The Drunks of Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 8 October 2026
There is a particular sort of loneliness to being drunk on the streets of Kharkiv after midnight. In peacetime, the drunk is part of the familiar furniture of any large city. He staggers home from a bar, argues with a lamppost, loses his telephone, sleeps on a bench or wakes in the morning with no very clear recollection of how he got there. In wartime Kharkiv, the same ancient human ritual takes place against a considerably more sinister background. The streets are empty because there is a curfew. The temperature is falling. An air raid siren begins its mournful electronic howl across the city and somewhere in the distance there is the unmistakable concussion of an explosion. And still, on occasion, there is a man lying on the pavement with a bottle of vodka beside him.
Rules and human beings have always enjoyed an imperfect relationship, and war does not abolish this ancient principle. Somewhere between the last drink and the journey home, judgement evaporates. A man who knows perfectly well that Russian drones and missiles may be travelling towards his city decides nevertheless that another half-bottle of vodka is an excellent idea. There is something simultaneously comic, pathetic and frightening about the resulting spectacle.
The drunk of Kharkiv may stumble along a deserted pavement while the sirens are sounding, apparently possessing a degree of indifference to Russian military technology that would be admirable were it not mostly attributable to alcohol. He may sit down on a bench for a moment and wake several hours later. He may curl himself into the entrance of a building because it offers protection from the wind. He may simply collapse wherever his legs finally decline to continue negotiations with the rest of his body.
The nights in Kharkiv are becoming cold, and that transforms drunkenness from foolishness into danger. Alcohol creates a deceptive sensation of warmth while the body is in fact losing heat, and a person who falls asleep outdoors may not possess the judgement to recognise what is happening to him. There are therefore two wars taking place around the unconscious figure on the pavement. There is the great geopolitical war, announced by sirens and explosions, and there is the small biological war between his body and the cold concrete beneath him.
It is tempting to ridicule such people. They have, after all, ignored virtually every piece of sensible advice available to them. They are outside during curfew. They are drunk. They may be sleeping in the open during an air raid. Somewhere nearby police officers, soldiers, emergency workers and air defence crews are working through the night precisely because the dangers from which the drunk has rendered himself incapable of protection are real. Yet ridicule does not quite capture what one is seeing.
The drunkards of wartime Kharkiv are also casualties of something more difficult to measure. Years of full-scale war have imposed extraordinary psychological pressures upon a city that lives unusually close to Russia and has repeatedly endured missile, drone and bomb attacks. Fear cannot remain at maximum intensity indefinitely. The human nervous system eventually rebels against perpetual vigilance. Some people cope by working furiously. Some exercise. Some pray. Some fall in love with improbable people. Some become obsessive about news and Telegram channels. Some develop an almost theatrical indifference to danger. And some drink.
Alcohol is an exceptionally crude medicine for war, but it works quickly, which is part of the problem. For a few hours it suppresses anxiety, blunts memory and creates an artificial distance between the drinker and whatever he would prefer not to think about. The bills remain unpaid, the friend remains dead, the family remains displaced, the military summons remains real and the Russian border remains inconveniently close, but vodka can make these facts seem less urgent until morning. Then morning arrives, and nothing has changed except the headache.
One should be careful about romanticising this. There is a tendency in writing about Ukraine to transform every manifestation of human weakness into some expression of national resilience. The man unconscious beside an empty bottle is not necessarily performing an act of resistance against Vladimir Putin. He may simply have a serious drinking problem. War does not make alcoholism noble, any more than it makes domestic violence, addiction or self-destruction noble. Patriotism should not require us to pretend otherwise.
Neither should wartime morality deprive people of compassion. A society under extraordinary pressure inevitably produces people who cannot cope with that pressure elegantly. The heroic narratives of war concentrate upon soldiers in trenches, surgeons in hospitals, firefighters pulling civilians from ruins and volunteers delivering supplies beneath bombardment. These people deserve admiration. Yet behind every heroic narrative lies a much larger population of ordinary human beings managing fear with varying degrees of success, and some manage it very badly indeed.
The man sleeping on the pavement may have been drinking excessively before February 2022. He may have been doing so for twenty years. Alternatively, he may have lost a home, a relationship, employment, friends or any coherent expectation of what his future is supposed to look like. The passer-by cannot know. One of the cruelties of observing strangers is that we see their behaviour without seeing the sequence of events that produced it.
Kharkiv makes these contradictions particularly stark because the city retains so much of the architecture and habits of a great European metropolis. There are grand buildings, universities, restaurants, expensive cars, fashionable clothes and elaborate cafés. There are also damaged apartment blocks, boarded windows, soldiers with exhausted faces and people whose lives have gradually come apart. Prosperity and desperation may occupy adjoining streets, and sometimes they encounter one another beneath the same street lamp.
After midnight the distinctions become clearer because most respectable life has disappeared indoors. Kharkiv’s wartime night belongs principally to the military, police, emergency workers and those who, for one reason or another, have failed to go home. The city becomes enormous and strangely empty. Footsteps carry further. A solitary figure becomes conspicuous. The orange light from a street lamp illuminates an abandoned bottle. Then the siren starts, and there can be few more absurd sounds against which to sleep than an air raid alarm.
Yet people do it, and that fact tells us something disturbing about prolonged war. Danger eventually becomes ordinary. The first explosions a person experiences may provoke terror. After hundreds of alarms, the psychology changes. People make calculations, consciously or otherwise. They remain in bed. They finish dinner. They smoke another cigarette. They decide that the drone probably is not coming towards their district. A sufficiently drunk man may make no calculation at all.
This habituation is both necessary and dangerous. Nobody could remain psychologically healthy if every air raid warning produced the same terror as the first. Yet the missile that arrives after the thousandth alarm is no less lethal because everyone has become bored with sirens. War creates the peculiar circumstance in which psychological adaptation to danger may itself increase physical exposure to danger.
The drunk sleeping outside represents the extreme end of this process. He has achieved complete indifference, albeit chemically. The siren can howl. Windows can shake. Somewhere an explosion can briefly illuminate the horizon. He remains asleep beneath a coat, or against a wall, or on the steps of a closed shop, participating unknowingly in one of the strangest tableaux of contemporary Europe. There is something almost surreal in the juxtaposition: the machinery of twenty-first-century warfare passing overhead while a man on the pavement pursues the considerably older human tradition of drinking himself unconscious.
There is another person in this scene who deserves consideration: the passer-by. What does one do? Wake him? Call the police? Find somebody to help? Leave him alone? A drunk can be aggressive when disturbed, and wartime cities contain weapons in quantities that encourage caution about approaching strangers behaving irrationally. Yet leaving an unconscious person outside in cold weather can have consequences more final than embarrassment. Civilisation is tested less by our treatment of impressive people than by what we do with inconvenient ones, and the easiest reaction is contempt. The harder reaction is to remember that this ridiculous figure remains a human being.
Kharkiv contains extraordinary courage. It also contains cowardice, addiction, stupidity, tenderness, selfishness, generosity and despair because Kharkiv is populated by human beings rather than characters in a patriotic film. This is one of the truths about wartime Ukraine that outsiders sometimes find difficult to understand. A nation can fight heroically without every citizen behaving heroically every hour of every day.
Indeed, perhaps this is what makes Ukraine’s endurance remarkable. The country is not populated exclusively by saints and warriors. It contains drunks, eccentrics, criminals, lovers, bureaucrats, exhausted mothers, frightened young men, corrupt officials, magnificent volunteers and people who simply want the whole nightmare to end. They quarrel, drink too much, make foolish decisions and occasionally fall asleep in exceptionally inappropriate places. And still the country continues.
Eventually the curfew ends and the city begins moving again. The trams and buses return. Coffee machines are switched on. Shopkeepers raise shutters. Soldiers appear looking for breakfast. The man on the pavement may wake with a headache of historic proportions and discover that he has survived another night through a combination of luck, alcohol and Russian inaccuracy. Alternatively, somebody may have woken him earlier and taken him somewhere warm.
There is no grand moral to the drunks of Kharkiv, and that may be why they are worth writing about. War journalism naturally gravitates towards the exceptional, whereas most human existence takes place among the ordinary, the shabby and the absurd. A drunk asleep beneath an air raid siren will never become an emblem of Ukrainian resistance, nor should he. He is simply another person trying, and for the moment failing rather spectacularly, to survive the psychological burden of a city at war.
The siren continues and somewhere another explosion rolls through the darkness. The windows tremble, but the drunk does not move. Around him stands a city that has learned the strange art of continuing ordinary human life under extraordinary circumstances. Kharkiv waits for morning.
