I took the escalator down to the platform, which dates to the early seventies, and is set off with a rather striking Soviet-era mosaic showing a square-jawed scientist and a muscular factory worker. Around sixty or so people milled about, most of them lying on blankets on the cold floor. The place had been packed the previous night, when missiles rained down, but it had thinned out as people ventured above ground to get personal items or groceries, which makes for an increasingly complicated quest in Kyiv these days. All restaurants are closed, and only a handful of supermarkets are open, all with lines that can stretch on for hours. That it is no easy task to secure food in a major city in the center of Europe, with a population larger than that of Rome or Paris, seemed as grimly surreal as the missiles.
A pair of three-year-old twins played tag along the platform, shrieking and giggling as they gave chase. Their mom, Victoria, said they had been down here for two days already. “I don’t tell them any fairy tales,” she said. “I say these sirens are for a reason, there are tanks, they are shooting, and you should hide in order to keep safe.” They had a small patch of concrete near a wall, on which Victoria had laid a number of blankets, along with plastic bags of food. Victoria told me that the girls call the air-raid sirens “the cows” because they think they sound like mooing. They already have an established routine: wake up, wash hands, brush teeth, eat some yogurt or pasta that Victoria boiled at home, and then read a book about dinosaurs.
The fact that Ukraine’s army has so far held out against the Russian invasion force seems to be a point of near-universal pride in Kyiv. Ukraine’s defense minister has declared that any citizen who wants a rifle can obtain one by showing up at official distribution centers and presenting a passport. Thousands of guns in the hands of everyday citizens scattered all over the city might not fend off an invasion, but they would certainly complicate any occupation. I went to have a look at one such center, set up on the grounds of a public school. A hundred or so people milled about; dozens of green crates full of rifles stood behind an iron gate.
Outside, I ran into two women in their forties, Olena and Oksana, who had signed up the day before. Each had an AK-47 slung over her shoulder. Olena is a university administrator; Oksana owns a wood-processing company. “Of course, it’s scary; it couldn’t be otherwise,” Olena said. But she had to do something, she said. Oksana said that her husband was in the Ukrainian military. “I couldn’t leave him, and my land, all on their own.” The two women, friends for years, had a buoyant, almost cheery energy. We stood on the street and talked about cities in Ukraine and Olena’s Cossack roots and old Russian folk songs—for a moment, you could almost forget about how absolutely terrible this all is.
The moment, alas, didn’t last. As the war drags on, Russia’s frustration with the lack of quick victory may translate into more indiscriminate violence. The prospects of wide-scale fighting inside Kyiv are horrific. At 11 P.M., Ukrainian authorities sent out an alert that, overnight, the capital was expected to weather the heaviest barrage of air strikes and rocket attacks seen so far in this long and awful week.
