In the Belly of the Tower: Night Thoughts Before the Drones

The night in Kyiv is not a silence; it is a waiting. Somewhere in the dark, beyond the ribbed concrete walls of this anonymous tower block hotel—neither luxurious nor poor, but efficient in the Eastern European way—there is movement. Not of people, but of machines. Whining, buzzing, purposeful. The Russians call them Geran-2, the Ukrainians call them shahedy, and I, lying still on my back, sheet drawn tight to my chest as though it might serve as a shroud, simply call them the bees.

They come in swarms, each one a loitering whisper of death, winding its way across the Dnipro in the gloaming, guided by cold hands and old vendettas. There is no point hiding from them, not in a high-rise like this. If they mean for you, they will find you. The worst part isn’t dying. It’s waiting to discover if you will.

At first, I tried to sleep. The blackout curtains do their job, but darkness alone is not sleep. I scrolled the news—bad idea. Then Telegram channels: videos of fiery blooms over Odesa and Kharkiv, shaky footage of an apartment block coughing out smoke like a wounded animal. Air defence reports: “Kyiv region – 15 out of 20 targets intercepted.” I wondered what happened to the five. Did they make a crater? Find a school? Strike the glass and steel coffin in which I now rest?

Eventually, I lay back, phone screen off, eyes open. The room hummed with electricity’s ghost: the minibar fridge breathing in small rattles, the air vent’s gentle exhale. But underneath that, fainter still, like a cough behind a closed door, I thought I heard it: the drone. Not a definite sound—more a pressure, like tinnitus you can feel in your spine. I listened harder. Then the mind began to fracture.

Thoughts come strangely when you think they may be your last.

I wondered why the mattress was so firm. Then I thought about whether the people who chose it ever imagined it would become a final resting place for some anonymous foreigner, perhaps pulverised without ever having left a mark. I thought about whether the ceiling would fall inward, or whether the explosion would be so close that the room would simply disappear in light.

I remembered an old poem by Zbigniew Herbert about a ruined city, and how resistance was sometimes just surviving long enough to bear witness. I wondered if there would be anything to bear witness to in the morning.

I imagined the drone operator, somewhere deep inside Russia—perhaps in Bryansk, perhaps further east—eating sunflower seeds with one hand while steering death with the other. Did he know where I was? Had his monitor drawn a red square around my building?

Or was I just a smudge on a satellite map, part of a grey band of civilian possibility?

I thought about my daughters. Not because it was poetic, but because I hadn’t called them. I had promised I would when I arrived in Kyiv, and then the transport was chaotic, and then there was the briefing, and then the sleep that never came. They'd be asleep now. Their dreams wouldn’t include their father being blown into pink mist by an Iranian drone operated by a disgruntled conscript with a cracked tablet and a hangover. But perhaps they should have.

I thought about art. About how strange it is that in this moment—on the cusp of possible annihilation—one’s mind drifts to stillness and beauty. To Vermeer’s women with their letter-reading silences. To the heavy hand of Chagall’s blues. To the weightless music of Arvo Pärt, whose notes fall like snowflakes on taut nerves. Is that what survival is? The ability to summon beauty in the moment before obliteration?

I considered getting up and showering, as though cleanliness would somehow grant me absolution or immunity. But the body refused. It knew the game better than the mind.

I thought about the people in the flats across the way. Were they also lying there, rigid under their sheets, composing last thoughts? Or had they lived with this for so long that the drones were no more fearsome than a summer storm? Perhaps they were already asleep, lulled by the thunder of distant interceptions.

Suddenly, a noise. A real one this time. A percussive thump, felt more than heard. Then another. Then the staggered bark of anti-aircraft guns, closer than they had any right to be. I flinched. My heart sprinted. The building seemed to hold its breath. Something outside shrieked, then nothing again.

I waited.

The air defences had spoken. Perhaps the bees were swatted. Or perhaps they were still circling, choosing.

I lay there, halfway between obliteration and survival, and the thoughts slowed. They grew simpler. Less metaphysical. I wondered what would happen to my laptop. Whether anyone would know to collect my things. Whether, in the rubble, someone would find my notebook and misread my scrawls as poetry rather than insomnia.

Then, absurdly, I thought about the borscht I had eaten earlier that evening. How the waitress had smiled as she set it down. “With garlic pampushky. You must try.” I had. It had been perfect. And then I thought: if this was to be the last supper, at least it had been honest.

Eventually, the adrenaline ebbed. The building remained. The drones, for now, had passed.

And as I drifted, uncertain whether sleep or steel would claim me first, I found myself humming a children’s song in a language I barely remembered. It meant nothing. It meant everything. In war, sometimes the most defiant thing of all is to fall asleep and dream.