Knives Out in Kharkiv

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 1 October 2026

Kharkiv changes after dark. This is true of every city, of course, but in Kharkiv the transformation can be unusually complete. Daylight Kharkiv is a city of coffee shops, university students, elderly women carrying impossible quantities of shopping, soldiers staring into their telephones and cars bouncing over roads that have survived several political systems and now a war. Night-time Kharkiv is something else, and on certain evenings it seems possible to descend through its different layers without ever leaving the same bar.

The evening in question began with a mistake: I had not eaten. This did not initially seem important because I assumed, as people foolishly do, that food would eventually appear. There would be a hamburger, a plate of chips, perhaps some Georgian food delivered by somebody on an electric bicycle. Civilisation had survived worse things than my failure to have lunch, and there seemed no particular reason to imagine that dinner would become the central philosophical problem of the night.

Then the knives began appearing, although nobody announced this development. There was no moment at which somebody stood up and proposed that we should all produce our knives. One simply appeared on the bar, followed by another and then another, until I realised that an informal collection of edged weapons had assembled itself between the glasses.

This is how strange evenings develop. The extraordinary does not arrive wearing a hat marked EXTRAORDINARY, nor does somebody ring a bell to announce that normality has concluded. It insinuates itself into the ordinary until, suddenly, the ordinary has disappeared and everyone is behaving as though the new circumstances had been perfectly reasonable all along.

One of the participants was a beautiful red-haired woman whose hair was tied back. She was dressed in dark green and had somehow concealed a knife inside her bra. This immediately raised questions of practical engineering that seemed to me considerably more urgent than any discussion about the knife’s qualities as a weapon, because human anatomy and sharpened steel are not natural companions.

She seemed untroubled by the problem and was discussing how she might adjust her bra without creating an unfortunate misunderstanding between herself and the knife, while the rest of us offered observations of varying usefulness. There are moments when journalism requires one merely to observe, and this seemed to be one of them. I could think of no responsible editorial intervention that would improve the situation.

I had a knife as well, although mine was made of plastic. It had been sharpened sufficiently to give it a certain theoretical menace, but placing it beside the other knives produced roughly the same effect as entering a bicycle in a tank competition. Nevertheless I put it on the bar. If civilisation was going to collapse around me, I preferred to participate symbolically.

Then the soldier produced his Bowie knife, and the balance of power shifted decisively. There are knives and there are Bowie knives, the distinction being partly functional but mostly theatrical. A Bowie knife does not merely exist; it makes an entrance. It belongs naturally on the belt of somebody crossing an unexplored continent in 1840, preferably after an encounter with a bear. This particular example looked as though it had arrived in Kharkiv after taking a wrong turn somewhere on the American frontier.

The soldier placed it on the bar with the casualness with which another man might put down his telephone. My plastic knife became embarrassed, or at least I became embarrassed on its behalf. Until this moment I had considered it a moderately formidable object, but beside the Bowie knife it looked like something provided with a particularly disappointing airline meal.

The conversation developed into a discussion of stabbing, although not in the form of any immediate quarrel. It had the abstract quality of a seminar. People debated hypothetical confrontations and gestured towards the various exhibits before them, while the whole thing acquired the atmosphere of a university tutorial in an institution whose ethics committee had been abolished. I listened, occasionally contributed and became progressively hungrier.

Meanwhile the light was disappearing. At first I assumed somebody had simply dimmed the lamps, but the darkness seemed to have ambitions. It spread across the room, swallowing the corners first and then the tables, until people’s faces floated above drinks and cigarette smoke. The knives still caught fragments of light from somewhere and occasionally flashed on the bar, which did nothing to make the scene appear more conventional.

The clientele began changing too. The people who had been there earlier gradually disappeared and in their places came men and women who seemed to belong more naturally to the darkness. They entered, embraced somebody, whispered something, ordered a drink, disappeared outside, returned or did not return. Some looked military, others criminal, others merely exhausted, and still others possessed that peculiarly Kharkiv quality of making it impossible to determine which category they belonged to. One learns not to ask too many questions, particularly when everybody has already displayed their knives.

Outside was the wartime city. Somewhere beyond the walls were apartment blocks with taped windows, checkpoints, sandbags, generators, soldiers, stray cats and people trying to live ordinary lives within artillery and missile range of Russia. Somewhere further north and east were men attempting to kill one another on an industrial scale. Inside, meanwhile, we were discussing knives, and the disproportion between these two forms of violence was so enormous that the smaller one had acquired an almost comic quality.

The absurdity was complete, yet nobody laughed very much because nothing about the situation seemed especially remarkable to anybody except me. Perhaps everyone else had experienced stranger evenings, or perhaps Kharkiv simply recalibrates one’s understanding of normality. Either way, the knives remained on the bar and the conversation continued.

I became increasingly hungry, and this is worth emphasising because hunger eventually overwhelmed every other feature of the evening. The darkness was interesting, the increasingly sinister clientele was interesting, the red-haired woman with the knife in her bra was extremely interesting and the soldier’s Bowie knife was impressive. Yet somewhere beneath these observations another thought had begun repeating itself with the persistence of a malfunctioning alarm: food. I had not eaten all day and my body was beginning to protest against the editorial priorities of the evening.

The knives therefore underwent a conceptual transformation. They ceased to be weapons and became cutlery. The Bowie knife in particular began to suggest roast beef. It was obviously absurdly large for the purpose, but hunger has little respect for proportionality, and I began to imagine an enormous steak arriving on an equally enormous wooden board. There was, unfortunately, no steak, and instead another mysterious person entered the bar.

By now I had the curious sensation that the room had become detached from the rest of Kharkiv. There was no longer an outside world in the conventional sense. There was merely this dark chamber containing strangers, soldiers, alcohol, cigarettes and knives, while somewhere beyond it drones crossed the Ukrainian sky and an enormous city continued its nocturnal wartime existence.

The red-haired woman was still there, apparently having reached some accommodation between her clothing and her weapon. The soldier remained beside his Bowie knife, while my plastic knife lay on the counter looking like an object recovered from a prison search conducted in a kindergarten. The evening had become ridiculous enough to acquire its own internal logic, which is usually the point at which it becomes impossible to leave because one wants to know what happens next.

Perhaps that is one of the psychological effects of living in a country at war. The threshold of absurdity shifts, events that once would have seemed alarming become anecdotes and things that previously appeared important shrink into trivialities. When missiles sometimes arrive before breakfast, a knife on a bar can seem almost reassuringly comprehensible.

A knife, after all, is an ancient thing and humanity understands knives. We have been making them since before we had cities, governments, philosophy or international organisations. A hypersonic missile is difficult to comprehend and a drone guided by artificial intelligence is stranger still, but a knife belongs to the oldest vocabulary of human danger. Perhaps that was why everyone wanted to talk about them: there was something reassuringly primitive about an object whose meaning required no software update.

There was something primitive about the entire scene, although not necessarily threatening. We might have been sitting around a fire several thousand years ago, displaying pieces of sharpened stone and explaining their merits. Only the alcohol, electric lights and mobile telephones distinguished us from our ancestors, and the electric lights were steadily disappearing anyway.

I wondered what Kant would have made of it, although he probably would not have approved of carrying a knife in one’s bra and his writings are frustratingly silent on the subject. Schopenhauer would have regarded the evening as confirmation of his darkest suspicions about the human will, Hobbes would have recognised the atmosphere immediately and Nietzsche might have stayed until closing time. I, by contrast, wanted a cheeseburger and was increasingly prepared to regard this as the most philosophically defensible position available.

This became the final philosophical truth of the evening. Civilisation may be fragile, violence may lurk beneath the surface of human society and wartime cities may reveal aspects of humanity normally concealed beneath bureaucracy and good manners, but a man who has not eaten all day eventually loses interest in metaphysics. Philosophy may concern itself with being, knowledge, morality and the nature of consciousness, but none of these questions is improved by low blood sugar.

The room grew darker still as people continued to come and go. Somebody laughed and somebody else whispered something into somebody else’s ear, while glasses appeared and disappeared. The knives remained on the bar like a little archaeological exhibition from a civilisation that had not yet decided whether it was beginning or ending.

I looked at my plastic knife and found it pathetic but somehow comforting. Amidst the steel, uniforms, shadows and nocturnal characters drifting through the room, its very inadequacy had become reassuring. It was an absurd weapon for an absurd evening and perhaps, in miniature, an appropriate emblem of Kharkiv itself: improvised, slightly ridiculous, theoretically dangerous and still somehow functioning.

Eventually there comes a point in every night when the imagination begins exaggerating what the eyes can see. The stranger by the door becomes an assassin, the man whispering in the corner becomes an intelligence officer, the beautiful woman becomes a femme fatale, the soldier becomes a character from another century and the Bowie knife becomes Excalibur. This transformation is especially likely to happen when one has not eaten.

The sensible explanation was probably much simpler. They were people having drinks in a bar. Some were soldiers because Kharkiv is full of soldiers, some carried knives because Ukraine is at war and people acquire habits in wartime that would seem eccentric elsewhere, and some were merely colourful characters who looked more sinister as the lights went down. Yet cities are composed partly of facts and partly of stories, and Kharkiv after dark encourages stories.

By the end of the evening I had ceased trying to decide whether the experience was dangerous, comic or merely strange. It had become all three and perhaps none of them. The knives had become props, the strangers had become silhouettes and the entire bar seemed to float somewhere between wartime reality and theatre. Only the hunger remained indisputably real, anchoring the whole increasingly hallucinatory spectacle to the mundane requirements of the human body.

That, ultimately, is what I remember most clearly. Not the knife concealed in the beautiful woman’s bra, not the soldier’s enormous Bowie knife, not my ridiculous sharpened piece of plastic and not even the succession of increasingly mysterious figures passing through the darkened doorway. I remember wanting dinner, and with every passing minute that desire seemed more reasonable than anything else taking place around me.

There is something reassuring about this. War can distort almost everything about ordinary life: it can alter one’s sense of danger, normality, time and even humour. Yet eventually the body asserts its priorities over all the stories the mind constructs around it. The knives could wait, the sinister strangers could wait and Kant, Hobbes, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer could wait as well.

Somewhere in Kharkiv there had to be a hamburger, and by the end of that strange evening finding it seemed a more urgent intellectual project than understanding either the nature of violence or the human condition. Perhaps that was the final lesson of the night: civilisation begins not with philosophy, laws or even the decision to put the knives back into their respective hiding places, but with finding something to eat.