In the summer of 2024, an American volunteer wakes in his AirBNB in northern Kyiv and prepares to face a ‘typical’ day in the midst of the ongoing war.
The phone alarm woke me at seven. The air conditioning wasn’t running, so I knew the electricity was out. After the Russians hit the electrical infrastructure with missiles, the Ukrainian government instituted rolling blackouts and published a chart online showing the hours when Kyiv could expect power. Only two hours a day were guaranteed; 7 AM on a Wednesday was listed as “Maybe,” meaning you may or may not have power, depending on the need.
I had an Airbnb in Obolon, a neighborhood in northern Kyiv. The area was stacked with run-down Soviet-era residential high rises. My heart sank when I first glimpsed mine from the Uber. It looked dilapidated despite the thirteen-story advertisement for Pandora Jewelry slapped to the side of it, and the interior was even worse. Luckily, my apartment was newly-renovated and clean, albeit basic.
The hot water still worked without power, so I brought my solar-charge lantern into the tiny bathroom and showered by its harsh light. I had recharged my phone and two battery blocks while we had power the night before, so the phone would last through this day of volunteering. But though you could shower with the water, it wasn’t potable without risking serious gastrointestinal discomfort. Everyone lives on bottles of spring water. On my first day in Kyiv, I bought a big bottle at an Obolon grocery store, only to later discover it was seltzer (“water with gas” says the label, but not in English). The next morning, I was forced to brush my teeth with seltzer water, which I subsequently cannot recommend.
I went down the steps and into Obolonsky Square. It was bustling at this hour, everyone dressed for work or school, and they poured into the underground metro station that also served as my building’s air raid shelter. In front of the high rise was what I can only describe as a sidewalk strip mall. Both sides of the sidewalk were lined with stalls, some of them enclosed and air conditioned, containing everything from delis and bakeries to florists and coffee shops. Businesses were not affected by the blackouts, so as not to harm the economy any further. I stopped into a tiny bakery and bought a danish – I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t read the sign, didn’t feel like opening Google Lens, and simply picked what looked good. I have just enough Ukrainian to be polite, and the women in the bakery helped me along. At another booth, a young man with some English made me a cappuccino. All this cost the equivalent of about two dollars. I wondered how long the young man would be in that stall; the draft age is twenty-five to sixty, and the war showed no sign of resolution.
My phone buzzed and I saw it was Sasha on Telegram. Sasha was the founder and leader of a small but effective charity organization simply called Gurtum – “The Group.” The volunteer groups all use online messaging systems to coordinate volunteers, and as a result I now have five of them on my phone. The message was in Ukrainian, and I copied it into Google Translate. He would pick me up at an intersection close by in twenty minutes, and I responded with, simply, Tak. Yes.
Sasha pulled up in black Dodge Journey with the Gurtum “gang sign,” as he called it, emblazoned on the doors. I jumped in the back with a young Finn named Nicol. A Ukrainian volunteer was up front next to Sasha. We pulled back out into traffic.
“Where to?” I asked Sasha.
“Ozera,” he called back. “We’re going to a school.” He was tall, in his early thirties with a thick beard. His English was good.
We drove northwest from Obolon and crossed the Irpin River on one of the two bridges the Ukrainians had blown up at the start of the 2022 offensive to keep the Russians out of the capital. That was successful, and after the Russians retreated, the bridge was quickly rebuilt with EU funds. Fortifications had been erected along the highway in case the Russians returned, poorly camouflaged with green netting. Ozera was another fifteen minutes past the bridge through farms and small villages.
We pulled up in front of a single-story schoolhouse surrounded by trees. All around were wide fields of wheat with a few scattered homes. We walked up to the schoolhouse, and the principal came out to greet Sasha with a hug.
“Let me show you what we built here,” said Sasha.
We walked around the back of the school – I could hear the children and teachers inside – to a long mound that ran across a small field behind the school. There was a steel door at one end.
“This is the bomb shelter we built for the school,” Sasha proudly announced.
“I thought everyone was going over Zoom,” I said.
“Only the older students. The young ones can’t stay home all day. Their parents are at work. So they come to school, but this one didn’t have a shelter. We built this one for them.”
He led us down into the bunker. It was like a basement, with concrete floor, walls, and ceiling, divided into two rooms. It was filled with child-sized tables and chairs, and shelves filled with books and boardgames.
“Do you like our artwork?” he asked. The walls of one of the rooms was painted with astronauts and rockets and planets.
“Tak, dobre,” I said.
“It has bathrooms in the back, in case the kids have to be down here a long time. We even put in wi-fi.”
“Was this all from donations?” I asked.
“Yes. Some things I get from destroyed buildings. The local governments let me use…what is it? Salvage. But mostly it’s donations. Well. . . let me show you what we need to do today.”
We went back outside and walked to the end of the earthen mound over the shelter. A metal ventilation pipe and a couple of wires stuck up out of the ground at the top.
“We’ve got a leak,” Sasha said. “Where the pipe goes through the concrete. The electric goes in the same hole. But water is coming in. We need to seal it up better.”
Nicol and I pulled shovels out of the Dodge and dug around the base of the ventilation pipe. It was a lovely, sunny day for working outside. Nicol took off his shirt in what was, for him, uncommonly warm weather.
While we worked, Sasha came and went to check our progress between phone calls. He was always on the phone, speaking in that excited Ukrainian style, like Italians do. I figured he was coordinating volunteers or hustling for donations. As usual for a foreigner lacking the local language, I did a lot of guessing about what was happening around me.
At one point, Sasha waved us off the mound and called us inside the shelter. He had picked up a pizza for lunch and the four of us sat at the tiny tables to eat, knees to our chests. The pizza wasn’t up to New York standards, but good enough for a country at war. The three of them drank kvass, a low-alcohol beer made from fermented rye. I tried it and found the flavor unique. Then I switched to Coke. Then back out to the hole.
Nicol and I dug down about four feet before we hit concrete and cleared out the earth around the pipe and wires. We paused a few times to watch what appeared to be a harrier hovering over a field, then suddenly diving on prey in the grass. We had to widen the hole so we could both stand in it, found the site of the leak, and closed the gaps in the concrete with sealing foam. After it dried, we covered everything with roofing tar. I have no idea if it was the correct technique, but it proved good enough for Sasha.
Then the children appeared outside, shepherded by the teachers into the shelter. Sasha called to us that there was an air raid warning, and that we should remain inside with the children until the all-clear.
We went in behind the children. There were about a hundred of them, and with concrete on all sides it was impossible to hear each other speak in the din. I had already learned that most Ukrainians ignore the air raid alerts. They come over the phone via either a free app (usually Alert! by Ajax) or through the Emergency Broadcast System. Like most everyone in Ukraine, Nicol and I both had the alerts disabled. I went to the metro for an air raid on my first night in Kyiv and found myself alone. There are simply too many alerts, and most of the missiles are intercepted before they reach the capital, which is not the case for most smaller towns in Ukraine. Most people in Kyiv simply ignore the alerts and go on with their lives. It would be impractical to duck into a shelter several times a day. I guessed that the school administrators wanted us to go into the shelter with them, but it was too loud to bother asking. After thirty minutes, the all-clear was given and Nicol and I filled in the hole.
“What else?” I asked Sasha.
“We’ll go over to Horenka,” he said. “I need to check on something. And there you will see many dots.”
“Many what?”
“Dots. You will see many dots.”
“…okay…”
We got back in the Dodge and drove east, back over the Irpin. We stopped at a small white building in a village.
“This used to be the library,” Sasha explained. “It was damaged in the shelling. We’re repairing it. And then they can use it for public events, too.” We went inside the empty building where three local volunteers were putting up drywall. They all conversed in Ukrainian, so Nicol and I occupied ourselves with petting a stray dog that had come around.
Sasha came out and showed me the concrete wall in front of the library.
“You see these dots?”
I looked closer. There were small holes right through the concrete.
“Bullet holes?” I asked.
“No. The Russians never got this far. This is little pieces from the artillery.”
“Shrapnel?”
“Yes, that.”
The Russians had shelled the towns across the river while they remained in the area for a couple of weeks. They must have been using big shells for the fragments to penetrate concrete.
We got back in the Dodge and drove slowly through the badly-paved streets. Now I was seeing dots everywhere – in wooden fences, in garage doors, in metal gates in fences. Smashed windows had already been replaced. Sasha pointed to a pile of rusting cars. He told me that the military had picked up all the cars in the street damaged by the shelling and stacked them here. The pile was about two stories high. All rusted from the paint burning off, the windows blown in, and all sprinkled with dots.
We finally pulled up alongside a school. “Come take a look at this,” said Sasha.
There was a playground overgrown with grass behind the empty schoolhouse. The swings and monkey bars were peppered with rusting holes.
“Please tell me the children weren’t here,” I said.
“No, it was a Saturday,” said Sasha. “The kids never came back. They were all,” and he said the next word one syllable at a time, “e-vac-u-a-ted to other towns.”
“Good.” Now I understood what he was doing. He wanted me to see what the Russians were doing to Ukraine. The fighting was elsewhere now, so all I could see in Kyiv were the dots and the occasional destroyed building that hadn’t been demolished yet. The holes were in other towns now, and in the people there. Tens of thousands of people.
“Let’s go back to Kyiv,” Sasha said. “Do you guys want to take some beer?” He meant go out for a drink. Nicol and I looked at each other. We were covered in dirt and sweat.
“No place fancy,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that.”
Sasha fought his way through the Kyiv rush-hour traffic and into Arsenalia, an upscale neighborhood east of the city center. He parked where I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t have, as do most Kyivans. The streets were full of good restaurants, pubs, and cafes, and the sidewalks packed with people: soldiers on leave, college students, and women in white dresses, the vogue of the summer.
Sasha led us to Pepper’s Club, a restaurant which looked too good for my clothes. But he called out to a waiter, who greeted him warmly and hugged him, so I knew it would be fine. They gave us a table with benches outside under a canvas canopy. Sasha ordered us two pitchers of Tennant’s Stout and wouldn’t take any money from us. After a pint, I forgot about my clothes.
We discussed all manner of topics regarding the war: the draft, for example, and Sasha told us how casino workers and circus clowns were eligible for a deferment. The biggest joke in Ukraine, he called it. He told us about life in the occupied zones of Crimea and Donbas, of how the ethnic Russians living there at first thought that they would be fine under Putin’s rule. Then the Russian army stole everything not nailed down, from cars to entire businesses, and shot anyone who protested, regardless of their ethnicity. He told us of when the Russians entered the towns north of Kyiv in 2022, claiming that that were rescuing the people from fascists, and where were all the flowers for the liberators? And the people told them, we’ll stick the flowers up your asses – go back to Russia! And eventually our pitchers were empty and the air cooled as the sun set on Kyiv.
“What time do you want to meet tomorrow?” I asked Sasha.
“I’ll text you at eight with where to meet,” he said. He first had to work out who else was available to work that day, and then he could figure out what project we would work on. As with so much else in Ukraine, he had to improvise to keep everything running. The Ukrainians have always been good at that.
I got on the metro at Arsenalia Station and rode back to Obolon. I was pleasantly surprised to find that we had power, that the air conditioner was running, that I could wash my clothes, and that I could shower without the lantern.
