At dawn, the features are drawn, the faces tired. Almost every morning in May, kyiv wakes up in the fog of war, after a night spent in underground shelters. At breakfast, everyone debriefs the explosions, looks for images of intercepted missiles or areas hit by Shahed drones, these low-cost Iranian explosive devices used en masse by the Russian army. “You have the alarm and the bombardments at 4 o’clock, then at 6 o’clock everything stops and, thirty minutes later, you go to work, you go to the museum or on a romantic date, says Julia, 24 years old , curator. It’s surreal, but it’s our life now.”
A defense system that improves every day
The night of Tuesday May 16 was particularly intense in the Ukrainian capital, one of the most turbulent since the start of the invasion in February 2022. Alarms sounded at the stroke of 2:30 a.m., prompting residents to take refuge in the shelters. At 3 a.m., the sky over kyiv erupted, with deafening explosions and missile debris falling in the streets. Three victims are to be deplored, and the zoo has been affected.
The head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, announced that the defenses of the city had neutralized all of the eighteen Russian strikes of the night. “Every day, our defense systems are improving and almost no longer allow Russian missiles to pass through. Our anti-aircraft defense is becoming one of the best in the world, close to the Israeli ‘iron dome'”, enthuses Roman, an entrepreneur converted into anti-aircraft defense systems. On this account, the American Patriot systems, received by kyiv a few weeks ago, demonstrate all their qualities to thwart Russian attacks.
But not all defense systems are sufficient to guarantee the safety of Ukrainians. In recent days, the Russian bombardments on cities have redoubled in intensity, after a slight lull of a few months. Most of the inhabitants of Kiev had even stopped rushing into the “invincibility refuges”, these anti-missile shelters created in the capital, but the explosions continue to make civilian victims everywhere in Ukraine. “The Russians do not aim at random, but their bombs are old, imprecise and devastating, continues Roman. They try to destroy specific infrastructures or ammunition depots by swinging large quantities of explosives, which do a lot of damage collaterals.”
An omnipresent fear
Like the grandmother who, on a train to kyiv, frantically refreshes her mobile application indicating bombings in the city of her grandchildren, Ukrainians live in constant fear of missile alerts. “Death is everywhere in this country, as if it were following you, asks Volodymyr, a volunteer in an NGO. Relatives of a friend had fled Donetsk, in the East, to take refuge in a village in the suburbs of Kiev. missile landed on their new home last week…”
At each end of missile alert, the inhabitants of kyiv can hear the reassuring timbre of American actor Mark Hamill, who plays the hero Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga. This May 16, at 5:33 a.m., his voice resounded again in the streets of the Ukrainian capital, always with the same conclusion after a night spent in the underground shelters: “May the force be with you” YOU”. It was the 746th air raid alert on kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion.