Even as air-raid sirens blare in wartime, Ukrainians wait for the traffic light to change
Complicated espresso drinks are still sold at service stations; pizza and sushi are still on offer; and rave parties still rave, even if they end at 11pm, in time for the midnight curfew.
The desire for order is core to how Ukrainians cope in this fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion.
Traffic lights seem to be the most obvious sign of how Ukrainians hold onto normality.
Red means stop. Green means go. There is no yellow light here, no caution, no chancing it. Even during air-raid alarms.
'Even when I walk my dog in the evening and there are no cars at all, I still wait at the kerb,' said Volodymyr Yeremenko, 63, a resident of Pryluky, a city of about 52,000 people about 145km east of Kyiv, who had come to the capital for a doctor's appointment.
Spotting a foreigner in Ukraine is easy.
They cross when the light is still red, or, God forbid, wander in traffic, something that is a hobby (or death wish) in cities like New York. Ukrainians have been known to shake their heads or to caution them not to cross.
Ukrainians say strictly obeying traffic signals was a peculiarity here long before the war.
Maybe it's a way to show they are more like the people in notoriously law-abiding street-crossing nations such as Finland or Germany.
'In Lviv, it's striking how people obey pedestrian traffic lights, even when there are no cars around,' wrote Johannes Majamaki, 24, a Finnish law student, on social media recently.
Majamaki, who often visits Ukraine, posted a photograph of pedestrians waiting on a carless corner. 'It feels like being back home in Helsinki,' he noted.
Putting firm numbers on how widespread law-abiding behaviour at traffic lights is in Ukraine is difficult.
Pedestrians wait for the light at a crossing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 20. Photo / Brendan Hoffman, the New York Times
The Kyiv police did not respond to repeated questions for data on the number of tickets issued for crossing against a red light.
The offence, a US$6 fine, is lumped together with offences by animal-drawn vehicles and errant bicycles, so it's impossible to parse out the pedestrian violations.
But Anton Grushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, said he thought that waiting patiently at the light was a cultural habit.
He said he typically crossed the street only on a green light. He said that was his custom, even if there were no cars, in 2005 and today, in the middle of the war.
He added that he had not noticed any change in Ukrainians' street-crossing behaviour since the Russians invaded in February 2022 because the war had been normalised for most people.
'This is more a matter of habit — something the war hasn't really changed,' Grushetskyi said.
'The sum of all these habits creates the impression of normal life, which is something many people deeply need.'
That doesn't mean that everyone always follows the rules in Ukraine. Plenty of government officials, for example, have been accused and convicted of taking money they shouldn't.
While waiting for the light, Yehor Riabchenko, 16, admitted that he climbed a wooden fence last year when he wasn't supposed to. But he also fell and broke his elbow.
On this Tuesday, he was rushing to the hospital to get stitches removed after a recent surgery for the injury when the air-raid alarm rang out.
Still, he waited for the green.
Yurii Ukrainets, 71, a retired military man, also waited patiently at the corner in Kyiv for the green pedestrian light during the air-raid alert because, he said, he had no desire to throw himself under the wheels of an oncoming car. What would happen if he ran across the street dodging cars? Chaos, that's what.
'Rules are rules,' said Ukrainets, who was on his way to a government office to check on his pension.
'Imagine my grandson is out there with my daughter, and they see me crossing against a red light.
'If I don't see them, but they see me, what will they think? 'Grandpa breaks the rules — so I can too.' I don't want to set that kind of example.'
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kim Barker
Photographs by: Brendan Hoffman
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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