Kyiv in the war's fifth year: missiles at 3am, day-long blackouts and the arithmetic of survival

In Kyiv, in the fifth year of the full-scale war, being woken at around 3am by the sound of explosions is now a regular experience for many residents. Ukrainian artist, writer and cultural manager Diana Berg wrote in her account of life in Kyiv that, sitting behind two thick walls and scrolling Telegram to see which way Russia's missiles were heading, she noticed a light was on — meaning power had returned while she was asleep.

Realising the power was back, she got up out of habit, loaded clothes into the washing machine and set a quick wash, hoping it would finish before load shedding started again. She then sat back down to wait out this period of the Russian attack.

According to her account, air-raid alert apps now divide threats by colour — yellow for drones and red for missiles. That night's alert was red. Ballistic missiles take only a few minutes to arrive, whereas Russian drones buzz overhead for about an hour.

On Sunday night (1 November), hackers hacked Ukraine's emergency alert app and sent a false warning of a nuclear attack, but they did not even notice it, because everyone uses their favourite Telegram channels. After five years of checking missile trajectories in real time, she wrote, everyone is over-prepared for the real thing and too tired to waste energy on a fake alert.

Diana Berg wrote that she first understood in Mariupol in 2014 how quickly people get used to shelling. Twelve years and two lost homes later, at her current address in Kyiv, the boundary of normality has shifted again. It is now a golden autumn and the cold has not yet set in, but after Russian attacks on power plants and substations the load-shedding schedule has returned. Winter has not even begun, yet she wrote that she already feels exhausted thinking about the winter ahead.

At 9:49am, a push notification from the power company said the schedule was no longer in effect. A four-hour cut grew to six hours, then to two six-hour slots, and finally to an emergency shutdown. On their neighbourhood Telegram channel, the anger of thousands of people shrank to 39 angry emojis and 12 praying-hands emojis. One scroll up in the same feed, a fundraiser was running for a pickup truck for the front line, because the previous truck had been destroyed and there was no transport to evacuate the wounded — people tap an angry emoji, send money for the truck, and move on.

In the first days of the attacks, their home backup battery lasted eight hours, keeping the wifi, laptop, fridge and lights running. Last winter, when the temperature reached minus 20 degrees Celsius, heating disappeared for weeks and the flat's temperature fell to 11 degrees. During a 30-hour blackout, she wrote, even the fridge was unplugged and food was hung out on the balcony.

Direct hits or falling debris start a fire somewhere in the city every night. Recently a drone struck the multi-storey building right outside her window, burning its top floors and killing a neighbour. In the fifth year of the full-scale war, she wrote, she finally sat down to update the fire safety protocol for her home.

Even so, Kyiv's cafes and clubs are still open. People work, make plans and meet friends — sometimes for an exhibition opening, sometimes for a funeral. But without power, ironing a shirt is out of the question, a hot shower can be a problem, and a hair dryer is allocated just two minutes on battery power, she wrote.

As the cold increases, the local grid starts to trip. After a marathon blackout, when power returns for a window of just two hours, the whole district switches on geysers, washing machines, ovens and vacuum cleaners at the same time. Within twenty minutes the substation itself blows from the overload — not from a Russian missile strike, but because of the residents themselves. A neighbour in the building chat group then shouts for everyone to stop switching everything on at once, she wrote.

During shutdowns, when the area sinks into darkness, street lights and traffic lights also go out. She pins reflective tape to her coat and walks with a torch past pharmacies and coffee shops running on petrol generators, their lights dimmed to save fuel. When long blackouts and snowfall begin, the city sets up warming tents officially called 'Invincibility Points'. Last winter, when the home battery ran out, she would go there in a puffer jacket and beanie, warming her hands around a paper cup of tea, charging her power bank, phone and laptop from a single extension cord and trying to meet a deadline; the people around her were doing the same, she wrote.

By the afternoon she returns from finishing her workout, with the scheduled blackout in full swing. She and her husband Sasha follow a strict rule of not plugging high-wattage appliances into their EcoFlow battery — no kettle, heater or toaster, with their coffee machine the only exception. Two tabs stay open in her browser — one on protests in Europe, the other on which fire extinguisher is best for a house fire. When the air-raid siren starts sounding again outside, she looks at the app on her phone: the alert colour is yellow.