The Last Marshrutka to Kharkiv

By Matthew Parish

Friday 30 October 2026

There is something particularly sinister about escaping a city under Russian bombardment in the last marshrutka of the day. Darkness has fallen over the Ukrainian steppe, and the driver is travelling at a speed that would ordinarily be considered suicidal. Yet tonight speed is our only apparent protection. We are hurtling along a black ribbon of tarmac towards Kharkiv, a city whose name has become synonymous with Russian aerial terror, in the peculiar hope that we might find some peace there. Such are the inverted calculations of survival in contemporary Ukraine.

Dnipro has endured another day of Russian attacks. The city, ordinarily a bustling commercial and industrial metropolis with its broad avenues, handsome buildings and imposing river, has descended into the familiar disorder that follows when a modern urban society finds itself subjected to the calculated destruction of its infrastructure. Electricity has disappeared, the railway station has become a place of apprehension rather than departure and thousands of people have been driven underground into the air raid shelters beneath it. There they wait, without adequate food or power, crowded together in the subterranean darkness, uncertain whether the next explosion will be closer than the last.

There is a special kind of misery associated with Ukrainian railway station shelters. They are places designed for the transient movement of human beings, not their indefinite imprisonment beneath the earth. In peacetime, railway stations represent possibility: the beginning of a holiday, a reunion with loved ones, the anticipation of a new life somewhere else. In wartime, the same buildings become reservoirs of human fear. The passengers who might once have been impatient about a delayed train now regard the prospect of any departure at all as an improbable luxury.

Above ground, the city has been transformed into an elaborate exercise in uncertainty. Nobody knows when the next attack will come, whether the electricity will return or whether the trains will run. The ordinary assumptions upon which civilisation depends have been suspended. The simple act of getting from one Ukrainian city to another has acquired the character of an expedition into enemy territory, although both cities remain under the control of the Ukrainian government. The enemy does not need to occupy the road to make travelling along it dangerous.

And so I find myself in the last marshrutka to Kharkiv, escaping one city that Russia is attacking for another that Russia has been attacking for years. The irony is almost too grotesque to contemplate. Kharkiv, once the object of constant anxiety because of its proximity to the Russian border, has become my destination of relative tranquillity. This is what four and a half years of full-scale war have done to the geography of the human imagination. Safety has ceased to be an absolute concept and become merely a comparison between different degrees of danger.

The driver appears determined to make the journey as quickly as the laws of mechanics will permit. There is no leisurely progress through the Ukrainian countryside, no stopping to admire the landscape and no reassuring sense that the journey is unfolding according to some sensible timetable. The minibus pitches and shudders as it hurtles through the darkness, its headlights illuminating little more than the next few seconds of our collective existence. Beyond their narrow beams lies an immense blackness in which almost anything might be concealed.

This is a road with a reputation for drone strikes. The Russian military has developed the practice of hunting vehicles far behind the conventional front lines, and the distinction between military and civilian movement is not one upon which the occupants of a Ukrainian marshrutka can safely rely. The small dimensions of our vehicle provide no meaningful protection from an explosive object descending out of the sky. We are simply a collection of human beings enclosed in thin metal, travelling at considerable speed through a landscape in which death may arrive without warning.

Nobody says anything.

There is no conversation, no nervous laughter and no attempt to establish the superficial intimacy that sometimes develops amongst strangers sharing an uncomfortable journey. The passengers sit in stony silence, each imprisoned within a private calculation of risk. They stare at the darkness beyond the windows or at the backs of the seats in front of them. Perhaps some are praying. Others may be thinking about their families, their unfinished business or the absurdity of dying on an obscure stretch of Ukrainian highway after surviving everything else this war has thrown at them. Their thoughts remain their own.

I find myself contemplating the psychology of silence. In normal circumstances, a minibus journey is a noisy and faintly disagreeable experience, punctuated by telephone conversations, complaints about the driver and the irritating rustling of food wrappers. Tonight there is none of this. The absence of conversation is not a sign of tranquillity but of its opposite. We have collectively recognised that nothing useful can be said. Words have no capacity to influence the object that might be hovering somewhere beyond the range of our vision.

There is something almost medieval about this predicament. We have returned to an age in which the traveller ventures into the darkness knowing that the road itself is dangerous, and that the authorities cannot guarantee safe passage. Yet the instruments of our possible destruction are products of the most sophisticated technological civilisation humanity has ever created. Small flying machines, guided by electronic systems and controlled by men who may be sitting many kilometres away, have transformed the Ukrainian countryside into a landscape of invisible predators. The ancient fear of the unknown has been married to the modern science of precision killing.

The driver, meanwhile, has no time for philosophy. His task is to keep his foot on the accelerator and his eyes on the road. Every minute saved is another minute in which we are not exposed to the hazards of this particular stretch of highway. Yet speed brings its own dangers, especially on a poorly illuminated road at night. We have exchanged one category of risk for another, and nobody has asked us whether we consent to the bargain. There is no need, because we all understand its terms.

One wonders what the driver is thinking. Does he regard this as simply another working evening, a routine journey between two Ukrainian cities in which he must deliver his passengers and return home? Has he become so accustomed to the dangers that they no longer intrude upon his consciousness, or is he every bit as frightened as the rest of us? Perhaps professionalism consists precisely in suppressing such questions. He drives because driving is what he knows how to do, just as the soldiers in their trenches continue to fight and the railway workers continue to operate their trains under bombardment. Ukraine survives through the accumulated determination of ordinary people to perform their ordinary duties under circumstances that have become utterly extraordinary.

There are few things more disconcerting than the realisation that one’s survival depends entirely upon the competence and good fortune of a stranger. The driver controls the steering wheel, but he cannot control the sky. His speed may reduce our exposure, but it cannot eliminate it. He is both our protector and a fellow potential victim, and we have entrusted him with our lives because there is no practical alternative. The relationship is one of absolute dependence without intimacy, an unspoken compact between people who may never meet again.

Behind us lies Dnipro, with its darkened railway station and its thousands of frightened inhabitants sheltering beneath the ground. I cannot quite expunge the images of those people from my mind. They are not soldiers or political leaders or the architects of some grand strategic confrontation between Russia and the West. They are ordinary Ukrainians attempting to lead ordinary lives in a country whose neighbour has decided that ordinary life must be made impossible. Their immediate concerns are not the abstractions of geopolitics but warmth, food, electricity, somewhere to sleep and the reassurance that their children will survive another night.

This is the essential cruelty of the Russian campaign against Ukrainian cities. It seeks not merely to destroy buildings or disrupt electricity supplies but to impose a permanent state of nervous exhaustion upon an entire population. The sirens, explosions, blackouts and crowded shelters form a cumulative assault upon the human capacity to live without fear. There comes a point when the distinction between an active bombardment and the anticipation of the next bombardment begins to dissolve. Even when the missiles are not falling, they occupy the imagination. The war continues inside the minds of those who have survived its immediate violence.

Yet the Ukrainian response is not quite what the architects of this campaign might have anticipated. People continue to work, to travel, to fall in love, to visit their friends and to conduct the ordinary business of society. The last marshrutka still departs, even when the railway station has become a refuge for thousands of people escaping Russian attacks. Drivers still take their vehicles along dangerous roads and passengers still climb aboard. Such activities are not necessarily expressions of extraordinary courage. Often they are simply expressions of necessity, because life cannot be postponed indefinitely until peace returns.

There is a temptation amongst foreign observers to romanticise this resilience, to portray every Ukrainian civilian as a hero engaged in an epic struggle for national survival. Such descriptions may contain an element of truth, but they also risk overlooking the terrible exhaustion beneath the surface. Most people do not want to be heroes. They want to go home, turn on the lights, prepare supper and sleep without calculating the distance to the nearest underground shelter. They want to make plans for tomorrow with some reasonable expectation that tomorrow will arrive. These are modest aspirations, yet in wartime Ukraine they can become almost extravagant.

The road continues relentlessly ahead of us. Occasionally lights appear in the distance, suggesting a settlement or another vehicle moving through the night. They disappear as quickly as they arrived, swallowed by the darkness. The landscape offers no reassurance and no indication of how much danger remains. There is only the engine, the movement of the vehicle and the silent concentration of its occupants.

I am struck by the peculiar elasticity of time under such circumstances. A journey that ought to be measured in hours becomes a sequence of individual moments, each of which must be survived before the next can begin. The mind becomes acutely conscious of things it would ordinarily ignore: a change in engine noise, a sudden alteration in speed, an unexpected light in the sky. Nothing may be happening, yet everything seems potentially significant. Fear sharpens perception while simultaneously depriving it of reliable judgement.

Somewhere ahead lies Kharkiv. It is an extraordinary city, scarred by Russian attacks yet stubbornly alive, its universities, cafés, theatres and intellectual traditions continuing to assert themselves against the violence directed towards it. It has endured devastation on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable to its inhabitants before February 2022. Yet tonight it represents the possibility of a bed, a meal, an illuminated room and perhaps a few hours in which I can forget about the sky. That this battered city should now constitute my idea of sanctuary says more about the condition of Ukraine than any catalogue of military statistics.

There will be no triumphant arrival at the end of this journey. If we reach Kharkiv safely, we shall simply climb out of the marshrutka, collect our belongings and disappear into the night. The driver will have completed another shift and his passengers will resume their separate lives. Nobody will erect a monument to the journey or record the particular terror of these silent hours. It will become one of the innumerable small episodes of survival through which Ukrainians have endured the war.

And yet I suspect I shall remember this journey for a very long time. Not because anything remarkable necessarily happens, but because of the oppressive awareness that something remarkable and terrible might happen at any moment. There is a distinctive loneliness in sitting amongst strangers who share the same unspoken apprehension. Each of us is silently waiting for the moment when the engine stops, the door opens and the ordinary world briefly becomes accessible again.

The headlights continue to carve their narrow tunnel through the darkness. Somewhere beyond their reach lie the fields and villages of eastern Ukraine, and somewhere above them may be the machines of a war that has made even the night itself seem hostile. We are moving as fast as we dare, yet there is no sense of freedom in our movement. We are fleeing danger towards another danger, hoping that the second will prove more tolerable than the first.

For the moment, there is nothing to do but remain seated, listen to the engine and trust the man at the wheel. The road stretches ahead into the black Ukrainian night, and the silence inside the marshrutka has become almost unbearable.

We are all waiting for the journey to end.

And none of us knows quite how it will.