Under the late spring sun on Saturday afternoon, these were some of the sounds to be heard in Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Park: birds chirruping; young couples chatting and laughing over iced coffees; tinny pop music playing from speakers mounted on lamp-posts; pensioners gossiping on the benches; and, at 11 minutes to three, a prolonged explosion that reverberated in the chest like a rumble of thunder.
A few miles away, in a quiet residential suburb, a glide bomb launched from a Russian fighter jet had smashed into a courtyard. As the resulting boom reached the park, people stopped in their tracks for a split second, then continued on, as if nothing had happened.
The explosion destroyed several houses and wounded six people. On Sunday, hits on a park and a recreation complex killed 11. On Tuesday morning, a fleet of kamikaze drones attacked, with more people requiring medical attention. North of the city, a new Russian offensive had reached the town of Vovchansk, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes, with many arriving at a humanitarian hub on the outskirts of Kharkiv.
But despite the daily air terror and the Russian troops on the move 20 miles away, life goes on in Ukraine’s second city. School lessons take place on subway platforms, theatre performances in basement shelters. The dolphinarium puts on three shows a day, pairs of dolphins and beluga whales jumping through hoops for watching families and the occasional group of recuperating soldiers. A vibrant restaurant and bar scene continues, and on Saturday evening there are a choice of musical options, from a classical concert to a rave.
Nina Khyzhna, a 31-year-old Kharkiv-born actor and theatre director, left for an artistic residency in Austria early in the war. But she returned to Kharkiv last spring and is determined to stay. In Europe, the sense of safety felt illusory, she said, and the cognitive dissonance between the peaceful idyll around her and what she knew was happening at home became too much.
“Doing theatre here makes so much more sense. The audience have heard the same explosions in the night, their houses have shaken from the same shockwaves,” she said, during a break in rehearsals for a new play.
For her, there was a strange silver lining to living under constant tension. “The closeness of death every day clarifies your perception and pulls away the things that aren’t meaningful,” she said.
Military analysts say Russia does not currently have the forces to mount a new land offensive on Kharkiv but is focused instead on making the city unlivable through air terror, easier than with other Ukrainian cities owing to Kharkiv’s proximity to the border. Planes can launch glide bombs without leaving Russian airspace.
Two hours after Saturday’s strike, along a rutted track lined with cottages in a quiet Kharkiv suburb, police photographers and forensics experts took stock of the scene. The blast had skewed a three-storey house to one side and cleaved a chunk out of the kitchen wall. A pink towel outside was caked in blood; neighbours paced the charred earth in sullen shock. There was no obvious military target in the vicinity.
Ihor Terekhov, Kharkiv’s mayor, arrived in weekend attire of trainers and a leather jacket to check the damage and talk to residents. Speaking in barely a whisper above the sound of masonry flapping in the breeze, he told the small group of journalists present that six people had been injured in the blast, including a married couple and their two children.
A woman in denim overalls raised her hand. “I also have a question,” she said, pointing to a nearby house which now had half the roof missing. “Where can I sleep tonight?”
Loss was a common theme in Kharkiv these days, said Nataliya Kramar, a softly spoken 49-year-old psychologist. Her consultations revolve around managing manifestations of loss: the death of a loved one or the destruction of a home. Some have lost their marriages, which disintegrated as the husband was forced by martial law to remain in Ukraine and the wife moved abroad.
In a city where so many people had close ties to Russia, many feel they have also lost family members who have been swallowed up by the Kremlin propaganda narrative of events in Ukraine. Kramar has experience of that: she no longer speaks to her cousins in Russia. “They’re biological relations, I guess, but I wouldn’t call them family any more.”
She believes that retaining as much “normal life” as possible is key for the city’s collective mental health. Municipal workers repair pavements, keep the grass in the parks mown, and have planted flower beds in front of the opera house with neat geometric swirls of bright marigolds and petunias. On Saturday, a couple of newlyweds stopped by for a photoshoot, while teenagers practised skateboard tricks, barely registering the explosions.
This idea of resilient Ukrainians keeping calm and carrying on under Russian fire has become something of a wartime trope, but it was more than that, said Kramar. “We are all in a collective trauma, some people more, some people less. And it’s a huge psychological support if you can do things that remind you of normality: walk in the park, go shopping, have a haircut. It gives that sense of continuity that is so important.”
Finding this thread of normality is easier in some parts of Kharkiv than others. In Saltivka, a suburb on the edge of town that was pummelled during Russia’s failed attempt to seize the city in 2022, some buildings have been patched up but many of the vast blocks of flats remain gutted and half-abandoned.
In one, Svitlana, 55, lives alone. Her daughter-in-law and granddaughter moved to Britain two years ago, and she sees them only on the occasional video call. Svitlana finds the days in Saltivka bearable, but the nights are harder: the stuttering patter of air defence systems, the primitive growl of Iranian drones – nicknamed “mopeds” – and the rib-vibrating booms of the KAB guided bombs. Dogs whimper and howl in the pauses.
“I go and sit like a mouse in the corridor and wait for it all to stop,” she said. Sometimes, when it gets too much, she pads in her slippers to the flat of a married couple with whom she has become friends, and asks to sleep on their couch. Being close to other people helps.
Indeed, one of the saving graces of life in Saltivka now is that people are friendlier. Courtyard encounters once called for suspicious glares; now there are greetings and mutual good wishes, a kind of frenzied camaraderie among people who have endured too much. But it is little substitute for the things that are gone.
“I would give everything to go back to how it was before,” said Svitlana, struggling to hold back tears. “It’s only now that we all realise how good we used to have it.”
Back in the centre, it is a little easier to shut out the war experience with moments of near normality. At 4pm on Saturday, thumping industrial techno beats start up at a disused refrigerator factory, a weekly event run by Some People, a new cultural collective. They want to turn the factory into a cultural space offering theatre, food, discussions and the occasional rave.
Many on the dancefloor are humanitarian volunteers, who have spent the week helping evacuate people from places bearing the brunt of Russia’s new offensive. Now, they are letting off steam. After tiring of dancing, they emerge into a courtyard. As people smoke and chat in the weak light, with the background noise of muffled beats coming from inside, it could be dawn outside a club in Berlin or another European city. Instead, it is 8pm and almost time to finish for the night, before the curfew.
Kharkiv in its prewar iteration was gone for ever, said Anton Nazarko, 37, co-founder of Some People. He did not only mean the physical destruction, he said, but also the old social codes and the connections between people that formed the fabric of any community. Now, notwithstanding the chaos and the terror, it was imperative to build something new. “All the old rules are destroyed and now a new Kharkiv is being born. And we want to take part in this,” he said.
Kateryna Pereverzeva, who edits a cultural magazine, said Kharkiv’s cultural life had never felt so vital and energetic as it did now. “When you feel so close to death all the time you start to live life more intensely because you don’t know how long you have left,” she said.
Pereverzeva, 29, said that over the past year she had developed a closer bond with many people who stayed in Kharkiv, and often struggled to connect with those who left. Her mother moved to Austria after the invasion and for a while sent job vacancies in Austria every week, trying to persuade Pereverzeva to join her. Those efforts have remained futile and usually ended in arguments.
For Pereverzeva, leaving Kharkiv would feel like denying reality. “Everything has changed. Things have happened that mean living like before is simply impossible, and for me it’s easier to be in the place where you can feel these changes more intensely,” she said.
