Thursday, August 27, was the first day of the new normal, but it didn’t yet feel normal to any of us in Kyiv.
I counted 11 air raid alerts between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Each time, the sirens in my quiet residential neighborhood would tear through the air—an ear-splitting wail, impossible to ignore even after nearly five years of war. The next sound was often machine-gun fire—Ukrainian air defenses downing incoming drones and missiles—or, in other cases, a great booming thud as enemy munitions exploded not far away.
Sometimes it was several hours before the all-clear signal; in other instances, just a few minutes. But by Thursday’s end, the shocks had added up—I was a wreck, hardly able to concentrate. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Moscow had launched 140 attack drones that day.
Ukrainians are no longer surprised by nighttime air alerts. That’s been normal since 2022, albeit growing worse every year, with the number of incoming drones and missiles sometimes swelling to 700 in a single night. They’re also used to Iranian-made Shahed attack drones and the better-engineered Russian version known as Gerans. The Ukrainian military has developed highly effective layered defenses—electronic jamming, jet fighters, traditional anti-aircraft guns, truck-mounted machine guns, and a new generation of innovative drone interceptors—that can shoot down up to 90 percent of these slow-flying triangular platforms, generally just over 10 feet long with an eight-foot wingspan.
But Moscow’s new, jet-powered Banderol drones, sometimes called drone-missiles, are something else entirely, and more than 100 struck Kyiv last Thursday. They’re between two and three times faster than a traditional Shahed. They fly much higher and come with sophisticated technical features, including autonomous targeting. They’ve been in use for months, but not in the numbers we saw last weekend—more than 1,500 Russian drones launched from Thursday through Sunday—and the air force hasn’t yet developed the kind of reliable countermeasures Ukrainians are used to.
Ukrainians knew this would be a challenging fall. Kyiv has been attacking targets—oil refineries, weapons depots, military supply lines, and warehouses—deep inside Russia since early spring. The devastating effects brought the war home to ordinary Russians and cut sharply into the oil revenues Moscow relies on to wage the war. It was no secret that Vladimir Putin would seek revenge, and everyone knew a desperate Putin would be an even more dangerous Putin.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed these fears last week, noting that Ukraine had “opened Pandora’s box,” and Kyiv would feel the effects of Russian strikes “every day and every night.”
And so it has come to pass—“every day and every night,” albeit not yet with the weapons Ukrainians fear most. Over the weekend, Moscow fired only a few of the hypersonic ballistic missiles Kyiv is unable to down except with U.S.-made Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, which have been largely unavailable since Washington consumed over half its inventory in Iran.
By Monday, after five days of nonstop alerts, it was clear this is the new normal. Like many Russian tactics, the bombardment follows a fairly predictable pattern. Through the long weekend, the center city was largely spared—most targets were in the suburbs and other outlying areas. The majority were warehouses and related retail infrastructure—a not very inventive Moscow is copying Kyiv’s drone attacks on its e-commerce warehouses. But while Ukraine sought primarily to disrupt military logistics and undermine the Russian economy, the Kremlin is focused on making life difficult for civilians.
According to Ukrainian officials, 90 percent of the refrigerated warehouses operated by the country’s major retail chains were destroyed last week. Fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy, and other essentials have disappeared from many supermarkets, including mine. Book storage depots have also been targeted—a brazen attack on the Ukrainian language and national identity. More recently, with few remaining warehouses to hit, the focus has shifted to electrical plants.
Nationally, train service has snarled. A critical subway line connecting east and west Kyiv has been disrupted, creating havoc for stranded workers and their families. One deadly strike in the Kyiv suburbs hit a weapons storehouse, sparking a fiery explosion that killed 38 civilians living nearby. (President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a sharp rebuke, criticizing the military for stockpiling ammunition near civilian homes.) But mostly, so far, the Kremlin seems more intent on terror than mass casualties.
“Do you think we’re calling for cruelty?” deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, Pyotr Tolstoy, said chillingly on a talk show last week. “Our goal is to demoralize the public so . . . they come out to meet our troops with their little paws raised.”
I thought I had conquered my fears long ago—tamping them down until I hardly felt them. After nearly five years in Ukraine, I’ve found that a routine works best. You decide in advance how you’re going to respond to each potential threat—in my case, generally ignoring just a few drones, sleeping in a windowless room when what’s incoming is a swarm of them, and heading to a basement shelter when I hear missiles. It’s arbitrary and personal—everyone’s routine is different—but it provides an illusion of safety. Unlike the incoming, it’s something you can control.
I’m not sure why the nonstop alerts seemed different, but for some reason—at least, at first—they shattered my sangfroid. One of the open-source social media channels that tracks Russian assaults summed it up perfectly: “Sleepless nights, disrupted schedules, closed businesses, and constant stress. The goal is simple: to make people feel exhausted and helpless . . . And we must admit, they are partially succeeding.”
The alarms are now too frequent to ignore. The pattern has been somewhat reassuring—I live in the city center, nowhere near a warehouse or an electrical plant. But of course, you can never be sure—maybe the next strike will be different. By now, after five days of unending alerts, I’m more annoyed than scared when the sirens blare. But that too could be a mistake—one that could lead me to brush off an essential warning.
Adding to the stress, no one knows what’s next—what the next Russian provocation will be. Moscow has announced that it’s preparing “massive strikes” on Ukrainian energy facilities, hoping for a reprise of last year, when many in Kyiv and other cities went without heat or power for weeks. The Ukrainian defense industry is racing to develop interceptors that can shoot down jet-powered drones, but there is still no answer—other than American Patriots—for Moscow’s huge stockpile of ballistic missiles. Perhaps the worst threat—expected, if it happens, near the end of the year—would be a new round of military mobilization in Russia, mustering the manpower for a spring offensive.
Ukrainians are tired of being lauded for their resilience. They think this creates an easy out for Europeans and Americans who ought to be doing more to help.
But sure enough, though it has been only a few days, many here are already getting used to the new normal.
My neighborhood streets are full of people—young couples, families, clusters of teens—going about their lives on a late summer weekend. On Sunday night, I was sitting in an open-air café when an alarm sounded, followed in short order by the unmistakable rat-tat-tat of an anti-aircraft gun—fairly close, by the sound of it. A few heads turned, but not many, and no one got up to run for cover.
Zelensky’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, a popular former spymaster, made a rare television appearance last weekend. “We will not stop the war now,” or anytime soon, he stated bluntly. “Not because we don’t want to. It’s just not realistic.” No one was particularly surprised. Ukrainians aren’t expecting a miracle. One public opinion poll conducted in late July, even as Russian ballistic missile strikes increased sharply, found two-thirds of respondents “ready to endure war” for at least another year, if not “as long as necessary.”
Meanwhile, for most of my Ukrainian friends and neighbors, it has been enough to find a way to navigate the new normal. It will get worse. It always does. But we’ve beaten this, the thinking goes, and we will beat whatever comes next.
