By Anastasiia Malenko
KYIV (Reuters) -Several nights a week, Daria Slavytska packs a yoga mat, blankets and food into a stroller and descends with her two-year-old Emil into the Kyiv subway. While air raid sirens wail above, the 27-year-old tries to snatch a few hours’ sleep safely below ground.
For the past two months, Russia has unleashed nighttime drone and missile assaults on Kyiv in a summer offensive that is straining the city’s air defences, and has its 3.7 million residents exhausted and on edge.
Other towns and villages have seen far worse since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in early 2022 – especially those close to the frontline far to the east and south.
Many have been damaged or occupied as Russia advances, and thousands of people have fled to the capital, considered the best-defended city in the country.
But recent heavy attacks are beginning to change the mood. At night, residents rush to metro stations deep underground in scenes reminiscent of the German “Blitz” bombings of London during World War Two.
Slavytska has started nervously checking Telegram channels at home even before the city’s alarms sound, after she found herself in early July running into the street to reach the metro with explosions already booming in the sky.
The number of people like Slavytska taking refuge in the cavernous Soviet-era ticket halls and drafty platforms of Kyiv’s 46 underground stations soared after large-scale bombardments slammed the city five times in June.
Previously, the loud air raid alert on her phone sent Emil into bouts of shaking and he would cry “Corridor, corridor, mum. I’m scared. Corridor, mum,” Slavytska said. Now, accustomed to the attacks, he says more calmly “Mum, we should go”.
“We used to come here less often, about once a month,” Slavytska said, sheltering in Akademmistechko station in western Kyiv. “That was six months ago. Now we come two or three times a week.” She spent the night curled up on her pink mat with Emil by a column lining the subway tracks.
The subway system recorded 165,000 visits during June nights, more than double the 65,000 visits in May and nearly five times the number in June last year, its press service told Reuters.
More people were heading to the shelter because of “the scale and lethality” of attacks, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, told Reuters. He said strikes killed 78 Kyiv residents and injured more than 400 in the first half of the year.
U.S. President Donald Trump cited Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian cities when announcing his decision on Monday to offer Kyiv more weapons, including Patriot missiles to boost its air defences.
“It’s incredible that (people) stay, knowing that a missile could be hitting your apartment,” Trump said.
EXHAUSTION AND TERROR
In April, a strike destroyed a residential building a couple of kilometres from Slavytska’s apartment block.
“It was so, so loud. Even my son woke up and I held him in my arms in the corridor,” she said. “It was really scary.”
With the threat of losing her home suddenly more tangible, she now takes her identity documents with her underground.
After seeing how stressed Emil became after the air alerts, Slavytska sought help from a paediatrician, who recommended she turn off her phone’s loud notifications and prescribed a calming medication. Slavytska tells Emil the loud sound during attacks is thunder.
Scientists and psychologists say that the lack of sleep is taking its toll on a population worn down by more than three years of war.
Kateryna Holtsberh, a family psychologist who practices in Kyiv, said sleep deprivation caused by the attacks was causing mood swings, extreme stress and apathy, leading to declined cognitive functions in both kids and adults.
“Many people say that if you sleep poorly, your life will turn into hell and your health will suffer,” said Kateryna Storozhuk, another Kyiv region resident. “I didn’t understand this until it happened to me.”
Anton Kurapov, post-doctoral scholar at the University of Salzburg’s Laboratory for Sleep, Cognition and Consciousness Research, said it was hard to convey to outsiders what it felt like to be under attack.
“Imagine a situation where you go out into the street and a person is shot in front of you … and what fear you experience, your heart sinks,” he said. “People experience this every day, this feeling.”
Kurapov warned that the impact of such stress could result in lifetime consequences, including chronic illnesses.
A study he led that was published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in August 2024 showed that 88% of Ukrainians surveyed reported bad or very bad sleep quality.
Lack of sleep can significantly impact economic performance and soldiers’ ability to fight, said Wendy Troxel, senior behavioural scientist at RAND Corporation, a U.S. think-tank.
RAND research in 2016 which Troxel co-authored showed that lack of sleep among the U.S. working population was costing the economy up to $411 billion a year.
As she tries to squeeze out more hours of sleep in the subway, Slavytska is looking into buying a mattress to bring underground that would be more comfortable than her mat. Danish retailer JYSK says the air strikes prompted a 25% jump in sales of inflatable mattresses, camp beds and sleep mats in Kyiv in three weeks of June.
Others are taking more extreme measures. Small business owner Storozhuk, who had no shelter within three km of her home, invested over $2,000 earlier this year in a Ukrainian-made “Capsule of Life” reinforced steel box, capable of withstanding falling concrete slabs.
She climbs in nightly, with her Chihuahua, Zozulia.
“I developed a lot of anxiety and fear,” Storozhuk said. “I realized that in order to be able to sleep peacefully in Ukraine, I needed some kind of safe shelter.”
(Reporting by Yurii Kovalenko, Anastasiia Malenko and Vladyslav Smilianets; Additional reporting by Dan Peleshchuk; Editing by Peter Graff, Frank Jack Daniel, Mike Collett-White and Daniel Flynn)
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