Things are rough in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 23 September 2026
Things are rough in Kharkiv, and I discovered this before I had even arrived. I was asleep on the train, somewhere in the darkness before dawn, when an exceptionally large woman began shouting at me. At first I had absolutely no idea who she was, why she was shouting or what offence I might have committed while unconscious. Ukrainian night trains have their own complicated etiquette, and it seemed entirely possible that I had violated some obscure rule concerning bedding, doors, tea or the permissible orientation of one’s shoes. Eventually I understood. There were drones.
This was not an abstract warning about drones somewhere over eastern Ukraine. Russian drones were attacking in and around Kharkiv, and the woman had decided that remaining asleep was an inadequate response to this information. She communicated her views at considerable volume. I sat up, disorientated, while the train continued rumbling through the darkness towards a city that Russia has been trying to terrorise into submission for years. There is something peculiarly absurd about being awakened because somebody may be trying to kill you. The human mind expects mortal danger to arrive ceremonially, with explosions, soldiers running down corridors, dramatic announcements and perhaps somebody shouting instructions through a megaphone. Instead there was a large Ukrainian woman, apparently furious with me personally for sleeping through the possibility of a Russian drone strike. She was probably right, and the train continued.
Arrival
Kharkiv railway station is magnificent. It belongs to that peculiar tradition of monumental railway architecture in which arriving somewhere was once considered sufficiently important to justify enormous halls, columns, chandeliers and ceilings designed to make the traveller feel very small. At the moment, however, its grandeur competes with a different soundtrack. The air raid sirens were wailing when we arrived, their mechanical lament reverberating around the station and announcing that the day’s business of surviving another Russian assault had already begun.
There is something unforgettable about stepping off a sleeper train in the early morning while sirens echo around an enormous railway station. Everyone hears them, but almost nobody visibly reacts. Passengers drag suitcases across the platforms, railway employees continue their work, taxi drivers wait outside, people stare at their telephones, somebody buys coffee and somebody else smokes a cigarette. The sirens continue screaming above this spectacle of ordinary human activity, apparently offended that nobody is paying them sufficient attention.
This is not because the people of Kharkiv do not understand the danger. They understand it considerably better than almost anybody else. Kharkiv lies close enough to the Russian border that warnings may be brutally short, and the city has endured repeated attacks throughout the war. The population has acquired an intimate knowledge of different varieties of aerial threat, together with the fatalistic calculations that accompany them. There comes a point at which fear itself becomes exhausting, and fear cannot indefinitely be the organising principle of one’s life.
People cannot spend years permanently terrified. They have children to look after, elderly relatives to visit, jobs to perform, lovers to quarrel with, cigarettes to smoke and groceries to buy. Human civilisation depends upon countless mundane activities, and war does not abolish them. Indeed war makes them strangely more important, because performing ordinary tasks becomes a way of insisting that the abnormal has not conquered everything. Kharkiv therefore carries on, whether or not the Russians, the drones or the electricity cooperate.
The electricity problem
The electricity, unfortunately, does not always carry on. Power cuts have become part of the rhythm of life. The lights disappear, the internet disappears and lifts become questionable propositions. Batteries acquire an importance they never possessed in peacetime, power banks become treasured possessions and every electrical socket becomes an opportunity whenever electricity happens to be available. One develops the instincts of a hunter-gatherer, except that instead of searching for berries or wild animals one searches for a functioning socket and enough time to charge a telephone.
Then the power returns and everything suddenly comes alive. Lights flicker into existence, refrigerators hum, telephones begin charging and routers blink enthusiastically. Somewhere a generator stops growling. People exploit the temporary abundance with the urgency of medieval peasants bringing in a harvest before the rain, because nobody knows quite how long this particular electrical civilisation will last. Then everything goes dark again and the process begins once more.
The psychological effect is peculiar. Electricity is one of those miracles of civilisation that modern people notice principally when it disappears. We expect to press a switch and produce light; we expect hot water, communications, heating, refrigeration and elevators. Modern urban existence consists of thousands of invisible assumptions, and attacks upon Ukraine’s energy infrastructure strike directly at those assumptions. They are intended not merely to damage machinery but to make the ordinary processes of life uncertain, difficult and exhausting.
Yet the remarkable thing about Kharkiv is how quickly people incorporate inconvenience into ordinary existence. Restaurants improvise, shops continue trading and generators appear on pavements. People illuminate rooms with rechargeable lamps and mobile telephones are charged whenever an opportunity arises. Plans are made on the assumption that electricity may disappear without warning, and everybody acquires a strange practical expertise in surviving the repeated disappearance of the twentieth century. The extraordinary becomes routine, until the routine becomes extraordinary again whenever something explodes.
A city under the sky
Kharkiv has always been an unusual city. She is enormous, intellectual, industrial and faintly eccentric. Her avenues are absurdly broad and her architecture ranges from imperial grandeur through Soviet monumentalism to the constructivist fantasies of the early twentieth century. There are universities everywhere, and beneath the surface lies the unmistakable atmosphere of a city that has spent generations arguing with herself about what precisely she is. War has added another layer to this complicated identity, because now everybody occasionally looks towards the sky.
The sky has become political. It contains reconnaissance drones, attack drones, missiles and aircraft, and an ordinary patch of blue above an apartment building can suddenly become the direction from which death arrives. A distant buzzing noise may be meaningless or it may cause everybody nearby to stop talking for several seconds. Then conversation resumes, because conversation must resume eventually. Nobody can spend an entire life listening to the sky.
That is perhaps the strangest aspect of Kharkiv in wartime. Danger has become omnipresent without becoming dominant; it sits beside ordinary life rather than replacing it. A couple walk down the street holding hands while a dog investigates a tree. A delivery driver swears at somebody and a tram rattles past. An air raid warning sounds and somewhere in the distance there is an explosion. Nobody screams, the dog continues investigating the tree and the city proceeds with whatever she was doing before Russia interrupted her.
Sublime chaos
There is a species of chaos that becomes beautiful when observed for long enough. It is not beautiful because suffering is beautiful, because it plainly is not, nor because war is romantic, because anyone who has seen very much of war rapidly loses patience with that idea. The beauty lies instead in human stubbornness: in the refusal of people to permit enormous machinery designed to frighten and kill them to determine every detail of how they live.
Kharkiv possesses this stubbornness in abundance. The city is chaotic because the machinery of ordinary urban life is constantly being interrupted. Electricity fails, alarms sound, transport changes, buildings are damaged, nights are broken by explosions and mornings begin with people checking their telephones to discover what happened while they were asleep. Yet millions of tiny acts of normality continue regardless, and collectively they amount to something considerably more impressive than the heroic rhetoric with which wars are usually described.
Coffee is made, hair is cut and contracts are signed. Students study, couples fall in love and people become drunk. Arguments begin for reasons entirely unrelated to Vladimir Putin. Somebody worries about his rent while somebody else buys an unnecessarily expensive pair of shoes. Children complain about their homework and grandmothers complain about everything. This is civilisation refusing to obey the logic of war, not through grand declarations but through an endless succession of trivial human decisions.
There is something sublime about it because the contrast is so extreme. The machinery of industrial violence hangs permanently over the city, yet beneath it people insist upon remaining human. The missiles and drones represent a gigantic apparatus constructed for the purpose of imposing fear, whereas the response is frequently something as modest as opening a café the following morning. Resistance is not always performed by somebody carrying a rifle. Sometimes it consists of unlocking the door at nine o’clock, switching on the coffee machine if there happens to be electricity and serving breakfast.
The mathematics of danger
People who have never lived under bombardment sometimes imagine that one either feels safe or feels terrified. Reality is more complicated, because human beings become amateur statisticians. How far away was that explosion? What sort of drone is being reported? Which district is being targeted? Is the warning ballistic? How long would it take to reach shelter, and is getting out of bed worth it? These calculations would appear insane in London, Paris or Berlin. In Kharkiv they are simply part of deciding what to do next.
Eventually one develops an uncomfortable relationship with probability. The chances of any particular missile or drone hitting any particular person remain small, but the consequences, should the arithmetic turn against you, are absolute. People therefore inhabit a psychological territory somewhere between rational caution and deliberate fatalism. Nobody can calculate the risks accurately, but everybody calculates them nonetheless, because the alternative would be either permanent panic or complete paralysis.
The woman on the train had evidently reached her own conclusion about this calculation. She had decided that whatever the statistical probability of our being struck, it was sufficiently substantial that I ought not to be sleeping through it. Her method of communicating this analysis lacked subtlety, but subtlety is perhaps overrated when Russian drones are flying around. I remain uncertain what precisely she expected me to do once awake, but at least I would apparently confront whatever happened in a properly conscious condition.
Things are rough
There is no point pretending otherwise: things are rough in Kharkiv. The city is tired, the infrastructure is battered, the electricity is unreliable, the nights are noisy and the warnings are relentless. Everybody knows somebody who has suffered, lost something or left. Years of war accumulate in ways that are difficult for visitors to perceive immediately, because exhaustion does not always announce itself dramatically. Sometimes it appears merely as a shrug, an impatient joke or the absence of any visible reaction when another siren begins.
Nevertheless Kharkiv does not feel like a dying city. Quite the opposite: she feels violently alive. Perhaps that is why her atmosphere is so difficult to describe. It is neither despair nor optimism and it is certainly not tranquillity. It is a sort of magnificent disorder in which the ordinary and the catastrophic have become neighbours, sharing the same streets and sometimes the same moments.
A siren begins and somebody orders another beer. The lights go out and somebody produces a torch. A drone flies overhead and somebody complains about the price of coffee. An explosion sounds and, after the instinctive silence in which everyone measures its distance, the conversation starts again. This is not heroism in the theatrical sense, because most people are not trying to be heroes. They are trying to get through Tuesday, and under the circumstances that is impressive enough.
War attempts to persuade people that nothing else matters. It demands absolute psychological attention, insisting that every conversation concern the war, every decision be governed by the war and every human emotion eventually collapse into fear, hatred or grief. Yet Kharkiv refuses this demand. The city remains vulgar, funny, impatient, beautiful, exhausted, argumentative and alive, and her people continue conducting the countless trivial activities from which civilisation is actually constructed while machines descend periodically from the sky with the intention of killing them.
Somewhere in this sublime chaos, trains continue to arrive and depart, restaurants continue to open, lovers continue to quarrel and people continue to complain when the electricity disappears. Somewhere on a train approaching the city in the darkness, an exceptionally large woman patrols the sleeping compartments, shouting people awake because the drones are coming. In Kharkiv this counts as a morning alarm, and perhaps that small absurdity captures the city better than any heroic description could.
Things are rough in Kharkiv, unquestionably. Yet Kharkiv is still there, and every ordinary day in which she remains noisy, difficult, chaotic and alive is itself an answer to those who would prefer otherwise.
