Why Is Everyone in Kharkiv So Crazy?
By Matthew Parish
Monday 5 October 2026
There comes a point in every foreigner’s acquaintance with Kharkiv when a question presents itself with irresistible force: why is everyone here completely crazy? I ask this question not as a psychiatrist, nor as a sociologist, nor even as an anthropologist, but from the rather more authoritative position of a man sitting in a bar drinking while extremely loud rock music competes with an air raid siren outside. The siren is winning, and nobody else in the bar appears to have noticed.
This is not quite true, because of course they have noticed. Everyone in Kharkiv knows exactly what an air raid siren sounds like, just as a Londoner knows the noise of an approaching Underground train and a Genevan knows the sound of somebody complaining about the price of dinner. The difference is that in Kharkiv an air raid siren theoretically means that something may shortly descend from the heavens and explode, whereas the principal danger associated with a London Underground train is that somebody might stand on the wrong side of the escalator.
Nevertheless, nobody moves. The barman continues polishing glasses, a woman at the next table continues scrolling through her telephone and two men continue a conversation that appears to involve football, women or possibly both. The rock music continues pounding from the speakers while, somewhere beyond the windows, the siren maintains its mournful electronic announcement that Vladimir Putin would like everybody to reconsider their evening plans. Nobody does, and this is the point at which the foreigner begins to wonder whether Kharkiv has collectively lost its mind.
The reasonable response to an announcement that ballistic missiles may be heading in your general direction would seem to involve getting up, locating the nearest shelter and proceeding towards it with a certain degree of urgency. The Kharkiv response is more likely to involve ordering another beer. This may not feature prominently in official civil defence guidance, but it appears to enjoy considerable popular support.
And yet this is one of the reasons I like Kharkiv so much. There is something immensely attractive about a city that refuses to perform its suffering for you, because Kharkiv does not particularly care whether you approve of it, understand it or consider its behaviour sensible. It has acquired the rough manners of somebody who has survived several attempted murders and no longer feels obliged to make polite conversation about the experience.
There is very little pretence here, because war has stripped away much of the social theatre that dominates life in safer European cities. People say extraordinary things because extraordinary things have happened to them. They tell you stories over drinks that would constitute the defining trauma of somebody else’s life and then ask whether you would like another Guinness. They can be abrasive, sentimental, generous, suspicious, hilarious and infuriating, sometimes within the same ten minutes, and I find this considerably more interesting than good manners.
There is an important distinction, however, between madness and adaptation. Human beings are extraordinarily good at becoming accustomed to circumstances that would once have seemed intolerable. The first air raid siren frightens you, the tenth interrupts your sleep and the hundredth irritates you. After several thousand, it becomes part of the municipal soundtrack, somewhere between the traffic, the tram bells and somebody playing dreadful music through the speaker of a mobile telephone.
War therefore creates its own peculiar psychology. People cannot remain permanently frightened because permanent fear is physiologically exhausting. If every siren produced the same terror as the first, nobody in Kharkiv would be capable of working, shopping, drinking, flirting, arguing, marrying, divorcing or performing any of the other activities by which civilisation maintains itself. Eventually the extraordinary must become ordinary because otherwise ordinary life becomes impossible.
That does not mean the danger has disappeared. Kharkiv remains one of Europe’s great cities living beneath the shadow of sudden violence, and explosions are not abstractions here. Buildings have been destroyed, people have been killed and almost everybody knows somebody whose life has been altered by the war. Yet this makes the indifference to the sirens simultaneously more comprehensible and more disturbing, because people are not ignoring something they do not understand. They are ignoring something they understand intimately.
Hence the particular variety of Kharkiv craziness. It is not the madness of people who believe themselves invulnerable but the madness of people who have discovered that acknowledging one’s vulnerability every minute of every day is no way to live. There is consequently a strange competition between death and inconvenience: a missile may arrive, but your beer is getting warm; a drone may be somewhere overhead, but you have already ordered dinner; the Russians may be attempting to destroy Ukrainian morale, but the guitarist has just reached the good part.
Strategic calculations thereby become curiously domestic. Is the missile actually coming towards Kharkiv? How long would it take to reach the shelter? Is the shelter open? Is it raining? Who is going to watch my drink? These questions sound absurd until one has lived somewhere in which they arise every day, at which point risk ceases to be binary and becomes a matter of weary calculation.
Human beings do this everywhere. We drive cars despite knowing that cars crash, drink despite knowing what alcohol does to the liver and, in Britain, eat kebabs at three o’clock in the morning despite possessing overwhelming empirical evidence that this is unwise. Kharkiv has simply extended the ordinary human talent for irrational risk assessment into the domain of ballistic missiles. Once one appreciates this, the apparent madness begins to look disconcertingly familiar.
There is also an element of defiance. Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian cities has never been exclusively about destroying physical infrastructure, because terror is intended to alter behaviour. Sirens, drones, missiles and explosions impose themselves upon the rhythms of civilian existence. They demand attention and insist that Moscow should have a seat at every dinner table, a presence in every bedroom and an invisible hand upon every glass raised in every bar. Kharkiv’s response is frequently to decline the invitation and carry on drinking.
This is another reason I have become so fond of the place. Kharkiv possesses an almost pathological resistance to self-pity, and although the city is battered it does not want to be treated as a museum exhibit of Ukrainian suffering. There are damaged buildings and darkened streets, but there are also restaurants, bars, museums, universities, lovers quarrelling, old women carrying shopping bags, young people making ridiculous plans and taxi drivers complaining about matters infinitely more important than geopolitics. Life does not merely continue here as an abstract slogan; it continues noisily, badly, drunkenly, romantically and often very late at night.
The people fascinate me for much the same reason. In Kharkiv one repeatedly meets individuals whom no novelist would dare invent because an editor would complain that they were implausible. Volunteers drive towards dangerous places carrying potatoes, paramedics go to work knowing that the next call may take them towards the aftermath of an attack and human rights lawyers document atrocities while the war producing those atrocities continues around them. Bartenders serve drinks during air raid alerts, while the city’s eccentrics, dreamers, opportunists, drunks, saints and scoundrels wander through the same streets, with occasional individuals appearing to belong simultaneously to several of these categories.
For a writer, this is irresistible. Kharkiv provides more human material in an evening than many comfortable cities provide in a year, because almost everybody has a story, although not everybody wants to tell it and some people tell stories that plainly improve in proportion to the quantity of vodka consumed. The city constantly reminds me that human beings are stranger, braver, more dishonest, more generous and considerably funnier than theories about human beings generally allow.
I also like the absence of certainty. In comfortable societies we construct elaborate routines designed to persuade ourselves that tomorrow will resemble today, whereas Kharkiv cannot offer this luxury. Plans remain provisional, and people cancel meetings because of alerts, electricity failures, military duties or events they prefer not to explain. Yet this uncertainty produces an intensity that safer places often lack: conversations matter more, friendships can form quickly, acts of generosity acquire greater weight and an ordinary evening in a bar can feel oddly precious because everybody understands, without needing to mention it, that ordinary evenings are not guaranteed.
This is why the apparent madness contains something admirable. Continuing to drink beer while an air raid siren howls outside is not necessarily sensible behaviour, and nobody should pretend that ignoring official warnings is prudent. Yet beneath the questionable personal risk assessment lies a deeper refusal to permit war to occupy every corner of consciousness. The population has discovered that survival means more than remaining biologically alive; it means preserving some fragment of ordinary existence in circumstances designed to make ordinary existence impossible.
The result can be disconcerting to outsiders. Kharkiv humour is dark because lighter humour sometimes seems inadequate, and people joke about explosions, compare the sounds of different weapons and continue parties through alerts. They complain about electricity cuts with the exasperation other Europeans reserve for delayed trains. When something explodes in the distance, somebody may identify the approximate weapon before returning to their conversation, not necessarily because they do not care but because they have cared for so long that the emotional machinery has developed unusual gears.
War also produces genuinely eccentric behaviour. It concentrates personalities, exaggerates habits and strips away many of the social conventions that ordinarily keep human beings respectably dull. People fall in love too quickly, drink too much and make extravagant promises. They become obsessed with causes, charities, military units, politics, conspiracies, religion or one another. Some become extraordinarily generous, others become extraordinarily selfish and almost everyone becomes more intensely themselves.
I suspect that this intensity is ultimately what draws me to Kharkiv. I have spent enough of my life in places where people conceal themselves behind professional titles, social conventions and carefully rehearsed opinions. Kharkiv is not entirely free of these things — nowhere is — but war has a habit of exposing character. When circumstances become difficult, you discover very quickly who will help, who will run, who will lie, who will steal, who will share their last cigarette and who will drive through the night to deliver food to somebody they have never met.
The answers are not always flattering, and that is part of the attraction as well. Kharkiv is not compelling because everybody here is good; they are not. It is compelling because people here are intensely human, with all the magnificence and grotesquery that this entails. War brings generosity and corruption, courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal into unusually close proximity. You do not have to search very hard for human nature in Kharkiv because it tends to sit down beside you and ask whether you are buying the next round.
Kharkiv amplifies this phenomenon because it is simultaneously a sophisticated metropolis and a frontier city. Universities, theatres, bars, laboratories and grand nineteenth-century buildings coexist with sandbags, damaged apartment blocks and the possibility of an explosion at any hour. The intellectual and the primitive sit beside one another, and you can spend the afternoon discussing philosophy before spending the evening wondering whether the enormous bang outside was sufficiently enormous to justify getting out of your chair.
Usually somebody knows and will explain the situation with unnerving calm: “No, that was ours.” This statement is supposed to be reassuring and, after enough time in Kharkiv, somehow it is. You nod, return to your drink and realise that your standards for what constitutes reassuring information have undergone a significant adjustment.
Perhaps, then, the original question is wrong. The remarkable thing is not that everyone in Kharkiv appears crazy but that anyone could expect four and a half years of full-scale war to leave everybody perfectly normal. Normality itself has changed, and what looks like insanity to a visitor may simply be the psychological architecture required to inhabit a city where tomorrow is expected but never entirely guaranteed.
There is nevertheless something infectious about it. After enough time in Kharkiv, you notice that your own reactions begin to change. The siren starts and you no longer immediately look towards the door. An explosion occurs and instead of asking whether you should take cover, you find yourself wondering what sort of explosion it was. Eventually you catch yourself participating in conversations that would sound deranged anywhere else on Earth: “Was that a missile?” “No, probably air defence.” “Another beer?” “Yes.” The transition from concerned visitor to honorary lunatic has occurred so gradually that you failed to notice it.
And this, perhaps, is how Kharkiv gets you. I like it here because the city feels extraordinarily alive precisely because death is not entirely theoretical. I like its irreverence, its intellectual energy, its rough edges, its improbable characters and its refusal to become what outsiders expect a city at war to be. I like the fact that behind the damaged façades people are still making plans, making jokes, making love, making money, making mistakes and occasionally making complete fools of themselves. That is not merely survival; it is civilisation behaving badly enough to prove that it remains alive.
There is something else I like about Kharkiv that is harder to describe. The city demands a certain honesty from you because it is difficult to maintain elaborate illusions about yourself when explosions occasionally interrupt your train of thought. Questions that seem terribly important elsewhere suddenly appear ridiculous, while things that comfortable life encourages us to take for granted — friendship, courage, loyalty, a warm room, a good conversation, a stranger doing something unexpectedly kind — acquire disproportionate importance. Kharkiv rearranges one’s hierarchy of values without asking permission.
Perhaps this explains why, despite everything, I feel unusually comfortable here. Kharkiv is not comfortable in any conventional sense; it can be cold, damaged, dangerous, chaotic, frustrating and exhausting. Yet there is a freedom in living among people who have learned that life cannot be indefinitely postponed until circumstances become convenient. There will always be another problem, another siren, another broken lift, another blackout, another bureaucratic absurdity and possibly another missile. If happiness requires the disappearance of all these things, happiness will have to wait forever.
The people of Kharkiv, by contrast, have developed the rather more practical philosophy that happiness must be seized while the opportunity presents itself. Drink the beer, play the music, kiss the girl, tell the joke, help the stranger, argue about politics and make plans for next week even if nobody can promise you what next week will look like. There is recklessness in this philosophy, certainly, but there is wisdom as well. A society obsessed with eliminating every conceivable risk can eventually forget what all that safety was supposed to be protecting.
The city does not persuade you that the danger is unreal. It teaches you that the danger is real and that life must continue anyway. That proposition is simultaneously courageous, foolish, rational and insane, which is probably why it describes wartime Kharkiv rather well. It also explains why the city can become strangely addictive: once you have experienced life stripped of some of its comfortable illusions, returning to places where people become apoplectic because their cappuccino contains the wrong variety of milk can require a certain psychological adjustment.
As I write these words, the rock music continues, the air raid siren continues and nobody has moved a muscle. The barman remains behind the bar, the conversations continue and glasses are raised beneath the peculiar soundtrack of a European city at war. Against all conventional logic, there are very few places I would rather be, because beneath all the madness there is something here that feels intensely and unmistakably alive.
Perhaps everyone in Kharkiv really is crazy, and perhaps by now I am becoming one of them. After spending enough time here, however, the more troubling possibility is that this is precisely why I feel so at home.
