The Art of Looking Like a Sociopath in Dnipro After Curfew
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 28 October 2026
There are cities in which the principal danger after midnight is being robbed. In Dnipro, the more immediate danger is being offered an increasingly bewildering range of services while the Russians attempt to kill you from the sky.
There is a particular facial expression that one must cultivate to walk through central Dnipro after curfew. It is not quite indifference, not quite contempt and certainly not fear. It is the expression of a man who has seen everything, understood nothing and decided that the safest course is to communicate absolutely no emotional response to anything whatsoever. This is what I mean by the cultivated air of sociopathy: the deliberate extinction of those ordinary facial movements by which civilised people acknowledge the existence of other human beings.
Dnipro is a city at war, close enough to the front lines to have developed an intimate acquaintance with Russian aerial weaponry and far enough away to retain the more traditional features of metropolitan life, including bars, hotels and people anxious to sell you things you never knew you wanted. The juxtaposition is extraordinary. One minute you are listening to the mournful electronic wailing of an air raid siren and wondering whether the next Russian ballistic missile has your hotel room number written upon it. The next, a perfectly respectable-looking barman is enquiring whether you would like the company of a young lady, as though the principal inadequacy of the evening were a shortage of female conversation.
The bar in question is described by Google as the best bar in Dnipro, which raises interesting questions about the criteria employed by the world’s most successful search engine. One imagines that the Google algorithm takes account of the quality of the cocktails, the friendliness of the staff and the general ambience of the establishment. It is less clear whether the unsolicited offer of female companionship is considered a positive feature, a negative feature or an optional extra to be selected under the heading of accessibility. Silicon Valley has evidently yet to develop a satisfactory metric for the moral ambiguities of Ukrainian nightlife under Russian bombardment.
The first offer can be dismissed with a polite smile. The second requires a slightly more emphatic refusal, accompanied by the kind of expression normally reserved for an insurance salesman who has interrupted a funeral. By the third, one begins to suspect that the entire hospitality industry has received a circular explaining that foreign journalists are desperately lonely creatures whose psychological stability can only be maintained by the immediate introduction of a woman of uncertain provenance. It is not entirely clear whether this is intended as a commercial proposition, an act of humanitarian assistance or a peculiarly Ukrainian interpretation of customer service.
Returning to one’s hotel, one might reasonably expect some respite from these bewildering attentions. Hotels, after all, are traditionally establishments in which one pays for the privilege of being left alone in a room with clean sheets and a functioning lavatory. In central Dnipro, however, even hotel staff may apparently regard this conventional understanding of hospitality as excessively narrow. The opportunity to meet a woman is raised again, this time with the solemn solicitude of a receptionist offering an additional pillow. One begins to wonder whether there is a city-wide conspiracy to ensure that no foreigner should ever have to face a Russian missile strike without romantic companionship.
The women themselves are not the proper objects of ridicule. Whatever circumstances have led to their being proposed as amenities of the hospitality trade, they are almost certainly negotiating economic and personal difficulties considerably more serious than the mild embarrassment of an Englishman who simply wishes to go to bed. The absurdity lies in the cheerful normality with which these proposals are made, as though the potential arrival of a stranger in one’s bedroom were no more morally complicated than ordering an omelette. War produces strange economies, but perhaps its most unsettling achievement is to make the extraordinary sound entirely routine.
And then there are the drunks. Dnipro after curfew appears to contain a small but determined population of gentlemen who have decided that martial law, Russian missiles and the imminent possibility of violent death are insufficient reasons to discontinue an evening’s drinking. These individuals materialise from the darkness at intervals with the alarming regularity of defective street lamps. They mutter, gesture, stagger and deliver what may be philosophical observations, requests for money, declarations of undying friendship or threats of physical violence. Without a sufficiently intimate knowledge of drunken Ukrainian, and perhaps with it, distinguishing between these categories is largely impossible.
The appropriate response is the same in every case. One must look straight ahead, neither smile nor frown, neither accelerate nor slow one’s pace and assume the facial rigidity of a particularly unsuccessful candidate for the diplomatic service. A normal human being might attempt to determine what the gentleman wants. This would be an error, because it would establish the dangerous precedent that communication is possible. Once that proposition has been conceded, there is no knowing where the conversation might end, particularly when the other party appears to have consumed enough alcohol to preserve a medium-sized mammal for scientific examination.
The air raid sirens provide a continuous soundtrack to this theatre of the absurd. Their principal contribution is to remind everyone that while they are engaged in the ordinary activities of late-night commerce, intoxication and unsolicited matchmaking, someone in Moscow may be contemplating the removal of their neighbourhood from the map. There is something profoundly surreal about being asked whether one would like to meet a pretty girl while a public warning system announces the possibility of imminent mass murder. It is rather like being offered a dessert menu aboard the Titanic after the iceberg has already entered the dining room.
One might suppose that the sirens would impose a certain sobriety upon the population. One would be mistaken. The experienced Ukrainian urban dweller has long since learned that a society cannot suspend its entire existence every time the Russians decide to launch another salvo of expensive machinery towards a block of flats. Life continues, in all its beauty, vulgarity, courage and stupidity. People fall in love, become drunk, make money, lose money, quarrel with their relatives and offer improbable commercial services to passing Englishmen. The apocalypse, it turns out, is not nearly as effective at interrupting ordinary human behaviour as religious literature would have us believe.
The foreign visitor must therefore develop a peculiar psychological discipline. He must be sufficiently alert to recognise genuine danger, sufficiently detached to ignore imaginary danger and sufficiently emotionally inaccessible to discourage every drunken stranger who decides that his evening would be improved by initiating a conversation with an obvious foreigner. He must refuse the solicitations of the hospitality industry without giving offence, interpret the air raid warnings without panic and navigate dark streets without appearing either frightened or available for purchase. He must, in short, adopt the outward appearance of a sociopath while retaining just enough internal humanity to remember why he came to Ukraine in the first place.
This last qualification is important, because genuine sociopathy would be a disastrous disposition for anyone attempting to understand Dnipro. Beneath its nocturnal absurdities lies a city of extraordinary endurance, populated by people who have endured years of Russian aggression while preserving the essential institutions and routines of urban civilisation. Their survival depends partly upon refusing to allow the war to dictate every detail of their lives. What appears grotesque to the visitor may sometimes represent an improvised assertion of normality, although one might reasonably question whether the unsolicited provision of women is the most convincing demonstration of civilisation’s continued existence.
There is also a curious inversion of priorities. In most European cities, walking through the centre after midnight involves evaluating the ordinary risks of urban life: theft, assault, intoxicated strangers and the occasional aggressive taxi driver. In Dnipro, all these conventional hazards continue to exist, but they have been joined by the possibility of sudden annihilation from the sky. One might imagine that this would put everything else into perspective. Instead, it produces an almost comic equality between dangers of radically different magnitudes. A drunk attempts to engage you in conversation, a barman offers you a woman and somewhere above the clouds a Russian missile may be approaching. All three demand decisions, although only one of them is likely to appear in tomorrow morning’s military briefing.
This is perhaps the most unsettling feature of life in a Ukrainian city close to the front. The human mind is not designed to sustain constant terror, and so it gradually accommodates even the most extraordinary threats within the framework of ordinary experience. A missile alert becomes background noise, an explosion becomes something to be discussed over breakfast and the possibility of death is incorporated into the day’s arrangements with the same weary resignation normally reserved for railway delays. The grotesque and the mundane become indistinguishable, not because people have lost their humanity but because they must preserve it somehow.
For the visiting Englishman, however, this accommodation is incomplete. He remains sufficiently unfamiliar with the environment to appreciate its madness, yet sufficiently accustomed to Ukraine to resist the temptation to treat every siren as the opening movement of the Last Judgement. This intermediate condition is especially conducive to dark humour. One cannot take the circumstances entirely seriously without becoming hysterical, but neither can one laugh at them without recognising the terrible suffering that has produced them. The result is a peculiar psychological balance in which irony becomes a form of emotional self-defence.
And so one walks on, through the darkened centre of Dnipro, passing shuttered businesses and the occasional illuminated doorway, listening to the sirens while attempting to avoid becoming involved in either a commercial romance or an incomprehensible argument with a drunken stranger. The face remains impassive. The eyes remain forward. Every muscle is instructed to communicate the same message: this man is entirely uninterested in anything you have to offer, and may possibly be more dangerous than he looks. It is an exhausting performance for someone whose natural inclination is to be friendly, talkative and curious about the world.
Eventually one reaches one’s hotel room, closes the door and contemplates the remarkable achievement of having survived another evening of Ukrainian urban hospitality. The Russians have not killed you, the drunks have not assaulted you and the hospitality industry has once again failed to improve your personal life. By any reasonable measure, the evening must therefore be counted an unqualified success. One can finally remove the mask of cultivated sociopathy, sit down upon the bed and consider whether the absurdities of Dnipro represent the breakdown of civilisation or its stubborn refusal to disappear.
Then the air raid siren begins again. One looks at the ceiling, considers the distance to the nearest shelter and wonders whether the hotel receptionist might be able to recommend a room with better protection against ballistic missiles.
Somehow, one suspects, she would offer a woman instead.
