A day in Kramatorsk on the eastern front

Sunday 1 February 2026

A day in Kramatorsk begins without ceremony. There is no clean division between night and morning, only a gradual thinning of darkness as generators fall silent and the city tests the air. The first sounds are rarely birds. More often they are doors, footsteps in stairwells, the cough of an engine that has decided, today, to cooperate. Radios murmur the overnight news while kettles are filled from bottles rather than taps, because water pressure is never quite trusted, even when it is present.

Electricity may or may not be available. People adapt instinctively. Phones are charged whenever the current returns, not when it is needed. Washing machines run at odd hours, lights flicker on as if embarrassed by their own unreliability. This rhythm, improvised and alert, is now ordinary. The war has not abolished routine; it has merely rearranged it.

By mid-morning, the city is awake in earnest. Shops open cautiously, some with plywood still nailed across their windows, others defiantly neat, displaying fruit, bread and cigarettes as if permanence were assured by habit alone. Queues form quickly, efficiently. Conversation is sparse, practical. Everyone has learned to distinguish the thud of outgoing fire from the whistle of incoming. When the sound is ambiguous, movement slows but does not stop. Life continues, albeit with an ear permanently tilted towards the sky.

The railway station stands as both promise and threat. Trains have stopped running, but buses trundle to and from a nearby village where the train now ends, carrying soldiers, volunteers and families who have delayed departure one day too long or one day longer than they expected. For some, the station is a way out. For others, it is merely a landmark passed on the way to work, its platforms too associated with past tragedies to invite lingering. The memory of previous strikes is not commemorated with plaques; it is carried quietly, the entrance hall now silent. Drone nets cover the roads in and out of town.

At midday Kramatorsk looks almost deceptively normal. Children attend lessons in basements or converted shelters, their schooling compressed into shorter, safer intervals. Offices function with skeletal staff. Volunteers move between warehouses and distribution points, checking lists, improvising routes around newly damaged streets. The front line is close enough to feel but far enough away to allow the city to pretend, for hours at a time, that it is merely another industrial town enduring a difficult winter.

Food is prepared with care and restraint. Ingredients are simple, often repetitive. Nothing is wasted. Cooking is less about pleasure than reassurance: a hot meal confirms that the day is still under control. When air raid sirens interrupt, pots are left on stoves, doors closed gently, people descending once more into familiar shelters. No one panics. Panic is inefficient.

Afternoons stretch uneasily. News spreads faster than official statements, carried by messaging applications and word of mouth. A strike in a neighbouring district, a power outage expected by evening, rumours of rotation at the front. Each piece of information is weighed, contextualised and, if necessary, ignored. Emotional economy is essential. To react fully to every alert would be unbearable.

As dusk approaches, the city contracts. Streets empty earlier than they once did. Curfews are observed not only because they are required, but because night belongs too easily to danger. Windows glow faintly where power permits; elsewhere candles and torches flicker behind curtains. Generators resume their uneven chorus. From time to time, the distant concussion of artillery rolls across the city like weather, acknowledged but not discussed.

Evening conversations are quieter, more intimate. People speak of ordinary things with deliberate focus: repairs that must be made, relatives who have called, a television series watched in fragments when electricity allowed. The war is present in every room, but it is not always named. Naming it too often gives it authority.

Sleep comes lightly. Bags remain packed by doors, documents kept together, shoes placed within reach. Sirens may wake the city once or several times. Each interruption is met with the same weary competence. Down the stairs, into the shelter, waiting, listening, then back again if permitted. Dawn will arrive regardless.

To live a typical day in Kramatorsk is not to experience constant terror, nor heroic defiance. It is to practise endurance at a human scale. The city survives not through grand gestures, but through thousands of small decisions made daily by people who have learned, against all preference, how to live inside uncertainty without surrendering to it.