'We are on the frontline, we are not allowed to forget it". On being shelled in Kharkiv.

Last week I went to Ukraine to report on life in Kharkiv and the surrounding region. On Saturday, the rockets landed. Here is my first-person long-read

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There was no siren to warn us.

The time it takes for a missile to launch from the Russian border, hurtle through the air above the mined fields and forests, the shelled villages of the formerly occupied territories, and the destroyed apartment blocks on the edge of Kharkiv city, is a mere 40 seconds. By the time the air raid alert starts to wail, the bomb has already landed, smoke turning the blue sky grey.

We are in Makers cafe, newly-opened in the past year, which sells strong coffee and bottled kombucha, borscht, sandwiches, and cakes, to Kharkiv’s hipster youth. A well-known blogger is completing a filming segment to the surreal soundtrack of Aqua’s Barbie Girl; young parents are hanging out with their toddlers; and we have just finished interviewing a rising star in documentary photography. 

I am exhausted. 

Today is my last day in Kharkiv and while I love the city with its giggling young people drinking and skate-boarding in the evening, its parks where couples walk hand-in-hand, kids squeal on the climbing frames, and friends eat ice-cream with friends; its streets where an old man plays his barrel organ while feeding flocks of pigeons, I am ready to go home. It’s been an inspiring six days, but the emotional toll of interviewing people traumatised by war has wrung me out. 

It is 11.10am, on Saturday 16 September 2023.

I’m considering ordering a second kombucha, when there’s a loud bang, the sound of something heavy falling to the ground. My fixer, Anna, sits up like a meerkat, her eyes wide with attention. It takes me a moment to realise what the bang is. I went to write ‘recognise’, but of course I don’t recognise it because I’ve never heard it before. Bombs, I realise, don’t sound how they do on TV.

They sound so close, the explosions, and yet the thuds are dull. As Anna says after, I hoped at first maybe it was something falling off something. It’s not. It’s five explosions, targeting what the police later described as an “infrastructure object”, just outside the city centre. 

Come on, Anna says, moments before the second bang lands. We go to the atrium next to the toilets, the walls tiled stylishly black, the sinks and soap dispensers too. The group of us sit and stand in silence, looking to the windows. The siren has started now, as one, two, three more bombs fall. Lie flat if I tell you too, says Anna, but I am already crouched in the gap between the sink block and the wall, pushing the vase of fake flowers away from the edge. 

What surprises me is how calm I am. I know what I have to do, which is to get to the bathroom, to get those interior walls between me and the windows. I smile at the toddler who is wandering across the tiled floor, I say “it’s ok sweetheart”, even though she seems quite content and anyway, she can’t understand me. I watch the older woman, a cleaner, in her patterned housedress, clutch her chest and gasp with every crash. And I am frightened, my hands are shaking, and I think I might be sick. But the important thing is I am not sick. The important thing is that I don’t panic. And when it’s over, and I want to cry, the important thing is that I don’t cry. 

After five explosions, it’s over. The raid lasted a matter of minutes and somehow that seems shocking, as though I was expecting it to go on for hours. Outside, the streets fill back up with pedestrians, enjoying the late summer sunshine; cars rattle down the road, a cyclist whizzes past. People order coffee, while I wolf down a chocolate hazelnut biscuit, my brain demanding sugar for the shock. 

The city reasserts itself. 

Virginia Cowles wrote in her 1941 memoir, about being shelled in Spain:

“I had never before felt the sort of fear that sends the blood racing through your veins. As intense an emotion as it was, I was surprised to find with the passing of danger it disappeared so completely. More curious still, it left no hangover of apprehension. In between bombardments, you literally forgot about them.”

I had highlighted the passage a couple of days earlier, reading it over dinner. I did not know if I expected to feel it, so soon.

This was the first of two attacks that day (although, technically, the second attack came after midnight, making it Sunday), and the first of three attacks on Kharkiv that week. Russia appears to be escalating its missile strikes across Ukraine, hitting Lviv, Kyiv, Kherson and Cherkasy in subsequent days, while Kharkiv endured a second attack on Thursday. Odessa has faced persistent shelling, as has Sumy, while the bombing in the early hours of the morning of the 17th prompted nationwide air alerts. On Wednesday 20 September, local media reported how Kherson was under fire, facing an “intensified attack” of nine bombs in one day. 

The shelling is taking place against the backdrop of Zelensky in the United Nations, where he proposes the removal of Russia’s veto as a permanent member of the security council, saying “it is impossible to stop the war because all efforts are vetoed by the aggressor”. In retaliation, Sergey Lavrov accused the US and its allies of “egregiously and openly” interfering in the domestic affairs of Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union. As Zelensky headed from New York to Washington, having deepened relations with Latin American colleagues, US Republicans signalled their distaste at ongoing aid for Ukraine. 

China, meanwhile, claims it is helping to broker peace, and North Korea has affirmed its support for Russia, promising weapons. This news is met with noticeable silence from the disinformation merchants who claim that this is a war about NATO expansion, and to end the war the west must stop arming Ukraine. Such disinformation is met with contempt by those I speak to in Kharkiv – when it comes to arming Ukraine, they speak in a unified voice.

It’s been nearly an hour since the first rocket landed, and smoke is still spiralling in the clear blue sky, signifying the intensity of the explosion and the subsequent fire. We later learn that the weapons used were Iskander-K missiles, and six civilians were injured. 

People in Ukraine drive much faster than in the UK, and we speed down the road towards the impact site, in an industrial area of the city. Our driver Vitalii jokes via Anna, about how I want to see more, asking if the explosions weren’t enough for me. I laugh, because in truth they were quite enough. He pulls over and has a quick chat with a man wearing a bulletproof vest with a tourniquet attached to it. The news is that we cannot go to the site, the police are there, and photos are not permitted. We drive on to where the police have set up a temporary barricade and are turning cars away. Local people are standing along the pavements, seemingly unsure where to go, but Vitalii already has a plan, swinging the car round to climb a hill that takes us up to a vantage point from which we can see the whole city. My camera cannot pick up the billowing smoke. Instead, it captures the scale of the city – the skyscrapers, the university, the bombed administrative building. Near where we park the car is a memorial to the Second World War – the dates here are marked 1941-1945. 

There is no street in Kharkiv where you do not see shelling damage. It is a stark reminder of what we have just experienced, but the war is more than bombs. Later that day, in a village in the formerly-occupied territory, a farmer tells me how he cannot cultivate his crops, he cannot grow grain to feed his livestock, because his fields are dotted with mines. He points to a tractor, its metal frame melted and warped after hitting a mine. They had driven the same stretch of field five times safely, on the sixth time they were unlucky. He was reluctant to talk at first, but kissed my hand when we said goodbye, telling me I am beautiful. 

Kharkiv is only 30km from the Russian border. These villages were the frontline, as are the buildings on the edge of the city. It is little wonder the apartment blocks in North Saltivka are among the worst damaged in Kharkiv. One block of flats, its front sheared away and its homes exposed to the world, family belongings piled up with the rubble of concrete, metal and pipes, once looked out onto fields stretching all the way to the Russian advance. There was very little between these homes, and the rocket launch.

Throughout the summer, there have been fears that Russia could be returning to the Kharkivska Oblast. In August, Politico reported that Russia had gathered 100,000 troops and was attempting to break through Kyiv’s defences in the region. The threat has focused on the Kupiansk region, where three people were killed on 19 September by a Russian attack. 

According to an analysis in the New York Times, “the Northeast, the Ukrainians acknowledge … is one of the very few places where Moscow’s forces are engaged in sustained offensive operations, and making small, tactical gains”. So far, the Russians have failed to break the lines. Still, writes Marc Santora, “there is no indication that Russian pressure will ease. Ukraine warned last week that Moscow had withdrawn ground forces from Belarus to join offensive operations in the area.”

It is partly the proximity to the border that allows for the Russians to organise here: they do not face the same logistical challenges as they may do in other regions. And it’s that proximity to the border that causes anxiety to those living in Kharkiv and the formerly-occupied territories. In Izium, an elderly woman told me she is frightened the Russians will come back. A volunteer in Kharkiv explained how “we are on the frontline… it is easy in the west to forget the war for a day or two, but here we are not allowed to forget it”. 

Our final stop for the day, and for the trip, is to the cemetery on the edge of the city. Just beyond the now closed airport, civilians and soldiers are buried overlooking a lake. Between 2014 and 2022, Anna explains, there were three rows of military graves, now there are dozens. Each one is planted with a Ukraine flag, hundreds that flutter blue and yellow against the pinkening sky. The scale is overwhelming. The gravestones are etched with a photo of the killed soldier. Some were only born this century. On the grave of one of the youngest, the family have placed a much-loved teddy bear. Tears tingle in my nose. One photo is of a soldier cuddling his dog. Some are older, my parents’ age. Some are my age. All of them had lives left to live. 

Not all the graves have been filled: open holes are waiting to receive the coffins of the recently-killed. Others are freshly covered over; mounds of soil yet to depress with time. Two women carry candles in jars to a nearby plot, in the newest section of the cemetery. Their heads are bowed in a very private grief, of a very public tragedy. 

Just after midnight, I’m woken up by my air alert app, and I can hear the siren sounding outside. Then I hear the first explosion. My phone beeps, it’s Anna: go to the bathroom. I’m already there, with my grab bag and the duvet from the bed. 

The explosions sound closer than before. There are four in total. Later, I read how Russia “launched an attack on the city of Kharkiv with S-300 anti-aircraft missiles at around 00:30 … The authorities reported that four S-300 guided missiles hit the building of a civilian facility. Afterwards, a blaze erupted on the site of the strike.”

But at that point, I don’t know any of this. What I know is that the city – and close by – is being shelled, again, and that I have to stay in the bathroom until it is safe to go out. I have turned the bathroom light on using the exterior switch, rather than the smaller light where the switch is in the room, a decision I am kicking myself over. I also didn’t pick up my pillow, and I am weirdly conscious of the fact I am not wearing any clothes. I don’t want to leave the relative safety of the bathroom to deal with any one of these three issues. 

Once again, I feel surprisingly calm, but my stomach is enacting my anxiety for me, cramping and gurgling in distress. I search ‘Kharkiv’ on Twitter, to see people posting about buildings shaking, about the number of missile explosions, and the estimated proximity. It feels like we are going through this together and there is a strange comfort in that, all of us waiting, and watching our screens, and hoping.

It was four and there will be one more, Anna messages. But it turns out that there are just four. Looks like they are done. The time is 00:37 am on Sunday 17 September. I wait a while longer, checking Twitter, waiting for the alert to end, and then decide to go back to bed. I’m surprised by how quickly I fall back to sleep.

I don’t sleep for long. At around 3am, I shoot up in bed, woken by the loudest bang I have ever heard in my life. I look at my phone, but there is no air alert. I can hear voices in the hotel, and smell cigarette smoke. I reassure myself: it must have been someone slamming a door. 

Minutes later, another bang, and this time I have no doubt it was an explosion. I grab my duvet, remembering my pillow this time, and go into the bathroom, turning on the smaller light using the interior switch. Still no air alert. And, weirdly, nothing on Twitter. The silence is confusing. I turn the light off and wait for whatever is happening to finish happening. 

At 3.35am there are four, fast, successive explosions, and so loud as to feel them through my body. My stomach is now water, my jaw clenched so hard that my teeth can’t chatter from fear, they are too tightly jammed together. My hands are shaking as I try to keep as still as possible, my breath ragged as I force myself to do 5-in-5-out breathing.

I start to think it was a gun – that there are gunmen in the building, and the four bangs were four gunshots. I am too frightened to leave the bathroom, I am too frightened even to shift my body into a more comfortable position. Any movement, I am convinced, could betray my presence to the imagined gunmen roaming the hall outside. 

It wasn’t a gunman, of course it wasn’t. The most likely explanation is that it was air defences. 

The third set of explosions in less than 24 hours, and despite the fact that this last set was protecting me and the city, they were the ones that scared me the most. I have never been so frightened in my life as lying on a cold tiled bathroom floor, in the kind of pitch darkness where you can’t even see the white reflection of the ceramic sink next to your face, waiting to hear a fifth, maybe sixth, explosion.

After each of the three episodes, my body expressed my fear for me – shaking hands, thudding heart, stomach reduced to liquid and pain. That morning had been the first time I had experienced the surreal horror of shelling. The dull thud that hits the ground but which you feel in your body, the speed of it all, and how your anxiety lifts when you watch people around you rushing back into life, filling the tear in the day with mundane activity. At midnight, there was no one else to watch, to learn from, to check when it was safe again, and this brought with it a new kind of fear. With no traffic, no people chatter, the sound of the blasts cuts through the air, with only the siren for company. It is hard to know when safety returns, but I had Twitter, a virtual community enduring together.

As for the final explosions, they were terrifying, because they came with no explanation – despite, in the logic that comes after an hour’s sleep and a crisp grey dawn, the explanation being almost stunningly obvious. 

If my brain was almost preternaturally calm and my physical body was anxious, there was also the inescapable horror of realising that somewhere near you, people are injured. They may well be dying. Infrastructure is burning – more buildings recklessly destroyed. And there is guilt, too, because hours after those final six bangs, I left Kharkiv, and a day later I was on the train to Poland, and then a flight home. 

Home is where I am typing this, back at my desk, only now I jump at every bang from the building site opposite my peaceful flat. 

There is no doubt that right now, it is air defences that Ukraine needs. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has called for more air defences to be given to Ukraine, telling Reuters: “There is an urgent need for air defence, not only new systems, but also ammunition, maintenance, spare parts ... We see that air defence is saving lives every day in Ukraine and we need to sustain the air defence systems of Ukraine”. The US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin agrees, saying “Air defence is saving lives. I urged allies and partners to dig deep and donate whatever air defence munitions they can as Ukraine heads into another winter of war.”

Back in the summer, key Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told allies that Ukraine cannot protect all of its main cities from Russian missile threats without a significant increase in the provision of air defence systems. The success of air defences is clear in Kyiv, where drone attacks are consistently repelled. But Kyiv is one city in a vast country under sustained attack. 

The pro-Putin shills on both the left and right claim that arming Ukraine is prolonging this war, that Ukraine should compromise, negotiate, put up and shut up. As if there is a negotiation with a country that bombs civilian cities while toddlers play in cafes, or while people sleep. Arming Ukraine, and solidarity with Ukraine, is what will bring peace to Ukraine. 

Thank you for reading. 

Sian