Kyiv, Ukraine – When Olena Krakovska is at work selling tools for manicures from a small shop on the basement floor of a shopping centre in central Kyiv, she doesn’t hear or see much. Air raid or not, I’m at work,” the 42-year-old single mother of two boys told Al Jazeera. Outside there are regular wailing air raid sirens, red-and-white explosions of Russian drones hit by Ukrainian interceptors, gong-like thuds and white plumes of smoke swelling in the sky.
Falling debris, from tiny metal pieces to larger fragments of fuselage, flop in the wind and come down with the sour stench of gunpowder. But when Krakovska is at home, the air raids rattle her senses and nerves. My brain isn’t functioning, my movements are uncoordinated,” she said.
Since mid-August, Russian air raids in Ukraine have become longer, more frightening for residents and more frequent as part of Moscow’s new tactic aimed at “terrorising our people, our cities and our villages far more intensely,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on September 6. Between June and early August, there were five air raids a week with a combined duration of 2.3 hours, according to a calculation by the UA.news web portal. In the third week of August, their number rose to 12 and their duration to 7.9 hours, and in the fourth week, 34 over 23.2 hours.
Early September brought a brief lull – Russia stopped shelling Kyiv for three days when United States negotiators visited Moscow and Kyiv. But on Monday, shelling resumed with a six-hour air raid, killing five, wounding 35 and causing several fires. Each raid involves fewer drones and missiles, but the timing is unpredictable, keeping hundreds of thousands awake all night and paralysing all walks of daily life.
They interrupt office hours, business meetings and school lessons, traumatise people and cause long traffic jams. They also turn commutes on public transport into hours-long ordeals. Stoicism, a macabre sense of humour and ingenuity keep Ukrainians optimistic.
That’s a phrase she heard from her great-grandmother Serafima, who survived the 1932-33 Holodomor famine and the 1941-43 Nazi occupation of central Ukraine. What worries her during her working hours is not the air raids but the schooling of her sons Bohdan, 12, and Volodymyr, 10. Their academic year began on September 1, but after two days spent in the airless school basement-turned-bomb shelter, she decided that they should study online, at home, in front of laptops.
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