to move classes online for a limited period until Sept. 25. The same pressure is being felt across Kyiv’s cultural life. Museums and theaters have struggled to operate under the dense schedule of air raid alerts. Myroslava and her family eventually managed to attend an anniversary exhibition dedicated to composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Ukrainian House – on their fourth attempt. The previous attempts were disrupted by security concerns. Relearning the lessons of survival For much of the war, Kyivans learned how to live with air raid alerts. People knew what to do when the sirens sounded. They knew where to shelter. They knew that eventually the alert would end, the trains would start to run again, shops would reopen and the city would return to work. Now that rhythm is breaking down. The question for Kyiv residents is no longer just how to get through one more night of attacks. It is how to live when the next interruption can come at any moment – and when there may be no clear end to the interruption at all.