Kyiv Sleeps in Hallways and Wakes in Ashes

In Kyiv, we don’t sleep in beds, we sleep between walls, praying they’re thick enough to hold back death until morning.

It begins with a siren. Not the kind from myth, but the modern wail of circuitry, a mechanical shriek that carves itself into your chest at midnight.

It comes without mercy, without preamble, and without end. This is Kyiv. A city that doesn't fall asleep so much as lie in wait, ears pressed to the silence, counting seconds between explosions. Here, war is not just fought; it is endured. It seeps through plaster and parquet, curls around teacups and towel racks. When I returned in June, my fifth time since the full-scale invasion, I did not arrive to report, I arrived to remember. To remember how a city breathes when the air itself is trying to kill you.

And what I found was this: people who no longer measure time in hours, but in impact craters. Who no longer sleep in beds, but hallways. Who still boil water for tea because rituals, however small, are the only things Russia cannot bomb.

When I returned to Ukraine for the fifth time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the city of Kyiv greeted me not with ceremony, but with an old, familiar rhythm: the siren wail of midnight air raids, the buzz of drones above tired rooftops, the unshaken hospitality of people who have long since woven war into the fabric of their daily lives. It was June again—early summer on the calendar, but in spirit, another season of siege.

I had last left Ukraine in September. Nine months later, I found myself once more in the capital, renting a corner of Soviet memory, a modest flat tucked within a concrete skeleton from another era. My friend, Vovo, had helped me find the place, a testament to how conflict forges unlikely continuity: friendships, routines, a sense of what’s normal in a place where normal no longer applies.

After leaving the Airbnb I’d used temporarily, I met up with Daniya, a new friend, an animator working with the National Museum of Ukraine. Over a late evening of conversation, food, and quiet laughter, we lost track of time. The city’s GPS services shut down just before midnight as part of Kyiv’s curfew protocol, and by the time I stepped into my car to return home, I realised I was directionless. The familiar blue arrow on the map had vanished. I was a foreigner again in a city I knew intimately, intimately enough to understand the danger of being out past curfew.

Without hesitation, Daniya offered me a place to stay. It wasn’t an act of charity, it was the fluid empathy of those who live through war together. We returned to his flat, where the kettle hissed to life and our conversation resumed under the soft yellow glow of a kitchen lamp. Tea. Fruit. Microgreens from the market. The mundanity of it all felt like resistance.

Inside the quiet refuge offered by Daniya, a flat suspended in Soviet time, every object became a gesture of resistance. A kitchen table, modestly dressed in a floral cloth, bore the soft weight of microgreens, tea cups, and conversation. The corridor, narrow and unremarkable by design, transformed into a sanctuary as mattresses were unrolled beneath pale yellow walls. The living room, with its tired green sofa and curtains parting just slightly to the outside world, stood as both a relic and a witness. Here, in a home untouched by shrapnel but not by fear, we lived through the night not by fleeing, but by choosing where to lie down. In Kyiv, safety isn’t found in bunkers. It’s made by people who keep the kettle warm and the blankets near the hallway.

And then, the sirens.

The phones on the table shivered with noise, urgent alerts, their vibration more menacing than the sound itself. An incoming wave of Russian missiles or Shahed drones had been detected. We checked the alerts, measured the risk, listened for distant thunder. We chose not to go to a shelter that night. Not out of defiance or carelessness, but calculation. I have spent the better part of my adult life covering armed conflicts; I have heard enough bombs to know which ones might end me.

We didn’t sleep in the bedrooms. The windows opened toward a schoolyard, a narrow street, potential paths for falling debris. Instead, we laid a mattress in the corridor, nestled between two interior walls. The hallway, long and unadorned, was never designed to protect, but in Kyiv it had become the safest room in the house.

We lay there, swaddled in blankets and tension, listening to the rumble of distant detonations. Sleep came in fractured doses, five minutes here, ten there, between the whine of incoming fire and the silence that lingered after. When morning broke, it did so reluctantly, casting a dull, yellowed light through the narrow windows.

The curfew lifted at five. Daniya brewed coffee with the reverence of someone trying to preserve something human amid all the inhumanity. He had work. So did I.

By seven, I was driving through Kyiv’s bruised streets, tracing the impact sites Vovo had marked for me the night before. A schoolyard crater. A collapsed stairwell. Burnt-out cars beside residential towers. Four people were confirmed dead that morning. More than twenty were injured. None were soldiers.

It was June 6th, 2025¹, my first full day back in Ukraine. That same night, Kyiv would be struck again. And again on the tenth². And again on the seventeenth³, when 440 drones and 32 missiles rained down across the capital and its surrounding regions. They struck not barracks but apartment blocks, not armouries but commercial estates. Odessa. Zhytomyr. Mykolaiv. Chernihiv. The names are not just places on a map—they are echoes of grief now carved into stone and skin.

The scars left by a Russian missile strike on a residential tower near Shuliavka Metro in Kyiv on the night of 5–6 June 2025 are brutally visible: torn balconies, shattered windows, and burnt-out concrete where families once lived. At least four civilians were killed and over twenty injured in a strike that turned homes into hollow shells. Debris littered playgrounds and courtyards where children had played just hours earlier. As the air raid sirens continued, residents, volunteers, and emergency workers rallied with wood, hammers, and resolve patching wounds where walls once stood, and dignity refused to fall. (VX Photo / Vudi Xhymshiti)

The Western world often measures war in geopolitical calculations, casualties per square kilometre, the arc of artillery range. But in Ukraine, war is measured in walls. Which ones fell. Which ones still stand. Which ones were strong enough to shelter a stranger during a night of terror.

There is no clear front line in Kyiv. The war is everywhere, in the stairwells where neighbours exchange updates about missile routes, in the kitchens where families whisper beneath the wail of sirens, in the corridors where people learn to sleep like soldiers without training.

And yet, life insists. The washing machine still runs. The kettle still boils. People still offer tea to guests, still whisper stories across the dinner table. They remember not just who was lost, but how they lived before they were taken.

This is Kyiv in June. A city where history shudders beneath every footfall. Where missile trails lace the sky like graffiti in a language none of us chose to learn. Where you measure safety by how many walls stand between you and the outside.

And still, every morning, Kyiv wakes. Not whole, but breathing. Its walls cracked, its people bruised, but never broken. A child’s toy sits on a windowsill missing its glass. A sewing machine hums beside a shattered wall. A mother pours tea in a kitchen without light, stirring in sugar with trembling hands. These are not images of resilience for the sake of spectacle. These are acts of defiance so ordinary they become sacred.

Because in Kyiv, survival is not just endurance, it is grace. It is the grace to offer shelter to a stranger at midnight. To brew coffee with trembling fingers. To sweep broken glass from a child’s bedroom floor and still believe in tomorrow.

This is not a war story. It is a love letter to the living.

To those who stay. To those who rebuild. To those who wake up, again and again, in a city that teaches the world what courage really means.

And if there is any justice left in us, let us not look away.

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1. Kyiv Railway Bombing — VX Pictures.

After the Blast — VX Pictures.

2. Kyiv Struck — VX Pictures.

3. Kyiv Underfire — VX Pictures.