Another Evening in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 29 September 2026
There is a particular moment in certain bars in Kharkiv when you realise that the evening has escaped from human control. Nobody has made a decision to this effect, there has been no announcement and no ceremonial declaration that the ordinary rules governing licensed premises have been suspended. Nevertheless, some invisible frontier has been crossed: the evening is no longer something that is happening in the bar, because the bar has become something that is happening to everyone inside it.
This transformation tends to occur gradually. At six o’clock everything may seem perfectly civilised: a few people are drinking beer, somebody is eating something involving potatoes and there is a young couple in the corner conducting an intense conversation that might concern love, money, betrayal, artillery procurement or all four. The bartender is still behaving as though the establishment possesses rules, music plays at a reasonable volume and people come and go through the front door without colliding with one another.
Then the soldiers start arriving, and the atmosphere begins to change. There is nothing remarkable about soldiers drinking in Kharkiv, because this is a city close to one of the most violent fronts in Europe and men who have spent days or weeks inhabiting circumstances that most civilians would find unimaginable occasionally wish to become extremely drunk. One would need a heart of stone to begrudge them this, although sympathy for the psychological pressures of military service does not necessarily make the resulting spectacle orderly.
By nine o’clock there are uniforms everywhere. Some of the soldiers appear to know one another and some apparently do not, although this distinction becomes progressively less important as vodka circulates. Conversations grow louder, Ukrainian merges with Russian, Russian merges with Ukrainian and both languages acquire the universal vocabulary of men who have consumed far too much alcohol and are beginning to disagree about matters whose importance is comprehensible only to themselves.
Someone shouts and someone else shouts louder. A third man intervenes, apparently in the interests of peace, by shouting louder than either of them, while hands begin landing upon shoulders and fingers are pointed. One soldier embraces another with tremendous affection and five minutes later appears ready to punch him, while a different soldier is explaining something of enormous importance to a woman who is plainly not listening. Throughout all this, the bartender continues pouring drinks.
War produces peculiar forms of social equality. In Kharkiv, the lawyer, the soldier, the volunteer, the foreign journalist, the NGO worker, the mechanic and the person whose occupation nobody has successfully established may all find themselves squeezed together around the same little bar. Nobody quite knows who anybody else is, and the sensible person learns not to enquire too aggressively because identities in wartime cities can be more complicated than they initially appear.
Into this environment walks a young woman who informs me that she has just been fired from her NGO. This is unfortunate, although not necessarily unusual, because the Ukrainian NGO world is a magnificent and frequently heroic ecosystem incorporating some of the bravest people I have ever encountered, but it is also occasionally a bureaucratic madhouse in which employment arrangements can dissolve with bewildering speed. Funding appears and disappears according to mysterious cycles, organisations expand and contract and people who were indispensable on Monday may discover by Friday that their services are no longer required.
The young woman has, however, another and apparently more immediate problem. She looks at me and asks, with no evident sense that there is anything unusual about the request, whether I can tighten her corset.
There are moments when asking further questions merely demonstrates a failure to adapt to circumstances, so I tighten the corset. Precisely why I am tightening the corset of a recently dismissed NGO worker in a bar increasingly occupied by intoxicated Ukrainian soldiers is unclear to me, but Kharkiv teaches flexibility. The task is completed with what I hope is professionalism, and she appears satisfied with the result.
Then she notices one of the soldiers, who is in an advanced state of alcoholic dissolution. Vodka has not merely been consumed by this man; it appears to have conquered him militarily, occupied his internal organs and installed a collaborationist administration. He sways, shouts and attempts to communicate with several people simultaneously, while his relationship with gravity has become increasingly provisional.
The recently unemployed woman in the corset assesses the situation for perhaps three seconds and then grabs him. Whatever misfortunes have befallen her professional career that evening, they have evidently done nothing to diminish her executive capacity, because she propels the sodden soldier towards the door with the determination of somebody removing an unwanted refrigerator from an apartment. There is an exchange of words, some of them very loud; the soldier objects, she objects more effectively, the door opens and out he goes.
Nobody seems particularly surprised, which by this stage seems entirely reasonable. I order another drink and begin to wonder whether the evening has reached its natural climax, a thought that will shortly prove optimistic.
Outside, meanwhile, black cars have begun appearing. One black car outside a Kharkiv bar means nothing and two black cars probably mean nothing, but a succession of black cars arriving during an evening in which heavily intoxicated soldiers are arguing, a woman in a corset is forcibly ejecting members of the Armed Forces and the atmosphere is beginning to resemble the opening scenes of a film whose final reel one would prefer not to inhabit encourages speculation.
The sensible response would be to pay one’s bill and leave, and this thought occurs to me repeatedly. Unfortunately, there is an important distinction between recognising the sensible course of action and following it, particularly when an evening has acquired the peculiar momentum of a railway carriage rolling gently downhill without a driver.
Then somebody leaves an opened lock knife on the bar. The knife is simply there: nobody announces ownership of it, nobody explains why it is open and nobody appears particularly concerned by its presence. It rests among glasses, bottles, telephones and the miscellaneous debris of the evening with the casual menace of an object that should plainly not be where it is.
This seems another excellent opportunity to leave, but instead I remain where I am. There is a peculiar psychology to nights of escalating disorder, because every additional indication that departure would be prudent simultaneously increases the temptation to stay and observe what happens next. One begins to think like an anthropologist observing an exceptionally interesting tribe, convincing oneself that surely nothing else can happen and that the evening must finally have reached its summit of absurdity.
Having witnessed the corset, the drunken soldiers, the forcible ejection, the black cars and the mysterious knife, it seems almost intellectually irresponsible not to remain another twenty minutes to discover what the universe has prepared as an encore. This is obviously a ridiculous argument, but ridiculous arguments acquire unexpected persuasive force after midnight in Kharkiv.
Then somebody starts playing with the lights. They go down and the bar becomes dark, faces disappearing into shadows while conversations continue but their tone changes subtly; then the lights rise again and nobody explains what has happened. A few minutes later they dim once more, producing the uncomfortable impression that somebody unseen has assumed responsibility for the evening’s theatrical direction.
There are circumstances in which subdued lighting creates romance, but this is not one of them. In a room containing intoxicated soldiers, unexplained arguments and an unattended open knife, the manipulation of the illumination feels less like ambience than stage direction, and one begins half-expecting some entirely new cast of characters to emerge from behind a curtain.
The shouting continues as one argument subsides and another begins elsewhere. Somebody is laughing uncontrollably, two men appear on the verge of fighting and are separated by friends, while somewhere behind me a torrent of Russian obscenities is answered by an equally energetic stream of Ukrainian ones. The linguistic politics of the war have temporarily given way to the ancient human principle that when people are sufficiently drunk they will curse one another in whatever language comes most naturally.
The woman whose corset I tightened reappears, apparently entirely composed by the evening’s events. She behaves as though physically removing a drunken soldier from a bar shortly after losing her job represents nothing more unusual than collecting one’s coat from the cloakroom, and nobody around her appears inclined to disagree.
This, perhaps, is the detail that captures Kharkiv most accurately. Extraordinary events take place without anybody treating them as extraordinary, because the city has endured missile strikes, drone attacks, blackouts, displacement, mobilisation, death and years of proximity to a gigantic war. Its threshold for astonishment is correspondingly high, and a chaotic bar containing drunken soldiers, mysterious vehicles, an unexplained knife and a recently unemployed woman in a corset is not necessarily a crisis. It is merely another evening.
There is nevertheless a darkness beneath the comedy, because many of these men have seen things they will never describe. Some will return to the front, some will be wounded and some may not return from it, while alcohol is doing work tonight that in another society might be entrusted to therapists, families, quiet weekends and years of gradual emotional recovery. The aggression and manic camaraderie are opposite expressions of the same enormous pressure, and the comedy of the spectacle should not cause us to forget the circumstances that created it.
That does not make a drunken fight harmless, nor an abandoned knife reassuring. It does, however, make the scene more complicated than a collection of amusing anecdotes about soldiers behaving badly, because war compresses life until fear, boredom, desire, grief, friendship and recklessness become crowded together. People begin to live at an emotional velocity difficult to understand from a peaceful country, and the normal boundaries separating the tragic from the ridiculous become increasingly indistinct.
The NGO worker has lost her job tonight, the soldier has lost command of his legs and someone has lost a knife, or at least lost interest in supervising it. The bartender may have lost control of the premises some hours ago, while I am beginning to lose confidence in my own judgement about precisely when it would be prudent to go home. Yet everyone continues, because continuation is one of the principal skills people acquire in wartime.
This is where the temptation to stay becomes strongest. Every rational calculation points towards the door, the black cars remain outside, the lights continue their inexplicable oscillations and the volume continues to rise, but departure would mean surrendering the answer to the evening’s central question: what happens next?
Kharkiv cultivates this dangerous curiosity because the city is forever poised between ordinary life and something unimaginable. You may spend an afternoon drinking coffee beneath blue skies and an evening listening to air-raid warnings; you may discuss philosophy over dinner and wake to explosions. You may meet a humanitarian worker, a soldier, a spy, a fraudster, a hero and a lunatic in the same week, occasionally without being entirely certain which is which, and sometimes with the uncomfortable suspicion that several of these descriptions apply to the same person.
The bar is therefore a miniature version of the city at war: compressed, unpredictable, generous, threatening and absurd. People form intense friendships and equally intense disagreements at bewildering speed, while everyone is conscious, somewhere beneath the alcohol and laughter, that tomorrow may impose obligations considerably more serious than anything happening tonight.
Perhaps this is why leaving feels strangely difficult. It is not courage that keeps you there, because courage would imply some useful purpose, and nor is it quite recklessness because throughout the evening the possibility of departure remains under active consideration. It is curiosity combined with the seductive sensation that normal rules have temporarily ceased to apply and that by remaining another ten minutes you may witness something so preposterous that nobody will believe you when you describe it later.
Eventually, of course, wisdom ought to prevail. There comes a point when journalism, anthropology and curiosity must yield to the elementary proposition that an open knife, a collection of drunken soldiers, unexplained changes in lighting and a fleet of black cars constitute sufficient material for one evening. The prudent observer pays his bill, puts on his coat and walks towards the door before the universe decides to introduce another complication.
Yet there is always that final glance back into the bar. The lights dim again, somebody shouts, the woman in the corset is arguing with somebody else, one soldier laughs while another bottle appears on the counter, and the evening gives every indication that it intends to continue deteriorating magnificently without you.
That is when the most dangerous thought of all occurs. Perhaps, after everything you have already seen, it would be a terrible shame to miss the ending, and perhaps there is no harm in staying for just one more drink.
