One afternoon in October, almost four years into Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, I was sitting in the sleek, modern offices of PEN Ukraine in Kyiv. We had gathered for a week-long series of meetings with writers, journalists, and human rights activists, and to visit scenes of Russian crimes in liberated areas around the country. Wartime realities made themselves apparent from one of our first sessions, in which delegates were to give brief presentations introducing ourselves and our work. Just as I was called upon to speak, our phones lit up with alerts.

“Attention!” they blared. “Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter.” Maksym Sytnikov, the executive director of PEN Ukraine, gave the group a weary smile. We picked up folding chairs and headed for the elevator. I continued my presentation in the underground parking garage. Perhaps a half hour later, the phones lit up again. “Attention! The air alert is over. May the force be with you.” (The English version of the Air Alert app is voiced by Mark Hamill, a.k.a. Luke Skywalker.)

Missile and drone attacks were, by now, part of the background of life in Kyiv. Since failing to capture the Ukrainian capital in the early days of its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia had, according to one independent monitor, pounded Kyiv more than 199 times as of December 18. It had used ballistic and hypersonic missiles and ever more sophisticated drones—including the turbojet-powered Geran-3, which can approach targets at speeds of up to 370 kilometres per hour, exploding on impact.

The effects of this campaign were visible everywhere: driving around the city, we saw buildings with their windows blown out, with missing walls and roofs. An office complex near our hotel in Podil had been hit by a missile on October 23, four days before we arrived.

Most of these strikes occurred around 4 or 5 a.m., on the theory that attacking a population in the deepest phase of sleep will deliver maximal shock. While a majority of Russian strikes now targeted energy infrastructure—the Kremlin hoped to weaken Ukrainian resolve by depriving them of heat and electricity over winter—some drone and missile attacks were meant to feel perfectly random. “They want you to feel as though you can die at any place, and any time,” said Sytnikov. “It’s Russian roulette.”

Another short drive and we were on Václav Havel Boulevard, facing a nine-storey residential building—the middle section of which had been obliterated last June by a Russian cruise missile that killed at least 28 and injured 134. On the dreary morning we visited, the site was totally unsecured, without even perfunctory police tape to prevent people from wandering through the rubble.

I walked around back and noticed a playground not fifty metres from the collapsed building, as well as a small collection of stuffed animals placed at the base of the wreckage. Oleksandr Ustenko, a former resident of the building, remembered the sound of the missile. “At some point, everything started shaking,” he told reporters the morning after the attack. “The ceiling shook, and the door was blown out.” Everything was on fire.

I looked up, and crumbled walls revealed the interior of a third-floor apartment: floral wallpaper, an overturned mattress, a woman’s handbags still hanging from their hooks. “We realize now that our privacy is very fragile,” said Anna Vovchenko, a translator and project manager at PEN Ukraine, as she surveyed the exposed apartments. We think of our private lives as sealed off from the public world, but war reveals the provisional nature of those walls, and of the privacy they promise.

When our hosts dropped us off for the evening, they warned us of ominous chatter on Telegram. We might be in for a bad night. I laid out my clothes on a hotel chair, hoping these meagre preparations might somehow ward off the worst. The Air Alert sounded at 12:30 a.m. For the next few hours, those of us in the shelter (which was more of an underground office) tried to read, or work, or scroll. Then we tried to sleep—without success, in my case. During these hours of exhaustion and boredom, I found I needed to scare myself to resist the temptation of my bed. Go back to bed and you’ll get blown to pieces, I told myself. People die in these attacks all the time—why not you? What makes you think you’re special?

This was, of course, exactly what our Russian tormentors wanted us to think. Terror was the point. Which was why, these days, most of the Ukrainians I spoke with no longer gave Putin the power to dictate when they sleep. They remained in their homes, and let the devil do his worst. It was 7:15 the next morning when the Air Alert finally ended, and Mark Hamill offered his surreal benediction: “May the force be with you.”

The next day, our group travelled to the village of Yahidne, about two hours northeast of Kyiv. There, we met Ivan Polhui, a retired kindergarten manager in his early sixties. Polhui, who wore a grey moustache and formless Ford baseball cap, told us about the ghastly events he and other villagers endured in 2022. After failing to capture the city of Chernihiv, he explained, Russian soldiers retreated to nearby villages for a ready supply of human shields. That March, they rounded up the more than 300 residents of Yahidne—ranging in age from ninety-one to........

© The Walrus