The Other Kharkiv: Poverty, High-Rise Apartments and the Architecture of Survival

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 7 October 2026

Kharkiv is an extraordinarily beautiful city, although it does not always reveal itself immediately as such. Its centre contains monumental architecture, enormous squares, universities, theatres, cafés and restaurants that would not be out of place in any great European city. Even after years of Russian bombardment, Kharkiv retains an unmistakable civic grandeur. Walk through the centre on an ordinary afternoon and, between air-raid alarms, it is possible for a visitor to imagine that the city is gradually returning to something resembling normal life.

Travel several kilometres towards the outer residential districts, however, and another Kharkiv emerges. Here stand the enormous apartment blocks constructed during the Soviet period, often separated by expanses of concrete, small shops, garages, playgrounds and patches of exhausted greenery. Many of these buildings were never luxurious. After decades of inadequate maintenance, economic upheaval and now war, some have become places in which the distinction between a home and a structure merely capable of being inhabited is becoming uncomfortable.

This is particularly apparent in parts of Saltivka and other large residential districts towards the city’s outskirts. Saltivka became internationally notorious during the first months of the full-scale invasion because of the intensity of Russian attacks upon it. The danger has by no means disappeared. UNHCR has reported that about 70 per cent of residential buildings in Saltivka were damaged, some beyond repair, while thousands of people nevertheless continue to live there, including displaced people who have nowhere better to go.

The scale of the wider problem is difficult to comprehend. Kharkiv City Council reported in June 2025 that almost 9,000 residential properties in the city had suffered damage as a result of Russian aggression. The reconstruction effort is substantial: the city says that 150 severely damaged apartment buildings were restored during 2025 and that work on another 200 major projects was planned for 2026. Yet these impressive figures also reveal the enormity of what remains to be done.

The lift that does not work

One of the simplest ways to understand poverty in Kharkiv is to enter an ageing apartment building and discover that the lift does not work.

For a young and healthy person, climbing eight or ten storeys is an irritation. For an elderly person it can amount to imprisonment. For somebody using crutches, suffering from heart disease or living with another disability, a broken lift may transform an apartment into a place that can scarcely be left. Carrying groceries becomes an expedition. Collecting medicine becomes a problem requiring assistance from neighbours. Descending repeatedly into a shelter during air-raid warnings may be physically impossible.

This is not an insignificant issue in a city dominated by high-rise housing. At the beginning of 2026 the municipal lift company was responsible for approximately 6,700 lifts, alongside more than 6,300 dispatch systems. Those numbers indicate the sheer dependence of everyday Kharkiv life upon an infrastructure that most of us barely notice until it fails.

War compounds every existing defect. Electricity interruptions stop lifts. Blast waves damage windows, doors, wiring and communal areas. Maintenance budgets must compete with emergency repairs after missile and drone attacks. The Ukrainian government extended its SvitloDIM resilience programme to Kharkiv region in 2026 precisely because apartment buildings require equipment capable of keeping essential communal systems functioning during blackouts.

There is an important difference between a building that is technically habitable and a building in which it is reasonable to expect a vulnerable human being to live. A functioning roof, electricity connection and water supply may satisfy the most elementary conception of habitation. They do not necessarily produce a decent home.

Poverty behind the apartment door

The poverty of Kharkiv is also frequently invisible because it is contained inside private apartments. A person may live in a building that appears perfectly ordinary from the street while inhabiting rooms with deteriorating plumbing, inadequate heating, broken furniture, ageing electrical installations and windows that have been repeatedly damaged or patched after explosions. Wallpaper peels, pipes leak, bathrooms decay and domestic appliances survive years beyond the point at which a wealthier household would replace them.

None of this necessarily reflects indifference on the part of the people who live there. Poverty imposes its own hierarchy of maintenance. If one’s income is barely sufficient for food, utilities and medicine, repairing a bathroom becomes optional. If replacing a refrigerator consumes several months of disposable income, the old refrigerator continues until it finally expires. If the communal entrance is filthy or the stairwell lights do not work, an individual resident may have neither the money nor the authority to repair them.

War makes this economics harsher. A household that might once have accumulated modest savings instead spends them on emergency repairs, medicines, transport or helping relatives displaced from somewhere closer to the front. An elderly pensioner may suddenly find a daughter and grandchildren living in the same small apartment. A family may be supporting a relative serving in the Armed Forces. Another may have lost its principal wage earner. Someone else may have fled Kupiansk, Vovchansk or a village closer to the Russian border with little more than a suitcase.

The result is a form of deprivation that does not always resemble the poverty familiar to western European cities. There may be no person sleeping visibly on the pavement. Instead there is an elderly woman living alone on the ninth floor of a deteriorating apartment block, carefully calculating whether she can afford both medicine and adequate food, and hoping that the lift works tomorrow.

Living vertically under bombardment

Then there is the peculiar psychology of living high above the ground in a city under repeated aerial attack.

Kharkiv’s apartment blocks were designed to house enormous numbers of people efficiently. They were not designed around a world of Shahed-type drones, ballistic missiles and glide bombs. When an air-raid warning sounds, residents of upper floors confront a grim calculation. The official principle of seeking shelter is obvious; the practicalities may not be.

An elderly person on the eighth or twelfth floor cannot necessarily descend the stairs quickly, particularly if the lift has stopped because of an electricity failure. Nor can that person realistically climb back upstairs after every warning, particularly when alarms may occur repeatedly. One Saltivka resident interviewed by UNHCR described precisely this predicament: living on the eighth floor, she and her husband were too old to run downstairs every time drones could be heard, and instead sheltered behind two walls.

This creates one of the cruellest inequalities of wartime urban life. Money buys choices. A wealthier person can move temporarily to western Ukraine, rent an apartment in a safer district, purchase backup electricity equipment or live in a modern building with better facilities. Poor people frequently remain where circumstances have placed them.

And the threat is not theoretical. In March 2025 alone, according to Kharkiv City Council, 219 residential buildings were damaged in attacks and almost 4,300 windows were smashed. Housing continued to suffer during subsequent attacks, while strikes on energy infrastructure have periodically deprived large parts of Kharkiv of electricity.

For residents of vulnerable high-rise buildings, therefore, the apartment is simultaneously home and potential target. Every unexplained noise in the night may prompt the instinctive question familiar across eastern Ukraine: was that an explosion, air defence, a motorcycle, thunder or merely a door slamming somewhere in the building?

The accumulation of small indignities

Extreme poverty is often described statistically, through household income, unemployment, pensions or eligibility for social assistance. Yet statistics inadequately capture the cumulative psychological effects of poor housing.

Poverty is the broken light in the stairwell that nobody repairs. It is the lift that works intermittently and the entrance door that does not close properly. It is carrying shopping up seven flights of stairs. It is cooking in a kitchen whose fixtures have not been replaced for thirty years. It is putting a bucket beneath a leaking pipe and learning to live with the bucket because the repair costs too much.

It is also the gradual disappearance of expectations. People become accustomed to things not working. The malfunctioning object becomes part of the architecture. A cracked window is taped. A damaged wall is covered. An ancient washing machine is repaired for the fourth time. The staircase smells unpleasant, so people walk through it more quickly. These are individually minor inconveniences, but together they can constitute an environment in which human dignity is steadily eroded.

War intensifies this because municipal resources are necessarily directed towards emergencies. Kharkiv spent hundreds of millions of hryvnias during 2025 dealing with accidents and repairs in apartment buildings, while simultaneously undertaking major reconstruction projects. This is not a city administration facing an ordinary backlog of municipal maintenance; it is a city attempting to maintain an enormous housing stock while that housing stock continues to be attacked.

That distinction matters. It would be facile simply to blame municipal authorities whenever something is broken. Kharkiv’s utility workers perform extraordinary work after attacks, frequently restoring electricity, heating and water remarkably quickly. After a major strike in January 2026 damaged more than 30 residential buildings and a hospital, for example, the regional authorities reported that essential services had already been restored in nearby buildings capable of continued occupation while hundreds of people worked on the aftermath.

Nevertheless, rapid emergency restoration is not the same thing as providing good housing. The first keeps a city alive. The second makes life worth living.

Two cities occupying the same streets

There is therefore a danger in talking too casually about Kharkiv’s celebrated resilience. The word is accurate, but it can become sentimental. People are resilient because circumstances require them to be. A pensioner climbing ten floors because the lift has broken is certainly demonstrating resilience, but it would be preferable if somebody repaired the lift.

The same observation applies more broadly. Kharkiv’s cafés may be full. Its restaurants may serve excellent food. Young people may dress fashionably and walk through Shevchenko Park. Businesses operate, taxis circulate and shops remain open. All these things are real, and they represent an impressive refusal to permit Russia to extinguish ordinary urban life.

Yet another Kharkiv exists simultaneously, often only a few kilometres away. It consists of people counting coins in supermarkets, pensioners living in decaying flats, internally displaced families sharing overcrowded accommodation, people with disabilities trapped by malfunctioning infrastructure and residents of tall apartment buildings who understand that their homes may once again be damaged tonight.

These two Kharkivs are not contradictions. They are characteristics of a large city at war.

Winter

Winter exposes everything.

A badly maintained apartment that is merely unpleasant in July can become dangerous in January. Damaged windows matter more. Heating matters more. Electricity failures matter more. A broken lift becomes more serious when stairs are dark and icy. Older people become increasingly reluctant to leave their apartments. Food, medicine, warm clothing and reliable electricity cease to be questions of comfort and become questions of physical survival.

Kharkiv understands this better than almost any major European city. The establishment of resilience points and hot-food distribution facilities, the continuing reconstruction of apartment buildings and government programmes intended to keep communal systems operating during blackouts all demonstrate the scale of preparations required merely to sustain ordinary civilian existence.

But infrastructure programmes alone cannot resolve the underlying problem. Kharkiv needs not merely reconstruction after Russian attacks but sustained investment in the ordinary fabric of domestic life: lifts, stairwells, plumbing, insulation, electrical systems, disability access, windows, roofs and communal spaces. These are mundane things. Precisely for that reason, they matter enormously.

What dignity looks like

There is an understandable temptation, when discussing Ukraine during wartime, to concentrate upon grand themes: geopolitics, military strategy, European security, weapons deliveries and diplomatic negotiations. Yet wars are ultimately experienced by individual human beings in specific rooms.

For a poor resident of Kharkiv, geopolitics may manifest itself as a window blown out at three o’clock in the morning. Economic policy may mean whether there is enough money to repair it. Municipal government may mean whether the lift works. Social policy may determine whether an elderly or disabled person receives assistance carrying groceries upstairs. Energy security may mean whether there is heat in the bedroom when the temperature outside falls below freezing.

This is why the condition of Kharkiv’s poorer apartment buildings deserves more attention. The city is rightly admired for surviving. Its people have endured a degree of bombardment that would have emptied many other European cities. But survival must not become the standard by which civilian life is judged.

The objective should not merely be that people remain alive inside damaged buildings. It should be that an elderly woman can press a button and expect the lift to arrive; that a disabled resident can leave home without organising an expedition; that children sleep in warm rooms; that bathrooms function, roofs do not leak and stairwells are illuminated; and that people who have spent years listening to explosions are afforded at least the elementary dignity of a home that works.

Kharkiv has demonstrated beyond doubt that it can survive. The harder task, during the war and eventually after it, is to ensure that survival does not become a permanent way of life for those who can least afford anything better.