Inside Kyiv’s Metro, a Citywide Bomb Shelter

Across Ukraine, especially in the cities where Russia’s onslaught has been particularly intense, underground spaces have become precious.

By Joshua Yaffa The New Yorker

 

Every night in Kyiv, metro stations fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians.Photographs by Emanuele Satolli for The New Yorker

 Late in the afternoon of March 1st, a gray, damp day in Kyiv, I heard—or, rather, felt—a chest-thumping burst from outside the window of my hotel. A spiral of black smoke floated upward, past office buildings and apartment blocks. Russia had targeted the city’s television tower, a thousand-foot landmark of the Soviet era that rises above the western edge of the city’s skyline.

The explosion left much of the surrounding area charred, including grounds on the edge of a complex dedicated to the thirty thousand Jews who, in 1941, were murdered by the Nazis at a site known as Babyn Yar. The irony was impossible to miss: a military campaign that Vladimir Putin had declared, in a grim and rambling televised address, was aimed at the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine came perilously close to bombing a Holocaust memorial. What made the destruction utterly tragic was that five people who were walking below the tower died instantly; four of them were effectively incinerated.

By the following morning, the United Nations put the number of confirmed civilian deaths at two hundred and twenty-seven, noting that the true count is “considerably higher.” (On Facebook, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service had said that more than two thousand civilians have been killed, but it later removed the number from the post.) Many of those deaths came from air strikes, whether from artillery shelling or missiles. As a result, across the country, especially in the cities where Russia’s onslaught has been particularly intense, underground spaces—cellars, parking garages, bomb shelters left over from the Cold War—have become precious. Every night in Kyiv, metro stations fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago. 

People gather in the metro with blankets, rolling suitcases, and plastic shopping bags.

With word spreading of the possibility of further Russian air strikes, I decided to pay a visit to Kristina Berdynskykh, one of the country’s most accomplished political journalists, who has spent every night of the war in her local metro station. Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Berdynskykh is thirty-eight, with shoulder-length brown hair and a demeanor that is both reassuringly competent and disarmingly self-deprecating. She had spent the day at her mother’s apartment, organizing provisions, calling relatives elsewhere in Ukraine, taking a shower, swapping clothes, and weighing whether to leave town. Many of her colleagues from Novoye Vremya, the magazine where she is the chief political correspondent, have relocated to western Ukraine. Two staffers joined Kyiv’s Territorial Defense Forces, the volunteer paramilitary brigades that have popped up around the country. Part of Berdynskykh’s urge to stay in the capital is journalistic; she managed to write one column the previous week—a description of her evenings spent in the metro—while hidden away in a hallway closet.

“I can’t stop imagining the following scenario,” she told me. “Kyiv holds out, and then I emerge from the metro and am one of the only journalists covering victory day.” She acknowledged that this may be an unlikely fantasy, but, then again, it felt no more possible to imagine a Russian takeover of the Ukrainian state. “The first days of resistance give me confidence that won’t happen,” she said. “What I’m less sure about is how much blood could be spilled in the process.” 

Kristina Berdynskykh picnics inside a Kyiv subway station with her mother, Galina, and her niece, Nastya.

We set up a picnic—alfresco, as we joked—on a blanket laid out on the platform. Galina produced what, in my famished state, looked like a Ukrainian bounty: boiled potatoes, sour pickles, slick pork fat. Berdynskykh and her family are from Kherson, a city in the south, where the Dnieper River empties into the Black Sea, not far from Crimea. It is largely Russian-speaking, with cultural and historical ties to its larger neighbor that stretch back for centuries. The next day, Kherson would become the first Ukrainian city to fall to Russian forces, having been blanketed by heavy shelling in the process.

I asked Galina, who was keeping warm with a heavy black coat and a wool knit hat, about her attitude toward Russia. She was a Soviet child, raised on stories of the Second World War, and was an enthusiastic member of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. “I didn’t think of Kyiv as my capital, but Moscow,” she said. “We were part of the same whole—it didn’t even cross our minds to separate ourselves.” Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Galina’s feelings for Russia were essentially warm. Not anymore. “They are my enemies,” she told me. “It’s terrible—we were so close, but after this I don’t know how it could ever be any different.”

After a week of nights spent in the metro, Berdynskykh has come to recognize a cast of recurring characters. There is the wife of a metro employee who, along with the couple’s five-month-old child, has effectively moved into the station, making rounds to hand out tea and marshmallows. A thirty-year-old trumpet player named Danil Kolotun, from a renowned national folk orchestra, has taken to playing the Ukrainian national anthem in the evenings. “You can see that people are down, pressured, scared,” he said. “I’m a musician—that’s what I can do well—so I figured I’d make that my contribution.” It’s also a way to lower his own stress: “I don’t want to panic—but I am angry.”

As the city’s curfew hour, eight o’clock, drew closer, more people filtered into the station. There’s a toilet, previously reserved for metro personnel, fifty feet or so down the tunnel in one direction. A single power strip is plugged in by the ticket window, for people to take turns charging their phones. People are generous, sharing food and bits of news about the Russian advance, but also suspicious. Kyiv is consumed by talk of diversanty, pro-Russian agents set on carrying out provocations and acts of sabotage. At another metro station, police claimed to have stopped a group of diversanty who tried to smuggle explosives and ammunition inside of a children’s toy—though, like so many stories in Kyiv these days, there was no way to know whether this was legend or fact.

As we sat on the platform, overhead televisions played the evening news: “Russian soldiers taken prisoner. Missiles in Kharkiv,” the chyron read. Earlier that day, carpet bombing of residential buildings in Kharkiv had killed at least eleven people, with some struck down in the street while holding grocery bags in their hands. A missile strike had hit the central square, throwing up a wall of fire. The city is less than thirty miles from the Russian border and had long harbored a pro-Russian strain in its politics—a sentiment that faded after 2014, and has all but disappeared over the past week. The indiscriminate bombing of Kharkiv “looks like revenge,” Berdynskykh said. “Putin says he wants to protect Russian speakers, but it turns out Russian speakers don’t want this protection.”

Nastya, a first-year university student in Kyiv, had booked a train ticket home to Kherson for early March. Now that the city is under Russian occupation, it’s unclear if she can return. Her parents had moved to a house on the outskirts of town, and told her that a column of Russian tanks and armor had rumbled past. A neighbor at their apartment building, in the center of Kherson, said that the courtyard was full of Russian soldiers. Residents pass stories of how some of these troops have taken to stealing food from local shops. Galina has heard from a few old friends in Kherson, too, but, as she said, “There’s not much to say. They sit all day at home, terrified.” She relayed how, during a recent conversation, she thought that she’d heard loud explosions on the other end of the line. “Oh, did you hear, something went bang over there,” she told her friend. “No,” the friend answered. “That’s back in Kyiv.”

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

The next morning, as we stretched our stiff backs, I asked Berdynskykh how long she thought she’d keep coming back to the metro station. It was, in a way, a silly question: that’s not for her to decide. “In one scenario, Putin realizes that his blitzkrieg failed—Ukraine is putting up too much resistance—so he’ll back off,” she said. But, knowing Putin, Berdynskykh imagined that the costs for Ukraine, even in this most optimistic version of events, could be ugly and severe. “He’ll make us pay one way or another,” she said. “As for the other option, well, I’d prefer not to even think about it.”