An Evening Out in Kharkiv

By Matthew Parish

Sunday 27 September 2026

Kharkiv at night has acquired the peculiar quality of a city that is simultaneously alive and waiting to be destroyed. There are cities in wartime in which everyone retreats behind their doors, draws the curtains and waits nervously for morning. Kharkiv is not quite like that. Kharkiv goes drinking, because there comes a point at which fear becomes tedious and human beings rediscover all their usual appetites.

This is not necessarily sensible. But then very little about living in a city regularly bombarded by Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs can sensibly be described as sensible. Human beings adapt to absurdity with astonishing speed. Eventually the air raid siren becomes part of the urban soundscape, like traffic or church bells, and people discover that they still need beer, cigarettes, flirtation, arguments and occasionally a thoroughly inexplicable punch in the face.

So it was that I found myself spending an evening in what might loosely be described as an Irish pub. The word ‘Irish’ should probably be treated generously. There was alcohol, there was darkness, there was shouting and there was an atmosphere suggesting that at any moment somebody might begin singing or fighting. That seemed sufficiently Irish for the purposes of Kharkiv.

The clientele was an improbable mixture of soldiers, volunteers, foreigners, local eccentrics and women dressed for a rather different city from the one being bombarded outside. Several of the girls wore short skirts beneath which stockings and suspenders were plainly visible. Others had chosen backless dresses, revealing not delicate butterflies or sentimental quotations but substantial military tattoos running across their shoulders and spines. In Kharkiv, even evening wear has become militarised.

Nobody seemed remotely embarrassed by any of this. Wartime has stripped away a number of social conventions. People dress as they please, drink when they can and form friendships with extraordinary rapidity because tomorrow’s arrangements are always provisional. There is something liberating about this, although it is a liberation purchased at a grotesque price.

At some point in the evening, for reasons I entirely failed to understand, a man with a beard began receiving a considerable beating. There may have been a cause. Perhaps everyone else knew what it was. I certainly did not. One moment he was part of the scenery and the next he was on the floor, where he remained twitching amid the legs of the drinkers while the evening briefly dissolved into that distinctive form of insanity in which events move too quickly for anyone to decide whether intervention would improve matters or merely enlarge the casualty list.

Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. Two of the young women bent down and hauled the unfortunate man upright. Blood was running from his jaw in several directions at once. His teeth appeared to have reconsidered their previous arrangement and adopted a new, less orderly one. He looked astonished rather than angry, as though he too had missed the explanatory portion of the evening.

The girls held him up. Somebody said something. Nobody called the police. The room hovered for a few moments in that peculiar silence that follows unexpected violence, when everybody is pretending to resume whatever they were doing before while simultaneously watching everybody else.

Then another man standing at the bar reached into his clothing and produced a loaded Glock 9mm sidearm.

He did not wave it around, threaten anybody with it or apparently consider its appearance especially remarkable. He simply placed it on the bar in front of him. Against the glasses, beer bottles and abandoned drinks, the pistol looked simultaneously absurd and entirely at home. A moment earlier the evening had involved fists and boots; now there was a loaded handgun lying amongst the alcohol.

Nobody screamed. Nobody ducked. Nobody seemed especially interested in asking why a Glock had suddenly joined the evening’s collection of objects on the bar. After what had just happened to the bearded man, however, its appearance seemed to settle an unspoken question. Whatever direction the evening was now taking, I had no particular desire to discover it.

And then the bar emptied.

There was no announcement and no panic. People simply disappeared. A room that moments earlier had contained drinking, shouting, flirting and violence quietly surrendered its occupants to the night. Perhaps this is another wartime instinct: when an atmosphere changes, one does not hold a committee meeting about it. One leaves.

Outside, Kharkiv was black. Not metaphorically black, nor romantically black, but actually black. Wartime darkness has a physical quality. Street lighting is sparse or absent and buildings disappear into silhouettes. The great avenues of Kharkiv, constructed for monumental Soviet daylight, become strange canyons after midnight. You walk through them partly by memory and partly by instinct, listening for cars and occasionally noticing another human figure materialise from nowhere before vanishing again.

I began walking back towards my hotel. Behind me was an Irish pub containing, so far as I knew, a battered man, two women who had pulled him from the floor and at least one loaded pistol. Ahead lay several kilometres of darkness and a hotel room. Under the circumstances, the latter seemed distinctly preferable.

Then the air raid sirens started.

There is something particularly surreal about leaving a bar in which a man’s teeth have just been rearranged, a loaded Glock has appeared on the counter and walking through deserted streets while an electronic voice and the rising howl of sirens announce that missiles or drones may be approaching. One danger gives way to another without any obvious hierarchy between them. Somewhere behind you there is a battered man with blood on his shirt. Somewhere above you there may be a Russian weapon navigating towards the city.

Then came the sounds of bombing.

In another country this would represent the dramatic climax of an evening. In Kharkiv it merely means that one walks somewhat faster and pays more attention to the direction of the explosions. The temptation to stare at the sky should generally be resisted. There is rarely anything useful to see, and darkness has the virtue of concealing from the imagination things it would otherwise prefer to invent.

By now it was well after curfew. The streets had become almost entirely mine, although this was not a privilege I particularly coveted. There is an illicit pleasure in walking alone through a great city after everybody has vanished, but in wartime the pleasure comes with the knowledge that there are excellent reasons why everybody else has vanished. Every footstep sounds too loud, every distant engine demands attention and every flash on the horizon invites calculations that one would rather not make.

Eventually I reached the gate of my hotel, a conspicuously comfortable establishment concealed behind the darkened street. The contrast between the pitch-black wartime city and the prospect of a luxury hotel room on the other side of a locked gate was sufficiently ridiculous that I did not attempt to reconcile it. I knocked.

Nothing happened, so I knocked again. After a while a security guard emerged from the darkness. He was gruff, broad and possessed of the expression of a man who had seen virtually every possible variety of idiocy and had decided that mine did not merit special attention. He recognised me and produced the faintest grim smile. Whether this meant ‘welcome home’ or ‘you are an idiot’ I could not tell. Quite possibly it meant both.

The gate opened and I stepped inside.

The hotel presented its own nocturnal soundtrack. From several open windows came laughter, shouting and unmistakable sounds of ribaldry and sex. Kharkiv was being bombed, the air raid warning continued and somewhere across the city emergency services were presumably beginning another night’s work. Inside the hotel, somebody was having a spectacularly good time.

There is an obvious temptation to moralise about scenes like these. One might say that people living beneath bombardment seize pleasure wherever they can find it. One might write solemnly about the affirmation of life in the presence of death, or the resilience of Ukrainians confronted by Russia’s attempt to terrorise their cities into submission. All of these observations contain some truth, but they also risk making ordinary people into symbols when they are merely trying to live.

Kharkiv does not spend every evening consciously demonstrating its resilience. Sometimes Kharkiv simply gets drunk. Sometimes women put on extravagant dresses, stockings and suspenders. Sometimes military tattoos decorate bare backs rather than uniforms. Sometimes soldiers laugh too loudly. Sometimes somebody gets beaten up for reasons incomprehensible to the foreign observer, and sometimes somebody else concludes that this is an appropriate moment to place a loaded Glock on the bar. Sometimes people have sex while missiles fall.

That may be the more profound form of resistance precisely because nobody necessarily intends it as resistance.

Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian cities is designed in part to make normal life impossible. Bombardment is psychological as well as physical. It seeks to impose anticipation upon every ordinary act: before sleeping, check the alerts; before travelling, check the drones; before meeting somebody for dinner, consider whether the restaurant has a basement. Terror works by colonising the imagination until danger becomes the organising principle of existence.

Yet human beings are remarkably bad at remaining terrified indefinitely. Fear exhausts itself. The nervous system cannot sustain indefinitely the proposition that every siren represents the end of the world, particularly when the sirens come night after night and morning nevertheless keeps arriving.

After enough nights of sirens, somebody orders another beer. After enough explosions, somebody buys a ridiculous dress. A woman tattoos the emblems of war across her back and then goes dancing. A hotel guest opens the window. Lovers make an unreasonable amount of noise. A security guard opens the gate after curfew, gives the returning foreigner a grim smile and asks no unnecessary questions.

None of this means that people have ceased to be afraid. Nor does it mean that Kharkiv has become safe. Quite the opposite. The darkness, curfew, guns and explosions exist because the danger is real. There is nothing romantic about a missile strike, and very little romantic about watching a bloodied man being lifted from the floor of a bar.

But there is a difference between recognising danger and permitting danger to dictate the entirety of one’s existence. Perhaps that is one of the strangest things Russia has failed to understand about Ukraine. Terror can alter people’s habits, empty streets and extinguish lights. It can make people sleep in corridors and learn the vocabulary of missiles. What it cannot reliably do is persuade millions of human beings to suspend indefinitely the messy business of being human.

I went upstairs. Somewhere outside another explosion rolled across the city. Somewhere inside somebody laughed. The competing noises briefly overlapped.

Then the window rattled, the laughter continued and Kharkiv got on with the night.