Hope, fear, exhaustion, and resilience in wartime Dnipro

At around 1:30 a.m. on December 6, an explosion woke me up in my mother’s apartment on a central street of my hometown, where I had fallen asleep to the wail of the air raid siren. The blast sounded close and was followed by several waves of bombardment.

When I went to my mother’s room to ask whether we should shelter in the basement of the nine-story Soviet-era building, she disagreed.

“They’re just Shahed [drones]. That’s how they’re shooting them down,” she said.

“We can go into the apartment corridor… if you want. There’s a load-bearing wall,” added my mother, Tetyana, 50.

She advised me to check local Telegram channels that monitor Russian attacks to see where the drones were heading.

The air raid alert continued throughout the night, and by morning a missile had struck a neighboring part of the city. For the next two days, thick plumes of smoke hung over the area as helicopters worked to extinguish fires caused by the attack.

Warehouses storing gauze, bandages, and rubber were hit, while debris from another missile was found scattered across a children’s playground in a park about a 10-minute walk from our home.

“No Shelter Can Save You”

As a major industrial center and a key hub for volunteers supporting the country’s defense, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city lies about 100–120 kilometers from the front lines in the east and south.

Dnipro has long been a target of frequent Russian air strikes.

With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now entering its fourth year, residents of Dnipro have grown accustomed to the constant threat of death and have learned to assess the danger, I observed during a three-week visit to the city as winter set in.

I had not been to Dnipro since the summer of 2022—just months after the invasion began on February 24—and several changes were immediately noticeable, such as above-ground concrete shelters now dotting many streets.

But people rarely actually use these shelters, Danyyl, a 21-year-old tourism student at a local university, told me the day after the nighttime attack.

“You can’t really protect yourself from missiles. No shelter would save you from a direct hit,” he said as we sat in a crowded café on the left bank of the river that gives the city its name.

As the capital of a province bordering the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv regions—all partially occupied by Russian forces—Dnipro faces daily threats from missiles and drones, even when their final destination lies deeper inside Ukraine, Danyyl explained.

“If something is launched from the south or east, it’s almost inevitable that we’ll have an air raid alert. It’s simply impossible to react every time,” he said.

In some cases, there is no time to react at all.

On December 1, a missile struck the city around 10 a.m., just minutes after the alarm sounded. Four people were killed and 45 wounded.

At the moment of impact, I was waiting at a red light in a line of cars. No one panicked, even though the immediate danger had not passed.

“It really is like Russian roulette,” I thought as I read on Telegram that a second strike could come at any moment.

When I later entered the building where my mother works, people were standing outside their offices, showing each other images of the aftermath circulating on social media.

Trying to understand what had happened before official statements were released, people were calling their families. One question echoed through the corridors: “Are you okay?”

Once channels monitoring Russian attacks began reporting that the threat level had somewhat decreased, groups of people dispersed and returned to work. Life resumed—what passes for normal life in Dnipro these days.

Darkness at Midday

Dnipro is not a frontline city, but with each year of full-scale war, Russian forces have moved closer, and life felt different this December than it did in 2022. It even sounded different.

Soldiers traveling to and from the front; billboards promoting service in Ukraine’s most prominent military brigades; boarded-up, damaged buildings—all testified to the presence of war.

Despite frequent attacks, many residents still went out in the evenings until the final hours before the midnight curfew.

Often, however, lights above popular venues were turned off, and the streets were filled with the noise of generators stationed near most cafés and shops. Walking past them, it was hard to hear the person beside you.

Amid intensified Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Dnipro now experiences regular power cuts and occasional complete blackouts.

Thousands of apartments remain without heating and electricity for more than 12 hours a day.

Unable to cook, shower with anything but ice-cold water, or perform basic daily tasks, some residents turn to power inverters, which typically cost upwards of $1,000—a price not everyone can afford.

“We store some energy when we have it and reproduce it when we don’t,” Volodymyr, a 23-year-old factory worker, told me while I was visiting his apartment.

“My family gave me an inverter as a New Year’s gift a few years ago,” he said. “It was a great gift, given our reality. Even though it’s one of the more expensive models, it doesn’t cover all needs, but at least we have light.”

What about the noise? “It’s tolerable,” Volodymyr said. “It sounds like someone is blow-drying their hair in the next room.”

“Their Souls Are Still in the Battle”

Since the start of Russia’s military aggression more than a decade ago in neighboring Donbas—the Donetsk and Luhansk regions—Dnipro has mobilized to support Ukraine’s numerically and militarily weaker forces resisting the invasion.

Now, as the full-scale war continues, Ukraine’s army has grown in size, weaponry, and experience, but the city’s role—still largely Russian-speaking—has not changed.

Dnipro hosts thousands of refugees from the east and south and hundreds of wounded soldiers at any given time. Local volunteer organizations work tirelessly to support those displaced by war and to supply frontline brigades.

Serhiy Kramarenko, a 43-year-old volunteer, told me that trips to the front and round-the-clock phone calls from soldiers, relatives, and civilians—calls that are “terrifying to answer”—have become a permanent part of his life.

“This has become a cross we carry every day,” Kramarenko wrote in a Telegram message. “We meet mothers who live from one phone call to the next. Soldiers who look through you because their souls are still there, on the front lines.”

While medicine, clothing, and food are needed daily, hundreds of people who have fled war-ravaged regions to Dnipro need something else even more, Serhiy said: human closeness.

“The work has become quieter, harder, and deeper. Because behind every request there is real human pain,” he said. “People here live between a destroyed past and a frightening future.”

Beyond Dnipro, closer to the front lines, people ask for only one thing: “to survive,” he added.

“There is no talk of comfort there… People simply want not to be forgotten, because being forgotten kills faster than cold and hunger.”

“Fatigue Does Not Mean Indifference”

Nearly four years after the start of the full-scale war, fatigue has made it increasingly difficult to mobilize financial donations. High-level corruption scandals have not helped either.

“No one expected it to last this long,” a 45-year-old entrepreneur from Dnipro who raises funds for the Ukrainian army told me. Still, he said this has not stopped the donations he manages to secure for military vehicles, drones, and electronic warfare systems.

“People are tired. That’s obvious,” said the entrepreneur, also named Serhiy, who did not want his surname published. “At the same time, fatigue does not mean indifference.”

Despite the daily reality of war, the city occasionally reminded me of peacetime Ukraine. And memories of that era were still all around me.

Road signs pointed toward Donetsk and Sevastopol in Crimea—Ukrainian cities occupied by Russia many years ago.

Dozens of magnets from across Crimea, our family’s favorite vacation destination when I was a child, hung on the refrigerator in my grandparents’ apartment. Many other souvenirs bought there before the Russian occupation were scattered throughout the room where I once lived.

But unlike even in 2022, residents no longer spoke loudly about restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders, though they remained unwavering in rejecting Kremlin demands for more territory or other concessions that would compromise the country’s sovereignty—or worse.

“People here no longer talk about unconditional victory,” Serhiy said. “We are simply trying to help our defenders preserve our country.”

— RFE/RL