Panda: Fourteen Hours in Kharkiv

By Matthew Parish

Monday 28 September 2026

At about two o’clock in the morning, an explosion tore through a street in Kharkiv. A projectile had apparently struck the roadway outside Panda, a small clothes shop whose owners have spent the war doing what thousands of small Ukrainian businesses have been doing: trying to remain in business, trying to preserve something resembling an ordinary life and, when they can, helping the people defending their country. The blast blew out the shop’s windows and left its owners confronting yet another of the arbitrary expenses that accompany commercial life in a city at war.

By late afternoon, the windows had been boarded up. The front door was still standing beneath its metal awning, surrounded by the battered façade of the building, while the hole reportedly left in the road by the overnight strike had already been patched by the local authorities. Barely fourteen hours had passed between destruction and repair, and in that short interval one can find much of the story of contemporary Kharkiv.

There is something particularly dispiriting about seeing a small shop damaged by an explosion. Panda is not a great industrial enterprise or an important defence manufacturer, and it is precisely its modest scale that makes its story worth telling. It is a small clothing business trying to survive in an exceptionally difficult commercial environment, serving ordinary customers while maintaining friendly relations with Kharkiv’s extensive NGO and volunteer community.

The people behind Panda also give donations to the Ukrainian military. They are hardly unique in doing so, and that is part of the point. Across Ukraine, particularly in eastern cities close to the war, the boundaries between running a business, helping one’s neighbours, assisting volunteers and supporting the Armed Forces have become extraordinarily porous.

A shopkeeper does not have to become a defence contractor to contribute to Ukraine’s defence. Sometimes a contribution consists of giving away some clothes, helping a volunteer find something a military unit needs or simply offering assistance because somebody one knows walks through the door and asks. These are modest acts, individually almost invisible, yet collectively they have become an important part of Ukrainian wartime society.

Kharkiv’s NGO community exists within an extraordinary informal ecosystem of relationships of this kind. Volunteers know café owners, shopkeepers, mechanics, drivers, warehouse managers, doctors and small manufacturers. One person knows somebody with a van, another somebody who can repair it, while somebody else knows where clothing can be found or which business might be willing to donate something rather than sell it. Much of Ukraine’s resilience has been constructed through personal relationships of this sort rather than through grand institutions, and Panda is part of this world.

The international image of assistance to Ukraine is inevitably institutional. Foreign observers see the large charities, international NGOs and government programmes because these are the organisations with websites, press departments, substantial budgets and recognisable names. Beneath them lies another Ukraine, consisting of countless small acts of generosity that are seldom recorded anywhere: a clothes shop gives something to soldiers, a restaurant feeds people passing through, a garage repairs a volunteer’s vehicle at cost price, somebody lends a warehouse and somebody else drives a parcel east.

None of these acts will determine the outcome of the war by itself. Collectively, however, they form part of the social machinery that has allowed Ukraine to continue functioning through years of invasion. Panda’s owners have performed another service that is easier to overlook: they have kept a small business alive in Kharkiv.

This is no trivial achievement. War is terrible for small businesses even when their windows remain intact. Customers leave, supply chains become unpredictable, electricity disappears, curfews constrain commercial life, employees relocate or join the Armed Forces and consumer confidence fluctuates with the military situation. Every new attack creates another reason for people to postpone spending money on anything that is not immediately essential.

Ordinarily, small businesses survive by managing uncertainty. An owner worries about next month’s rent, whether a supplier will increase prices, whether a competitor will open nearby and whether enough customers will walk through the door on Monday morning. These are normal commercial risks and, with sufficient skill and experience, they can at least be anticipated.

War introduces an entirely different category of uncertainty. There is no sensible business plan for an explosion outside the front door at two o’clock in the morning, no marketing strategy that prevents blast waves from shattering windows and no careful management of overheads that removes the possibility that premises into which one has poured years of labour may be damaged before breakfast. One can work hard, pay one’s bills, treat one’s customers well, support one’s community and make every commercially sensible decision available, only for an entirely external event to rewrite the accounts overnight.

This is one of the less visible cruelties of running a small business in a war zone. It is not merely the danger of being physically injured, frightening though that is. It is the destruction of predictability itself, without which the elementary calculations involved in running a business become immensely more difficult.

Should an owner invest in new stock when tomorrow’s demand is unknowable? Should premises be refurbished when the windows might disappear again? Should money be spent on expansion, kept aside against another emergency or donated to soldiers who need help now? How much capital can a small enterprise sensibly risk in a city where an otherwise perfectly viable business may wake up one morning with sheets of plywood where its windows used to be?

These questions are frustrating precisely because there are no satisfactory answers. The small businessman or woman is expected to perform the ordinary disciplines of commerce while simultaneously absorbing risks that would make a conventional business plan almost meaningless. Profit margins, inventories and customer demand must be considered alongside electricity cuts, air-raid warnings and the possibility of physical damage to the premises.

Against that background, keeping a small clothes shop operating requires an unusual mixture of optimism and obstinacy. Kharkiv is full of people exhibiting both, and this perhaps explains why the city continues to possess such an energetic commercial life despite everything that has happened to it.

Kharkiv has endured repeated Russian attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Its geography makes the danger particularly acute because the city lies close to the Russian border, leaving its residents with an unwanted familiarity with the sounds and routines of war. Nevertheless restaurants remain busy, coffee shops serve customers, mechanics repair cars, hairdressers cut hair, couriers race around the streets, markets trade and clothes shops sell clothes.

People meet friends, buy presents, go to work and complain about prices. The ordinary details of urban existence continue alongside the profoundly abnormal fact that the city is periodically bombarded, and this coexistence of the ordinary and extraordinary is one of the defining characteristics of wartime Kharkiv.

The photograph of Panda’s entrance after the latest attack captures this peculiarity remarkably well. There is an ordinary red door, an air-conditioning unit, drainpipes, electrical cables and the metal framework of the entrance canopy. Around them are boarded windows, ageing masonry and the improvised appearance of a building that has just endured the effects of another nearby explosion.

The image is not one of spectacular devastation, and that makes it in some ways more affecting. This is simply an ordinary place of business upon which the war has intruded, without invitation and without warning. The shop looks damaged yet functional, which might serve as a description of a great deal of Kharkiv after four and a half years of full-scale war.

There is a temptation when writing about Ukraine to describe all of this invariably as “resilience”. The word has become so familiar that it risks losing its meaning, because resilience sounds admirable when viewed from a safe distance while in practice it is frequently exhausting, expensive and profoundly frustrating. People should not have to be resilient all the time.

A shopkeeper should be allowed to worry about whether an autumn collection will sell rather than whether the windows will survive the night. An entrepreneur should be able to calculate risks using spreadsheets rather than air-raid alerts. A business owner ought to be permitted the ordinary frustrations of capitalism without the extraordinary frustrations of war being added to them.

There is nothing romantic about arriving at a small business into which one has invested money, time and years of work and discovering that its windows have been blown out. There is nothing heroic about calculating the price of replacing glass, examining stock for damage or wondering whether another interruption can be afforded. Nor is there anything ennobling about having to repeat the exercise if the same thing happens again.

This is the other side of Kharkiv’s celebrated endurance. People become tired, owners become frustrated and money runs out. Every repair consumes resources that might otherwise have purchased new stock, increased wages, improved premises or simply provided the owners of a small business with some return for years of hard work. War imposes a tax that appears on no invoice and in no government accounts.

Yet what happened outside Panda after the attack provides another part of the story. According to the account provided to the Lviv Herald, the explosion occurred at approximately 2 a.m., but by roughly four o’clock that afternoon the local authorities had already patched the damage to the roadway. Somewhere in Kharkiv, municipal employees had received yet another report, dispatched workers and machinery and repaired the street.

There is no monument to this sort of work and there are seldom international newspaper articles about it. Nobody holds a press conference because a hole has been filled with asphalt, yet this mundane efficiency may represent one of the purest forms of Ukrainian defiance. A weapon strikes a road during the night, municipal workers arrive during the day and then the traffic continues.

This is what reconstruction actually means in Ukraine. Abroad, the word is often used to describe some immense future enterprise involving international conferences, development banks, investment funds and billions of euros. All of that will eventually matter enormously, but reconstruction is not waiting for the war to end.

It happens when somebody sweeps broken glass from a pavement and when plywood is placed across a shattered window. It happens when electricians reconnect a cable, builders repair a roof and road workers patch damage left by an explosion before the afternoon is over. Ukraine is simultaneously being damaged and rebuilt, and sometimes the interval between the two processes is barely fourteen hours.

That tells us something about why Kharkiv remains alive. Cities do not survive merely because their municipal administrations continue functioning; they survive because millions of mundane transactions remain possible. Shops sell things, restaurants cook food, buses move people, mechanics fix cars, employers pay wages, customers spend money and roads remain roads.

Destroy enough of these ordinary relationships and eventually one destroys a city without having to destroy every building. This is why the survival of businesses such as Panda matters beyond the fortunes of their owners. Every functioning small business employs somebody, purchases something from somebody else, pays somebody’s salary and gives people another reason to remain.

The relationship between Panda and Kharkiv’s NGO community adds another dimension. Ukraine’s volunteer movement has become one of the country’s most distinctive wartime institutions precisely because it does not exist separately from ordinary society. Volunteers walk into ordinary shops, soldiers drink in ordinary cafés, NGO workers become friends with local business owners and people help because somebody they know asks them.

Panda has given donations to the military while trying to survive as a commercial enterprise. That is a small fact, but Ukraine’s war effort is constructed from millions of small facts of this kind. Generosity does not pay electricity bills, however, and patriotism does not replace shattered windows, so supporting Ukraine’s small businesses must mean something more practical than praising their fortitude.

Buy the coat or the shirt. Drink the coffee, eat the meal and pay the bill. Kharkiv does not need to become a museum of wartime heroism in which everybody is congratulated for surviving while its businesses quietly go bankrupt; it needs customers, investment and people prepared to spend money in the city despite the risks.

For Panda, there are now windows to replace and whatever other consequences of the explosion its owners must address. Those costs are real and should not be transformed too casually into an inspirational story, because resilience has a price and somebody invariably has to pay it. There is also a peculiar psychological burden in rebuilding something when there can be no guarantee that the same thing will not happen again tomorrow night.

That may be the greatest frustration of all. Repair normally implies progress: something was broken and now it is fixed. In wartime Kharkiv, repair comes without that comforting finality, because the new window may itself be shattered, the repaired roof may again be damaged and the stock painstakingly replaced may again be put at risk.

Nevertheless people repair things. The photograph of Panda’s front door tells that quiet story: the glass around it has gone, but the door remains; the building has been boarded up and the street outside has already been repaired. At two o’clock in the morning there was an explosion, while fourteen hours later Kharkiv was repairing itself.

Perhaps one day visitors will walk through a prosperous peacetime Kharkiv without knowing how many times individual pieces of the city were damaged and rebuilt. They may buy clothes behind windows that were once sheets of plywood or drive along roads without knowing that holes were once patched there within hours of an attack. The scars will fade and eventually many of them will become invisible.

The purpose of attacking a city is not confined to breaking glass, asphalt and concrete. Repeated bombardment also makes ordinary life harder and commercial planning precarious, turning routine decisions about stock, investment and opening hours into calculations conducted against a background of physical danger and radical uncertainty. Small businesses such as Panda represent the people who continue making those calculations anyway.

A small clothes shop friendly with Kharkiv’s NGO community gives what it can to Ukrainian soldiers while struggling to survive as a business. An explosion blows out its windows at two o’clock in the morning; the windows are boarded, the road is patched and the owners face the infuriating business of calculating the damage and carrying on. There are grander stories about this war, but there may be few that explain Kharkiv better.