Joy, Anarchy and Survival Amongst the Ruins in Kharkiv

To walk the streets of modern Kharkiv is to straddle two worlds: one of pulverised concrete and caved-in roofs, the other of laughter in underground cafés and the clink of spoons stirring instant coffee in bomb shelters. This northeastern city, once Ukraine’s second largest and a beacon of academia and culture, has become something of a paradox—an urban hellscape forged by Russian aggression, yet electrified with the stubborn, irrepressible vitality of its citizens.

Since the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Kharkiv has stood as both a target and a symbol. Barely 40 kilometres from the Russian border, she was among the first to be shelled, besieged, and bled. Her vast Soviet-era apartment blocks—those endless rows of grey monoliths—have become favourite targets for glide bombs and S-300 missiles. Her once-grand postmodern skyline, punctuated by the stately Derzhprom building and the onion domes of churches that somehow remain standing, is now pocked with wounds. At night, the city glows not with neon but with the intermittent flicker of fires and the strange bluish light of anti-aircraft batteries rising to meet Shaheed drones and Iskander strikes.

And yet Kharkiv breathes.

She breathes in the small ways: the graffiti murals that sprout like weeds on walls near the university ruins, some of them scrawled with ironic slogans—“WELCOME TO HELL” beside a smiley face; or “POST-APOCALYPSE ZONE: ENTRY FREE”. She breathes through the laughter of students from the Polytechnic Institute, who gather in the metro station vestibules to swap war stories and charge their phones from hacked-together battery stations. It breathes in the anarchic freedom of a city so broken that the usual rules seem no longer to apply, and from that absence of structure emerges an intoxicating, slightly reckless joy.

Curfews are strict, and for good reason. Russian missile strikes often come at night, and the city’s defenders rely on darkness to move unseen. But before the nightly lockdown, there is a strange hour—perhaps between five and seven in the evening—when the air smells faintly of diesel generators, and people begin to emerge from their shelters. They congregate in unexpected places: a wine bar that now sells mostly beer and canned food, operating out of a basement beneath a collapsed shopping centre; a punk club in Saltivka whose ceiling is reinforced with scaffolding, where poets perform beside empty shell casings. Music—sometimes scratchy techno, sometimes folk songs sung in drunken unison—echoes in alleyways. The spirit is almost Dionysian.

But one must not romanticise ruin. The hardships are constant and cruel. Electricity and water outages are regular, especially in the suburbs. Queues form daily for humanitarian bread and military rations. Many residents sleep in corridors, away from the windows, because no one knows when the next shockwave will shatter the glass. Children learn arithmetic to the accompaniment of air raid sirens, their schools now housed in underground stations. Pets are tied up near entrances so they can be found if the house collapses.

The psychological strain is relentless. In many parts of Kharkiv, especially near the front-facing districts like Pivnichna Saltivka, entire blocks lie abandoned, their walls torn away like peeled fruit, revealing bedsheets flapping in the wind. Survivors speak softly, if at all, about neighbours buried in their homes. The elderly often sit on makeshift benches outside damaged buildings, chain-smoking and silent, eyes unfocused on anything visible.

Yet in the same space, a kind of moral and emotional clarity has taken root. With the collapse of the ordinary has come a resurgence of community. Young people organise informal defence networks, delivering medicine, running solar-powered internet relay nodes or clearing rubble. Soldiers, briefly rotated away from the Zero Line, find solace in the city’s chaos. It reminds them that the spirit of Kharkiv has not been razed, only stripped of her finery.

Language in Kharkiv has also evolved. Once a predominantly Russian-speaking city, Kharkiv is now linguistically fractured in a peculiar way: some speak Ukrainian with deliberate pride, others switch between Russian and Ukrainian depending on context, and many overlay it all with English profanities learnt from TikTok or drone warfare manuals. The linguistic chaos mirrors the city’s existential flux—Kharkiv is not quite what she was, not yet what she will become, but intensely alive in her in-between.

Kharkiv is a city in a state of vigil: not dead, not thriving, but radiating with the fierce energy of survival. Every missile that misses, every tram that still runs, every illegal rave thrown in a half-collapsed warehouse is a small act of defiance, an affirmation of life. This is anarchy not as collapse but as resistance—the absence of imposed order revealing the moral geometry of a people who, lacking protection from the heavens, have built their own kind of justice among the ruins.

One might see it that Kharkiv is less a city than a declaration. She shouts through her shattered windows and reverberates across cratered streets: we are still here. And that, in the hellscape, is a kind of joy.