Letter from Kyiv: The messed-up day-to-day of living under Putin’s cruel air war

A woman drinking coffee in her apartment, which was damaged in the night attack on the UNIT.City residential complex in Kyiv. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian View image in fullscreen A woman drinking coffee in her apartment, which was damaged in the night attack on the UNIT.City residential complex in Kyiv. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian Letter from Kyiv: I marvel at how people deal with daily life under Putin’s cruel air war People have absorbed violence and terror into their lives. Somehow, they keep going – quietly rescuing, evacuating, replacing, mending, adapting … and sometimes saving tiny animals I t was a glorious balmy night, and I was walking home from dinner. I’d just eaten fried red mullet from the Black Sea on a pavement terrace, listening to the cries of the last swifts as darkness crept over the city. A couple of blocks from where I was staying, there was a curious sight: a couple and their dog were standing over a hedgehog, which was standing seemingly irresolute in the road. I wasn’t sure the couple were doing the right thing by shining their phone torches at the poor creature, but their intentions were clear enough: they were trying to protect it and chivvy it out of the way of the traffic. As a car bore down, I flung myself into the street, like a latter-day Roberta from The Railway Children, and waved my arms to get the driver to stop. At the same time, the couple’s dog gave an encouraging bark to the tiny animal, which scuttled across to the opposite pavement, and into the safety of a yard. Everything always feels heightened in Kyiv, and I was apt to overthink into this moment many metaphors of escape, protection and destruction. Hedgehogs, by the way, are a surprisingly common sight in Kyiv. So too are the “hedgehogs” made from metal beams welded together in a three-dimensional star-shape, a highly effective obstruction for tanks. (The other favoured tank obstructors are known as “dragon’s teeth”, because of their resemblance to monstrous molars rising from the ground.) After this small drama had concluded, I realised two things: that I had really, really needed the creature to survive, and that it was perhaps odd that strangers in the street should have found it necessary, in the middle of a horrific war, to band together in unspoken defence of a hedgehog. Later that night, the Russian military unleashed a long-expected combined missile attack on the city. I woke up with a start around 2.30am, my heart racing. It took a moment for my ear to tune into the sound: was it outgoing, or incoming? Yes: outgoing – air defence. Later came Shahed drones, which sound like airborne lawnmowers, punctuated by the small-arms fire of the Ukrainians. The sonic landscape of missile, while now familiar to my Ukrainian friends, is so remarkable to me that I can never stop myself recording it on my phone. The next morning, my brilliant colleague, the photographer Julia Kochetova, and I went out to report on the damage in two