As the Russians advance towards Kharkiv, Ukrainians head to the dance floor

We arrived in Kharkiv at lunchtime on Friday May 10th, as news was breaking that Russian troops had crossed the border, around 30km away, early that morning. “Shit, it’s war again,” thought Artem Vusyk, a theatre director. More than a year and a half ago Russian forces had been driven back from the outskirts of the city by a Ukrainian counter-offensive. This was the first time since then that they had set foot in this corner of eastern Ukraine, just as Ukrainian resolve seemed to be fraying along the front line.

Vusyk ended his rehearsal early after a friend, serving on the front line, called to report the Russian advance. Vusyk suggested the actors go home and pack go-bags as a precaution. Nina Khyzhna, Vusyk’s girlfriend, booked tickets on the night train to Kyiv. “Maybe we’ll go for a day or two,” he mused. “I don’t want to leave Kharkiv, but she’s anxious.”

By the following morning it was clear that the Russians were slowly advancing. “Everyone makes their own decision whether to stay here or to leave,” Oleh Syniehubov, the regional governor, told us.

An air-raid alert sounded near-continuously over the course of the weekend but life in the city seemed almost normal. On Saturday, at the main square, a handful of protesters holding hand-drawn placards complained that the council was spending too much on maintaining the parks. “We think it is improper to waste money during this cruel war. We are now at war and they are planting flower beds and reconstructing monuments! The city should fund our army more, otherwise it will be the occupiers enjoying our parks or destroying them,” said Olena, a sturdy and steadfast biology researcher. “I don’t think our streets or parks should be neglected or left in a mess,” she added, “but they buy foreign exotics, very expensive flowers.”

Resilient”, Anastasia Paraskevova told us cheerfully, when we asked how she was coping with the cumulative effect of the war, “but tired as fuck.” She had short pink hair and a row of hoop earrings. Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, Paraskevova worked in a vegan grocery; now she volunteers for the war effort, raising money and ferrying supplies like drones, power banks and medical aid to front-line units. Kharkiv had been under bombardment for so long she had grown tired of the word “resilient”: “Once it was cool, you could pat yourself on the back. Now it doesn’t sound good. People celebrate the fact that we are so comfortable with dying and death, that we are so cool with it and so brave. But it’s not like we have any choice in the matter.”

Paraskevova’s father was killed by a rocket strike shortly after the war began. Her mother survived but the house was “burnt to a crisp”. In the week before we spoke there had been two drone strikes a couple of minutes’ walk from her home. “Everything shakes, windows, doors. The sound is quite terrifying, even for hardened ‘resilient’ Kharkiv veterans.” The air-raid app on my phone wailed. It sounded a different note – high and shrill – from the alert for Kyiv and other regions in Ukraine. No one in the café reacted. Paraskevova said that most people had turned off the app because it went off half a dozen times a day. “You will lose your marbles if you have this sound on all the time.” There’s not a whole lot anyone can do anyway. Because of the city’s proximity to Russia, explosions often occur before the siren sounds. One café owner told us that if they closed every time there was an alert, they’d never be open.

People in Kharkiv are used to the front line moving back and forth. The Russians tried to capture the city in the early days of the war. They fired missiles into the centre but their troops only managed to reach the northern stretch of the ring road. From there, they pummelled one of the outer neighbourhoods with artillery for months. All but about 300,000 of the city’s population of 1.5m left. Then a Ukrainian counter-attack in autumn 2022 pushed Russian forces back across the border. Kharkiv was now out of artillery range. Over the course of 2023, many residents who had fled to Europe or safer Ukrainian cities returned.

When we first visited in April, half the shops along Sumska street, the main shopping thoroughfare, were boarded up. The buildings are a mix of pre-revolutionary pastel façades with art-nouveau balconies and heavy-duty Stalinist blocks. A street artist had painted the plywood panels with birds in bright colours. Traffic was thin but people were eating al fresco, kids in cool trainers drank matcha tonics, a woman handed out flyers for a new sex shop, street-cleaning machines swept the kerbs and skateboarders clattered up and down the steps of the closed opera house. The police fined us for stopping in a no-stopping zone.

The population of Kharkiv now stands at around two-thirds of the pre-invasion height. The city’s famed technical institutes, its universities, theatres and arts academies remain closed. But new bookshops and restaurants have optimistically popped up. It has become an article of municipal duty to clean up the rubble after missile strikes, patch holes in the tarmac and repair damaged traffic lights.

The city parks were beautifully maintained and lush with spring flowers. Lilacs bloomed beside a newly unveiled monument to children killed in the war. We met Ludmilla, a park keeper. She was bedding marigolds as an explosion crunched loudly, a few hundred metres away. “I have two sons serving in the army, so it’s very important for me to keep working, but I can see it’s important for people in the city also.” The anti-flower protesters seem to be a minority. “People stop to thank us, one lady this morning gave us chocolates…” Her eyes welled up. “It’s very important,” she repeated, “I can’t even explain it.”

Soldiers on leave wandered under old oak trees, staring, seemingly dazed, at the peaceful sight of hopping sparrows and couples kissing on benches. We were a bit lost too. There was often no GPS in the city because the Ukrainian authorities jammed the signal to throw off the guidance systems of Russian missiles.

Life has managed to go on even as Russian attacks on Kharkiv increased, becoming almost daily this spring: ballistic missiles, Iranian-made Shahed drones and the dreaded new glide bombs – Soviet devices fitted with navigation technology and fins. Kharkiv’s air defences aren’t as comprehensive as Kyiv’s, where hardly any missiles get past the Patriot batteries. In March two power plants were destroyed. Electricity became rationed – several hours on, several hours off – and the chug of generators filled the streets. Khyzhna described life in Kharkiv as “magical realism”: “You hear drones, you hear the air defence, rat-a-tat-tat, you feel like you are in ‘Star Wars’. And in the morning you are buying coffee in a beautiful café that is partly destroyed, and afterwards you go to a photo exhibition and then a concert, and between them you hear explosions.”

The sirens in each region are activated by a centralised warning system. They are prompted by the detection of different threats – military jets taking off from air bases in Russia, missiles launched from Crimea or Russian ships in the Black Sea, drones, incoming artillery in front-line areas – but there’s no way to know from the sound of the alarm the exact nature of the threat. To provide more specific information, a host of Telegram channels, operated by people with sources in the army, air defence, police or intelligence, have sprung up. When the siren goes off, people scroll through several channels filled with rocket and explosion emojis, trying to figure out if it’s a glide bomb (scary, you should try to get somewhere safe); “tactical aviation” (farther away, less specific, less scary); or a general alert, in which case, there is no need to interrupt what you were doing. One local entrepreneur told us, “I fire people from my team for doom-scrolling. It’s impossible to work if your mind is being influenced by all that.”

“We got used to the S-300s,” said Paraskevova, referring to the Soviet anti-aircraft missiles that the Russians often deploy against cities and ground troops. “But I hate the new guided bombs because I can hear them flying. They are slow. The sound is like a plane and for 20 or 30 seconds. It’s the most dread you will feel in your entire life. You sit in your corridor and hear them closer, closer. It gives you grey hair prematurely. It’s the same with the Shahed drones. Everyone hates them because of the dread buzzing – the buzzing of death – closer and closer, they buzz louder and louder, and you can hear our guys with machineguns trying to take them down.”

Yuliia Pylypchatina, a celebrated ceramicist, lives on the 16th floor of an apartment block with her boyfriend and two Borzois, a breed of Russian hunting dog. She always texts someone before and after she uses the lift, in case the power goes down between floors and she is stuck without mobile signal. The bomb shelter is too far away so she huddles in the bathroom during attacks. “The dogs look at me and if I am calm, then they are calm,” she said. “So I have to be calm. But it’s scary. There is always that ‘birthday moment’ after each explosion when you say, ‘Thank God’ and think, maybe I am needed for something else if I am still alive.”

In the safety of a metro station, the council has built classrooms along a pedestrian tunnel. Rows of boys and girls aged nine and ten sat at little desks. Children’s drawings were tacked up on the stone walls, along with times-tables and maps of Ukraine. There are 55,000 school-age children in Kharkiv. Most schools don’t have shelters so the majority of kids are taught online. But 2,200 children now go to school underground (the city is prioritising primary-school children whom they believe miss out most from remote learning).

A boy called Yaroslav sat at the back. We asked him how old he was.

“I’m 10! It’s my birthday today!” He grinned shyly.

“How do you like school?”

“Fifty-fifty,” he said, adding, “but I love Kharkiv.”

When it was time for break, the class gave Yaroslav a round of applause and, according to tradition, he handed out sweets to everyone.

His teacher, Olena Fedorova, wore a bright yellow vyshyvanka, a traditional Ukrainian embroidered blouse, and a big smile. She told us that the children had begun to open up since they started coming to class in September. “Some arrived as hedgehogs, they did not let anyone in. With Yaroslav, for example, it was not at all possible to hug him. He was so closed up, because his grandfather died at the beginning of the war. When he talks about it, he starts crying. But now, you see, we hug him, he smiles.”

A new feature of the attacks on Kharkiv over the spring was the double-tap, a technique the Russian armed forces perfected in Syria. They hit a target, wait a few minutes for the emergency services to arrive, then hit it again. Another Yaroslav, in his 20s, works as a volunteer medic, responding to the strikes. He has an air of coiled ferocity. His focus has been hardened by the continuing emergency into something like monomania. His call-sign, the number 46, is tattooed on his neck, and 1654, the date of the founding of Kharkiv, is tattooed on his knuckles.

“All of us have had concussion at some point,” Yaroslav said. “It’s not that scary for us. Nausea, headache, your head spins, you can’t hear properly. I felt it once, but it passed.”

“Are you OK?” we asked him. He looked nonplussed, as if he didn’t understand the question. He scrolled through a Telegram channel: outlook cloudy with a chance of glide bombs. “I’m OK,” he said after a long pause. “I’m working.”

In the early hours of April 4th, Yaroslav and his team responded to an explosion. He showed us the video he shot with a GoPro on his helmet. In the darkness I could see only the blurred flashing lights of ambulances and the shaky headlamps of the emergency workers. Hands came into view, clearing rubble, holding a stretcher. The volunteers knew they should stay at the scene for only five minutes. “But that night”, said Yaroslav, “we were slow, one of us lost a radio, we were looking for it. Then we heard a Shahed. It’s a very unpleasant noise, a rumbling closer and closer. The problem with a Shahed is that you can hear it but it’s hard to understand where it is. With a shell or a missile you can hear the whoosh and the direction. But a Shahed can just circle around and you don’t know when it will stop and strike.”

The camera jerked into a car. They began to set off. Through the windscreen there was an orange flash and a bang. Yaroslav got out of the car and ran. A policeman lay splayed on the ground, his shirt pulled up. There was only a little trickle of blood. Hands stuck a transparent dressing over a slit in the side of his torso, leant over and did the same to another slit on the other side. A piece of shrapnel had gone straight through. “He died two days ago in hospital,” Yaroslav said.

I asked him how things were different since the attacks intensified over the spring. “Everything changes from one explosion to another,” he said. “There’s a lot of traffic, then there are no cars. People are scared, then it’s never mind, then they are scared again, then it’s never mind again.”

For some the wartime stress is debilitating; for others, especially artists, it has been galvanising. Kostiantyn Zorkin, a sculptor who works in a number of media, told me he had never been so productive in his life. “When I hear an explosion, I think, ‘I have a project to finish’.” A handful of venues, such as the Yermilov Centre, a gallery dedicated to Ukrainian artists, are lucky enough to be located in basements. The Yermilov Centre resumed holding exhibitions in the autumn of 2022.

The artists of this generation feel as though they are helping a new city come into being, particularly as economic and cultural relations with the Russians just over the border had been severed by the war. “Kharkiv is changing,” Zorkin told me. “It won’t be the same again. There is something about this city that has been revealed to us since the full-scale invasion and we have a responsibility to talk about it – to understand it for ourselves and for the city.”

Pylypchatina, the ceramicist, showed off her sculptures of brightly coloured flowers – bulbous, tactile, playful. “I am young and fabulous, and I am blossoming,” she told us unashamedly. “These are the flowers inside of me and I am a flower.” Before the invasion, she had made minimalist plates. When she returned to Kharkiv in the summer of 2023, she began to mould what she called “objects of senseless beauty”, using colour in a way she had never dared to before. “This blossom proclaims life,” she said, handling a cartoonish chrysanthemum. “For me these things are contrary to death and to war. Now whenever I take the clay I don’t know what will emerge from it. I allow myself to create something without a particular purpose…Maybe now I understand that people are beautiful and amazing just by existing, not because of any purpose they might serve.”

“There is a naked feeling, of this moment, this second,” explained Vusyk, the theatre director. “Every moment is here and now and valuable. We understand every rehearsal might not happen tomorrow, that every performance might be our last. It is both fatalistic and romantic.”

“Everything becomes very clear,” said his partner Khyzhna, who works as a choreographer. “It gives you the feeling that the glass has been cleaned. You can see very clearly where you have to be, what you have to do, what makes sense and what makes no sense. For example I always wanted to make a dance performance before but I never had the time. But now I thought: ‘OK if I die tomorrow, what would I like to have done today? I would like to move!’” So she devised “Someone Like Me”, a performance piece combining oral history and movement, based on interviews about the war with several generations of Ukrainians.

Anton Nazarko is the lead singer of Tysk, an electronica band, and owner of a national chain of shoe-cleaning establishments. He has put all his money into creating a three-storey cultural venue inside an old Soviet factory that made refrigerated display cabinets. Called Some People, it will eventually contain studios for visiting artists, gallery space, a bookshop, a recording studio and screening rooms.

There is a dance floor on ground level. Nazarko has bricked up the windows and fireproofed the doors so that the room doubles as a shelter. Every Saturday, he hosts a rave. “There’s a saying that the dance floor is a safe space, but in our case, the dance floor really is a safe space,” Nazarko told me. “When the sirens sound we shout, ‘Everyone on the dance floor!’” Nazarko, blue eyes shining, talked a mile a minute. “We understand, if we want people to come back to the city, we need to build this. If we wait, there is a danger that stagnation will set in and afterwards it will be too late.”

On the afternoon of Saturday May 11th, the day after the Russians crossed the border, Nazarko wondered if anyone would come to the rave that evening. The bouncers waited at the door, the bartenders prepared cocktails, the DJ had come from Kyiv in a show of solidarity and lasers flashed on the screens to the thumping beat of the music. By 7pm, just under a hundred people had gathered – a good crowd. “Why would we worry about news?” asked Kostia, a marketing manager who was wearing silver eyeshadow in a stripe across his face and elegant high-heeled boots. “You can die any day. Obviously you have to be prepared, but we are prepared every day.” Residents in Kharkiv have bags packed with documents, cash, medication and clothes. “The news? It’s just whatever.”

People gathered a little nervously at other events in the city that night. “We live with bad news all the time,” Yuliia Nikolaevska, a musicology professor told me, at a wine-tasting-cum-poetry reading she had organised as part of Kharkiv’s music festival, scheduled to run through the month of May. “The motto of the festival is ‘Listen, Hear, Feel’. Now, of course, there are a lot of sounds, like sirens, we don’t want to hear; and sounds that we must listen to like other people’s pain. We have become more sensitive to sound, and we have become more sensitive to each other and how to listen to each other,” she said.

I spotted Olena Rybka, the deputy editor of Vivat, a book publisher, who had explained to us a week or so before that Ukrainian literature was thriving in wartime and book sales were up. Rybka told us she had woken early to the news of the Russian attack and looked in on her six-year-old daughter, “sleeping like an angel”. She got dressed and went to work as normal. At lunchtime she went for a walk in the park with a colleague. “It was a very strange, hard, profound feeling”, she told me, “to see this park, so perfectly cared for, with all the beautiful flowers, but empty.” She excused herself; it was time to introduce the poet. “And to think, at this event we are talking about themes like love!”

Kharkiv’s cultural flowering is heartening, but two years of constant attacks scrape the soul. We met Kristina, aged 15, at a children’s art studio in a snug, brick cellar with walls spattered with coloured paint and hand prints. She had ivory skin and raven hair. Silver studs pierced her nose and lower lip, and she wore a T-shirt that read, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” She stood in front of a large blank canvas, about to begin the second in a series of four portraits. “Here I can let myself go,” she told me. “No one tells me what I should paint. I can release my inner beast.”

Kristina could see that the war had changed people and noticed the changes in herself too. “Like my piercings. It’s something like self-harm, like some people cut themselves. When there are too many emotions, when there’s too much happening around me, I do another piercing. Yes, I do it myself.” She lifted up her hair to show her ear lobes, “I already have 10mm tunnels.”

“Different people react differently,” a drone engineer called Roman told us (he didn’t want us to use his real name). “Some doom-scroll, wanting to know all the information. Some people need to do something, be active, build drones. My reaction was to donate all my money to the military – this isn’t a healthy reaction either. Everyone in war reacts by developing some kind of emotional disease.”

One of these is a blasé attitude towards death. “It doesn’t faze me that much any more,” Paraskevova, the volunteer with pink hair, said. “The only huge problem I have is severe, severe, severe insomnia. I have meds that really don’t help, they just make me feel ill. I don’t sleep, pretty much at all.”

Time and again, we heard people debate whether to stay in the city. Nazarko, the cultural impresario, has two young children, a daughter aged six and a son who is four. When we asked him if he and his wife had talked about leaving Kharkiv, his infectious enthusiasm dipped for a moment. “It’s a sensitive topic,” he said and looked away. The proprietor of one of Kharkiv’s trendiest restaurants didn’t want to talk about how his sous chef had been snatched off the street by military recruiters. “He is now at the training base. It’s like he said, ‘Eventually we will all end up there.’”

“I’m not scared of explosions,” Zorkin, the artist, told me. “What scares me is the uncertainty. It’s impossible to see the future. There’s a feeling too that if we stop everyone would fall apart – at least on a metaphysical level.” We were sitting in his cellar that served as an atelier, among wood carvings he had made during the war. There were recurring subjects: books, people and trees, leaves and birds, windowless façades, burning buildings, skulls.

“There is also the fatigue that collects and becomes bigger and bigger,” he continued. “I don’t know how to relax. I have a problem with joy – I can’t, or I don’t dare to, feel it. But there is joy in collaboration,” he elaborated. “Here you can release yourself. There is a joy even when we don’t understand what we are doing.”

Over the following week the air-raid sirens continued in Kharkiv. One alert, the longest of the war, lasted over 16 hours. Drones attacked the city several times, yet there was no mass exodus.

Roman texted from the front lines: “In general the situation is still not clear. We are working. Maybe it will be very bad, maybe we will be able to fight back. To lose Kharkiv is to lose the war.” ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine