Missiles and drones now strike the capital almost every hour. Lives are being torn apart, and the stories people tell are hard to bear.
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Polina Kolodiazhna works with Greenpeace, helping to plan and build solar installations for hospitals. With funding from the Biohaus Foundation in Paderborn, solar systems and batteries from Germany are making their way east, where they are installed by Ukrainian women trained as solar installers by Greenpeace.
Gallows humour in Kyiv
Kolodiazhna’s report from Kyiv captures the mood there: “It has been an extremely difficult month for the city. We have even started making a joke: the war actually only began this September.” The gallows humour says a great deal about how sharply the attacks have intensified, and how far daily life has shifted with them.
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The strikes now come day and night, and in September, Kyiv was under air-raid alert for around 243 hours, roughly a third of the entire month. The gaps between alerts have become a race to buy food, reach a pharmacy or cross the city. “Sometimes we have an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes only a few minutes,” Kolodiazhna writes. “That is very short for stocking up on food or other daily necessities.” And the gaps keep getting shorter.
Many shops, pharmacies and service providers close during alerts, and for good reason. The aim, as many people in Ukraine see it, is to wear down the population, and Russia’s relentless attacks are taking away the basics of a normal life: sleeping through the night, going to school, accessing medical care or simply getting to work safely.
Strikes close to home
On 28 September, a drone hit a National Academy of Sciences building in central Kyiv, killing two people. The building stands just one building away from the German Embassy. “My apartment is about 300 metres away,” Kolodiazhna writes. “When the Academy was hit, I was standing in the courtyard. Within seconds I was showered with tiny fragments of concrete. My apartment filled with smoke.”
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On many mornings, residents wake to smoke from fires in and around Kyiv hanging over their neighbourhoods. “The attacks stay with us long after the explosions,” she writes, “in the air we breathe, in our homes and throughout our daily lives.”
The attacks are aimed above all at medical and municipal facilities, as well as energy infrastructure and telecommunications. A few examples: On 17 September, a kindergarten in the Dniprovskyi district was severely damaged. A week later, windows and doors were shattered on several floors of Maternity Hospital No. 2. Patients and staff were unharmed because they had taken refuge in the shelter, and a baby boy was born there, underground, while the attack went on above them.
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Medicines running short
Numerous warehouses have been destroyed, leaving some foods scarce in supermarkets and some medicines hard to find in pharmacies. Damage to pharmaceutical factories is making the shortages worse, and people who rely on regular medication are going without.
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The attacks are also disrupting the internet, with around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding area affected by outages. On 27 September, the headquarters of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, was hit. Strikes like this cut people off from each other and from life-saving warnings.
Russia is also keeping up its attacks on power and heating, including thermal and combined heat and power plants. “Attacks on 30 September damaged energy facilities in and around Kyiv and once again led to emergency shutdowns in the capital,” Kolodiazhna reports. “We had no electricity and, for a time, no water. Winter is approaching, and we dread it.”
On 30 September, a drone hit the Institute for Nuclear Research, which houses a research reactor. As a precaution, the reactor had been shut down in February 2022 and its core unloaded. Fortunately, the reactor and its safety systems were undamaged, and radiation levels remained normal.
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No respite in October
On 1 October, a Russian drone struck a school just as lessons were getting under way, setting the building alight. More than 100 pupils and around 60 staff had taken refuge in the shelter, and no one was hurt. “We are appalled, again and again, at how unscrupulously Russia endangers even children,” Kolodiazhna writes. “Russia’s terror knows no limits.”
Later that day, two drones struck near the Southern Bridge over the Dnipro. A metro train was caught in the blast, and dust poured into the carriages. Passengers and the driver escaped unharmed, but traffic over the bridge was halted for a time.
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Refusing to give up
“Before I go outside, I check the Radar UA website,” Kolodiazhna writes. “It tells me whether I have enough time to reach my destination before the next air-raid alert is triggered.” The site tracks in real time which drones and missiles are heading towards Kyiv.
“Even though it is hard, and growing harder all the time, we will not be brought to our knees,” she writes. She ends: “It comforts us when we feel that people see and hear us. That we are not entirely alone in this terrible war.” (HS)
Read Polina Kolodiazhna’s full account on the Greenpeace website (German)
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