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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘It's just daily life': Kyiv residents get used to overnight Russian drone attacks
It only occurred to Iryna Yakymehuk to make use of the local bomb shelter after the Shaheed kamizake drone struck her nextdoor neighbour's fifth-floor flat at 2am on Tuesday, taking a messy bite out of the bedroom. The 22-year-old had returned to her home in Kyiv's Obolon district from the underwear shop where she works as an assistant at about 9pm. She ate macaroni while swiping through some funny TikTok videos before getting into bed at 11pm. Russia has stepped up its aerial attacks on Kyiv in recent days. From the safety of Washington, Donald Trump had warned that Vladimir Putin's response to Ukraine's audacious Operation Spiderweb attack on Russia's nuclear-capable bombers a week earlier 'wouldn't be pretty'. But Yakymehuk doesn't look for that sort of content on TikTok. Air raid sirens, and talk of drones and missiles, have been par for the course for Kyiv's residents since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion three years ago. A car dealership was destroyed by falling debris from a shot-down missile a couple of years ago, but otherwise the Obolon district in north Kyiv, 6 miles from the government buildings in the city centre, has avoided the worst. 'I am a deep sleeper, so I don't normally hear the drones,' Yakymehuk said as she was queueing with others in front of a blue tent where police were taking down details and volunteers were giving out compensation forms to fill in. 'It's just daily life, I don't think about it,' she added, squinting up in the morning sun at the demolition workers dangling from cranes at the corner of the 25-storey apartment building as they sought to make the site safe. The window frame of her bedroom had been blown in, and was dangling at an angle. On Monday the drones did wake her. They seemed to be on top of her, she said. And the persistent, nagging buzz of what seemed to be a large number of them was getting louder, as if someone was slowly bringing a electric shaver ever closer to her face. Then the first massive explosion that made her heart jump. And a second. This one sent 'sparks' flying across her bedroom window on the fifth floor, she said. Yakymehuk ran down the stairs from her flat, as did others, out of the building and to the bomb shelter – a dusty cellar, in reality, below another building, 100 metres away. The door to it is not always unlocked. But it was tonight. There were hundreds in there already, 'maybe 500 people', she said. Others in the queue outside the tent on Tuesday morning said they heard 10 explosions in all. Black smoke was still bellowing from the neighbouring industrial estate at mid-morning. This appears to have been the target. One woman in the Obolon district had been killed. Across Kyiv, four were said to be injured. Seven of Kyiv's 10 districts reported being hit in one of the largest drone attacks on the city since the war started. Yakymehuk might not sleep so well in future. Kyiv could be any European capital during the day. It is a far cry from the opening months of the war, when it resembled European cities during the pandemic. Then the streets were empty. The shops locked up. There was a nervous energy among the soldiers at checkpoints that would make everyone else anxious. And the Russians wanted Kyiv. They had been at the edge of the city and could come back. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion Today, the atmosphere is different. The nightlife is lively, restaurants full, and those with money flash it around. Some people are nervous as it gets dark. That's when the Russian bombers and their drones come, increasingly so in recent weeks, even before Operation Spiderweb. The nerves are especially acute among those who live near factories and industrial estates, which the Kremlin suspects of playing a role in Ukraine's war effort. They listen in their beds for the drones to drop, breathing a little easier as they pass by. But others, maybe the majority, ignore the air raid sirens and assure themselves that the drones won't come for them. They get on with it. It is only when an attack from the air comes to your own doorstep that the reality of the situation bites, said Elvira Neehyporenko, 34, whose red Honda, parked just below where the Shaheed drone struck, had taken a hefty blow, leaving it with smashed windows and a caved-in roof. Neehyporenko lives in the same block as Yakymehuk but further away from the where the drone struck. She laughed as she admitted that when the explosions began, a little distant at first, it was her dog Molly, an American Staffordshire terrier, who had the sense to run into the bathroom. Neehyporenko, whose boyfriend is in the army and fighting in Kharkiv, followed the dog. She stayed there for a while on the cold tiles, before the biggest explosion forced her down to the first floor, where she stayed for fear of what she had heard was a Russian tactic of striking at people as they flee from damaged buildings. Standing watching all the commotion outside the flats mid-morning on Tuesday was Oksana Kodynets, 23, who lives in the apartment block opposite where the drone struck. She was taking her 18-month-old daughter, Maria, for a walk. Her husband is in the army and had been working an overnight shift in the city. She had been alone last night and was a little shaken this morning, she admitted. She had recorded the sound of the explosions, including the largest one, just over the way, and had been listening to them this morning. It was a kind of metallic sound, nothing like she had heard before, she said, as she played it from her phone. Does she worry? 'I did last night,' she said with a half-smile. 'I thought it was going to be the last day of my life.'
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump silence as Russia steps up attacks on Ukraine highlights diplomatic failure
The noises in Kyiv in the early hours of Sunday morning went like this. First was the staccato sound of the air defences booming on the edge of the city. As those guns stopped, the sound of drone motors approaching was audible, getting quickly louder before the briefest moment of silence and then a sudden detonation. But, after two days of heavy Russian air raids that hit civilian buildings across Ukraine, the response has been silence from Donald Trump. In the space of just over a week, since the first direct talks between Russia and Ukraine since March 2022 broke up inconclusively with no sign of a ceasefire, the failure of his intervention has become clear. Boasting before his inauguration as US president that he could end the war in 24 hours, he has instead emboldened the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, by declining to impose pressure for an immediate ceasefire – backed by Europe – or meaningful sanctions. Since Trump's two-hour call with Putin last Monday, the Russian leader has made clear his disdain even as Trump's own Defense Intelligence Agency predicted that Moscow would continue fighting through this year. In the aftermath of the call, Putin has ordered the creation of a 'security buffer zone' along Ukraine's eastern border. Strikes on civilian targets only seem to be accelerating, culminating in two straight days of air raids, including Saturday night's – the heaviest aerial bombardment of the war so far, with almost 300 drones and nearly 70 missiles. Related: 'US silence encourages Putin' says Zelenskyy after largest Russian attack to date – Ukraine war live Ukrainian and western officials anticipate that Russia will once again attempt a large-scale offensive during the summer, even if they are highly sceptical that it will be effective given Moscow's punishing losses. The reality is that with deadlock on the ground, the escalating long-range drone war on both sides is becoming ever more significant, even if it cannot conquer territory. As it has become ever larger, with Russian and Ukrainian factories turning out thousands of new drones, it has become more sophisticated with Moscow's employment of big numbers of decoys and systems designed to fool air defence systems. While Ukraine has targeted bases and factories, including those producing fibre optic cable for a new generation of small combat zones, the purpose on Russia's side appears aimed solely at undermining morale on the home front. In recent days, drones and missiles have hit apartment blocks, homes and a student dormitory. On Sunday the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, angrily denounced 'the silence of America … encouraging Putin'. His words raised a more critical question: whether Trump, as he has long threatened, has already walked away from his perfunctory efforts to end the war. When a US official did stir themselves to condemn the strikes, what was missing – any suggestion that Putin and Moscow were responsible- was as significant as what was said. Posting on X, Trump's envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, condemned the attacks under an image of fires in the Ukrainian capital. 'This is Kyiv,' he wrote. 'The indiscriminate killing of women and children at night in their homes is a clear violation of the 1977 Geneva Peace Protocols designed to protect innocents. These attacks are shameful. Stop the killing. Ceasefire now.' Phillips O'Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, has suggested in his newsletter on the war that, far from the recent talks heralding any hopes of a breakthrough, they had in fact removed any pretence that the US-mediated talks were going anywhere. 'On Monday the great charade we have been seeing for months came to an end,' wrote O'Brien this weekend. 'The charade was that Trump was trying to negotiate a deal between Ukraine and Russia that would work for both states. The reality was always that Trump was trying to bludgeon Ukraine into making major concessions to Russia and help Putin achieve many of his strategic goals.' If Trump has already disengaged, that raises a number of difficult questions for Kyiv: will the US continue supplying military aid in sufficient quantities? More crucially, can Europe step into the diplomatic and military void provoked by that disengagement? What is clear to Ukrainians, despite the several weeks of headlines over the potential for a breakthrough in peace talks, is that without pressure from Washington, or hugely accelerated aid from Europe, the war will grind on. And there will be more nights like Saturday's in their future.
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
US silence as Russia steps up attacks on Ukraine highlights Trump's failure
The noises in Kyiv in the early hours of Sunday morning went like this. First was the staccato sound of the air defences booming on the edge of the city. As those guns stopped, the sound of drone motors approaching was audible, getting quickly louder before the briefest moment of silence and then a sudden detonation. But, after two days of heavy Russian air raids that hit civilian buildings across Ukraine, there has been only silence from Donald Trump. In the space of just over a week, since the first direct talks between Russia and Ukraine since March 2022 broke up inconclusively with no sign of a ceasefire, the failure of his intervention has become clear. Boasting before his inauguration as US president that he could end the war in 24 hours, he has instead emboldened the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, by declining to impose pressure for an immediate ceasefire – backed by Europe – or meaningful sanctions. Since Trump's two-hour call with Putin last Monday, the Russian leader has made clear his disdain even as Trump's own Defense Intelligence Agency predicted that Moscow would continue fighting through this year. In the aftermath of the call, Putin has ordered the creation of a 'security buffer zone' along Ukraine's eastern border. Strikes on civilian targets only seem to be accelerating, culminating in two straight days of air raids, including Saturday night's – the heaviest aerial bombardment of the war so far, with almost 300 drones and nearly 70 missiles. Ukrainian and western officials anticipate that Russia will once again attempt a large-scale offensive during the summer, even if they are highly sceptical that it will be effective given Moscow's punishing losses. The reality is that with deadlock on the ground, the escalating long-range drone war on both sides is becoming ever more significant, even if it cannot conquer territory. As it has become ever larger, with Russian and Ukrainian factories turning out thousands of new drones, it has become more sophisticated with Moscow's employment of big numbers of decoys and systems designed to fool air defence systems. While Ukraine has targeted bases and factories, including those producing fibre optic cable for a new generation of small combat zones, the purpose on Russia's side appears aimed solely at undermining morale on the home front. In recent days, drones and missiles have hit apartment blocks, homes and a student dormitory. On Sunday the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, angrily denounced 'the silence of America … encouraging Putin'. His words raised a more critical question: whether Trump, as he has long threatened, has already walked away from his perfunctory efforts to end the war. Phillips O'Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, has suggested in his newsletter on the war that, far from the recent talks heralding any hopes of a breakthrough, they had in fact removed any pretence that the US-mediated talks were going anywhere. 'On Monday the great charade we have been seeing for months came to an end,' wrote O'Brien this weekend. 'The charade was that Trump was trying to negotiate a deal between Ukraine and Russia that would work for both states. The reality was always that Trump was trying to bludgeon Ukraine into making major concessions to Russia and help Putin achieve many of his strategic goals.' If Trump has already disengaged, that raises a number of difficult questions for Kyiv: will the US continue supplying military aid in sufficient quantities? More crucially, can Europe step into the diplomatic and military void provoked by that disengagement? What is clear to Ukrainians, despite the several weeks of headlines over the potential for a breakthrough in peace talks, is that without pressure from Washington, or hugely accelerated aid from Europe, the war will grind on. And there will be more nights like Saturday's in their future.
