"what's it like in Ukraine right now?"
reflections from my latest trip
I just returned from another trip to Ukraine, where the mood has shifted as palpably as the seasons. The cold has settled in; children are bundled in their warmest clothes, with hats secured tightly under their chins. Their parents and grandparents are preparing for another winter of Russian attacks targeting civilian infrastructure—heating, electricity—aimed at grinding down Ukrainian resilience as the full-scale invasion nears its two-year anniversary.
It remains very safe in Kyiv, thanks to air defense systems Ukraine received from its allies. Unlike my September trip, the air raid siren did go off at least once per day. About half the alarms were short—ten or twenty minutes here or there as the authorities determined which direction missiles or drones were traveling—but several stretched on for hours, usually because a MiG aircraft had taken off somewhere in Russia, placing the whole country under alert.
Every time the alarm sounds, every Ukrainian makes their own personal calculation: will they go to the shelter or not? They reference Telegram channels to see the cause of the alert: if it’s a MiG, they stay above ground. The other calculations get more complicated. Ballistics travel faster than most people can get to their shelters. Drones are easily dealt with by air defense but can be devastating if they slip through. Do you interrupt your meeting? Your grocery shopping? Your shower? Do you drop everything, knowing you might be stuck in a basement or a metro station for hours? (Ukrainian kids in school do—for every alert, they proceed with their teacher and classmates to the shelter, no matter what.) Do you bring your pets? Wake the sleeping baby?
Kyivans know they are lucky. Ukrainians living closer to Russia in areas with fewer air defenses are under far greater threat; their cities have been bombarded, their air defenses are less effective, if they exist at all. But even in a “safe” city, these constant calculations are a a constant worry. It remains very safe in Kyiv, but very exhausting.
Toward the end of my trip, one alert sounded in the morning. I was getting ready for my day; prep with my team for a meeting over breakfast, and the meeting itself. The alert was arresting. While I had gone to bed every night with everything I’d need to head to the shelter easily at hand, the moment the alarm sounded that morning I was in my underwear, in the middle of doing my eyeliner, and hadn’t yet gathered everything I needed for the day.
I texted with my colleagues. It seemed like a large wave of drones was headed to Kyiv. I finished getting dressed as quickly as possible Another text: maybe ballistics too. I moved more quickly, gathering everything I might need to stay belowground a number of hours—food, laptop, chargers—knowing that for every second I wasted in my room I was further at risk if there was actually a ballistic missile headed to Kyiv.
As I opened my door to head to the basement, carrying my coat, scarf, and a heavy bag full of a day’s stuff and then some, my watch vibrated and the siren outside sounded: all clear.
That’s the reality in Ukraine today: a constantly heightened state of anxious awareness. A desire to just get on with life, willing the war to be over, while mentally preparing for it to drag on.
As I’ve written before, Russia is counting on Ukraine and its allies to become exhausted, stricken by “war fatigue,” so Ukraine is willing to come to the bargaining table and Moscow can extract confessions from the Ukrainian government that the Ukrainian population will support. Americans have certainly lost sight of what that outcome would mean, particularly as U.S. aid to Ukraine has been conflated with the question of funding Israel’s war against Hamas. A new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll displayed worrisome trends, with a full 36 percent of respondents across party lines who believe the U.S. should fund neither war, and much deeper partisan divides:
This is an essay about what it’s like in Ukraine right now. (My kid is going to wake up from his nap in a few minutes, so I don’t have the runway to get into the broader geopolitical arguments for continued support to Kyiv, and why even in a complex global landscape, these decisions need not be zero sum.) Let me simply remind you—based on my fresh personal experience in Kyiv—what Western support has done: save civilian lives. After Russia deliberately targeted maternity hospitals, shopping malls, schools, and other clearly non-military targets over and over again, the West finally provided Ukraine with the air defense systems it had long been requesting. Those are the systems that make daily life in much of Ukraine liveable—exhausting, but liveable.
Ukraine needs more of that support—and, crucially, our moral support—to keep carrying on as it heads toward another difficult winter.