The Svyatoshyn Station Limit

War in Kyiv is boring and mundane. I can’t seem to document the war. Instead, the things that end up getting documented are all sorts of dumb nonsense. 

My life in Kyiv depends heavily on the type of Russian weaponry.

If it's Shaheds that are flying, I have plenty of time to spare—a Shahed takes about thirty minutes to reach me (if it’s a standard one) and ten (if it’s a jet-powered one). So I head to the basement of the neighbouring building. The attacks last a long time, so I end up hanging out there until midnight. 

When I get to the basement, Grandma Kateryna is already there, along with a small group of older women. Grandma Kateryna gives a rundown of the latest events. I’m already aware of most of them, so the rundown feels a bit redundant.

‘Trump went to Iran,’ she says, ‘with this attitude, as if they are going to kick everyone’s ass over there. And now the Iranians have blocked everything for him in the Gulf. “Sit and cry without oil, you little shit,”  the Iranians told him. That’s what Trump deserves, if you ask me. It’s karma for not wanting to give Ukraine weapons. By the way, the Hungarians have declared war on us. Or maybe they haven’t. Nothing’s clear yet. All the bloggers are saying different things. Have you heard that a drone has already crashed over Kyiv? Soon, a swarm of drones will fly in and buzz right outside our windows. But the most important thing—nukes are coming soon. That’s for sure. One military guy said in an interview that before attacking Estonia and Latvia, the Russians will definitely hit us with a nuke. To scare Europe. You get the idea. Go to the pharmacy tomorrow and buy some nuke pills.’

When the missiles are flying, I sit in the basement and listen to Grandma Kateryna’s news digest.

A ballistic missile could reach us in a minute. It rarely strikes during the day, but at night, if there’s a ballistic missile alert, it’s a disaster. Six to eighteen missiles, and MiGs might take off and add Kinzhals to the mix. You can’t go to the basement for a ballistic missile strike because there isn’t enough time to safely cross the street. So I sit in the shared hallway. 

From there, you can hear a neighbour arguing with her husband, trying to get him to help her carry the stroller with their baby downstairs.

‘Kolya,’ she says, ‘Kolya, get up, missiles.’

‘Fuck off,’ Kolya replies and snores.

‘Kolya, get up! Help me with the stroller!’ the neighbour says irritably.

Kolya keeps snoring.

The neighbour fusses around in her apartment a bit longer and comes out into the hallway with the stroller. At this point, I usually say: ‘Good evening. They’re going to launch balistics soon.’

The child is about five years old; she doesn’t speak well, and as soon as she sees someone in the hallway, she tries to kick them or hit them in the forehead with her toy car.

‘Good evening,’ the neighbour says grumpily and walks past me toward the stairs. She rattles the stroller down the stairs and steps out onto the street just as the first explosions hit, adding the loud slam of the building’s entrance door to the sounds from the sky.

Then it gets quiet in the hallway. All you can hear is Kolya snoring. And the rockets coming in.

The alerts can be long; we have to sit in the hallway for hours. To not waste time, I work. My colleague Anya writes in the evening:

‘The deadline is tight, but they’re saying there’s an increased ballistic threat—I’ll manage to get it done tonight. I hope the shelling will be just enough to keep me awake, but not so bad that I’ll shit myself. If it’s too scary, I won’t be able to focus.’

At night, right after the first strikes, Anya wrote:

‘Oh, you’re not sleeping anyway—prepare a report for me.’

‘I can’t today,’ I replied, ‘I have to finish my dissertation.’

I’ve probably written a quarter of my doctoral dissertation in the hallway.

I didn’t write my dissertation in the basement because I have an expensive laptop and I was afraid it would get stolen if I fell asleep. But there’s an extra door in the hallway, so the laptop is safe. Of course, it could catch fire in the hallway if a missile hits, but only along with me, so that’s not a problem—I won’t need to buy a new one anyway.

A large-scale missile attack is the most convenient option. Then I’ll just spend the night in the metro. Monitoring channels warn of large-scale attacks in the evening, and sometimes as early as lunchtime.

To spend the night at a metro station, you have to get inside before closing time. At my station, that means I have to be inside by 10:30 p.m. I grab the folding bed and sleeping bag I bought back in the army and head to the metro at exactly 10:15 p.m.

Actually, during the day, I enter the metro for free using my combat veteran ID. But at night, when I go to the shelter, I feel awkward showing my ID. What will the attendant think of me? At night, I pay the entrance fee.

To get to the toilets at the station, you need to go through the door marked 'Staff Entrance' and cross the footbridge into the tunnel. They’re usually left open for those spending the night in the shelter. But if they’re closed, you need to press buttons 3 and 5 at the same time. Make a note of this—you never know when you might need it. You need to check that a train isn't arriving at the station, press buttons 3 and 5 at the same time, and walk along the bridge to the sign that says 'Svyatoshyn Station Limit.' You won’t get lost, because there’s a homemade sign hanging on a string that says 'No Entry.' Written in blue marker.

In the metro, I go straight to sleep, because if there’s no alarm, they’ll wake everyone up and kick us out at 5:45 a.m. when the station opens. You can sleep like a king in the metro. Shaheds, ballistics, kynzhals—it’s all the same.

But for this adventure, you will need the right gear. Apart from a good folding bed and a sleeping bag, you should at the very least bring warm clothes, earplugs, and a sleep mask. With this combo, I could sleep in the metro every single night. Once, the attacks happened three days in a row. Every night I slept in the metro, and in the morning I’d go home to shower and head to meetings. By the third day, I’d even gotten a little used to getting up so early. I even thought about starting to write morning affirmations, as those trendy bloggers recommend.

Photos from the author's private archive

I try to get the coolest spot—under the stairs. It’s quieter, darker, and all around quite cosy in there.

You won't hear conversations in the metro. In winter, everyone is coughing. In summer, some people smell bad. Until midnight, trains with empty cars screech back and forth. Most of the time, they just pass by without stopping. But sometimes they bring in workers in orange vests. The workers laugh loudly and disappear somewhere deeper into the underground.

After midnight, the metro becomes almost quiet. At first, some kind of machine from the tunnels still hums, sounding like a giant hand dryer. Through the haze of sleep, it seems like some giant is drying his hands in the tunnel.

Once an hour, the bell rings ‘zzzzzz-zzz-zzz,’ and twice a night, the horn honks ‘woooooo.’ The monitoring channels report: ‘Eight missiles on Kyiv,’ and I’m fast asleep. This is the high life. The key is to wear layers, because for some reason it’s always cold in the metro, even in summer. Maybe it’s because of all the stone around.

In the morning, during heavy bombardments, two civilisations meet in the metro—the above-ground and the underground. To the sound of explosions, working people leisurely descend into the passageway. The ground shakes, smoke drifts through the air, and fiery trails flash across the sky. They buy coffee at a glass kiosk near the metro, finish their cigarettes, film a missile flying overhead on their phones, and head down to the platform to go to work. The underground dwellers look at them in bewilderment. In response, they look at the underground dwellers in equal bewilderment and board the first trains.

I spent the night before defending my thesis in the metro. The defence was in Uman, starting at 1 pm. Just imagine — the examination board, a live stream on the Ministry of Education and Science’s website, all by the book. I had to leave home by car no later than nine o’clock in the morning. My researcher friend from New Zealand was a huge moral support:

‘I know how hard and nerve-wracking it can be,’ she said, ‘Believe in yourself and everything will be fine!’

In the evening, I went to the metro to make sure I could get enough sleep. I went to the toilet at the end of Sviatoshyno station and hit the hay. I woke up at 7.30 am, looked at my phone — the missiles were still flying. My alarm is set on my watch because you can't hear your phone in the metro. As it started vibrating on my wrist, I woke up, checked the news feeds, and the shelling was still going on. ‘Three rockets on Kyiv! Ten drones over the city centre. Ballistic missile threat from Bryansk. Ballistic missiles descending!’ Telegram channels, grouped in a folder labelled ‘war,’ were flashing with red exclamation marks.

And for some reason, I woke up starving.

I waited until the balistics had fallen on the city and went up to the surface for a moment.

I got myself a coffee and a hot dog, went back down, ate, and went over my thesis defence presentation. Time is ticking. The missiles keep flying and flying! It’s time for me to head out so I can get ready in time. Of course, I’d anticipated this possibility and done the most important thing—washed my hair last night. But that’s not enough for a successful defence; I still need to pop by home to get changed. 

At 8.30 am, the missiles finally stopped; only Shaheds remained, so I went home and got changed. As I was driving out of the courtyard, a Shahed hit a building in my neighbourhood.

The defence was being broadcast live on the Ministry of Education’s website; it couldn’t be interrupted. Whether ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads, or Putin himself arriving by helicopter and dropping TNT blocks over the university, the thesis defence had to continue right up until the vote and the announcement of the thesis committee’s decision.

So there I was, telling the committee about my experience of gender-based violence, when suddenly the air-raid siren went off. And it wasn’t some random drone or a take-off of a MiG, a carrier of Kinzhal ballistic missiles. No, every monitoring channel in the folder displayed: ‘Missile heading for Uman’. We carried on, because the show must go on. And everything seemed to be going fine, but I was distracted by the missile flying overhead, and something terrible happened—I forgot to thank my opponent for her question, thereby violating the fundamental and unbreakable tradition of Ukrainian academia of thanking everyone for every question during a defence. However, the committee, miraculously, forgave me for this mistake. I passed my defence.

During the day in Kyiv, the alarm sounds roughly every two or three hours. Since I gave up smoking, I’ve found it difficult to take regular breaks from work to rest my eyes. A video course on preventing eye problems when working at a computer, which I watched on YouTube, emphasised that a healthy habit should be linked to regular, repetitive actions. So I linked this healthy habit to the air-raid siren. When I see a missile threat, I go out into the corridor and do eye exercises. It worked out quite consistently. Incidentally, I have minor vision problems following a concussion sustained during my military service, so I try not to strain my eyes.

But in winter, I was incredibly lucky and, thanks to a scholarship from INDEX, I spent a whole three months in Lviv.

In Lviv, the war is completely different. There is one major drawback here—there is no metro. So, when there is a heavy missile attack, you can’t go down into the metro and lie down to sleep in peace. There are no other downsides to Lviv.

Missiles rarely hit here. But I still always go to a shelter.

I arrived at the beginning of January and was given a wonderful flat on the sixth floor with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of a fortress built by King Danylo Halytskyi in the 13th century on a 413-metre-high hill—the architectural landmark known as the High Castle. One evening, I was sitting, finishing my book, taking the opportunity to do so away from the corridor. And then suddenly the air-raid siren wailed outside the window. I checked my phone, opened the ‘War’ folder, and saw red exclamation marks on every channel—a probable launch of the Oreshnik intercontinental ballistic missile.

I went down to the basement. My friends messaged me:

‘Did you go to the shelter down there, too?’

‘I did, even though it’s silly—what Oreshnik in Lviv?’ I replied.

The single blue tick under the message turned into two, just as the first of Oreshnik’s five missiles struck.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

It was the first time I’d heard Oreshnik, and I really didn’t like it.

Then there was a terrorist attack not far from my flat. I wrote to my friends about it. My friends asked:

‘How many metres is “not far” from you?’

‘Eight hundred,’ I looked at the map and replied.

‘Eight hundred is pretty far for a terrorist attack,’ my friends said.

We discussed the matter a bit more and decided that ‘nearby’ meant less than three hundred metres. And eight hundred metres is quite far for a terrorist attack.

Eight Shaheds also arrived here recently in the middle of the day. There were 32 casualties, several of them in critical condition. The Shaheds set fire to several buildings and struck the Bernardine Monastery complex. UNESCO issued a statement saying that wars must be conducted in such a way as not to endanger 17th-century monuments.

There is a comfortable shelter here in the Palace of Culture. It isn’t very deep, but it’s located in a basement auditorium. There are rows of empty numbered chairs there. You can take any seat. And there’s a very convenient toilet. It’s nothing like the one at the edge of Sviatoshyno station. It’s pretty quiet and not cold.

In Lviv, I organised a playwriting course for veterans as a resident of the Veterans’ Theatre project. We’re on the lookout for new talent and aim to give them a professional start. People often refer to this as therapy. In Ukraine, it’s currently fashionable to call projects involving veterans ‘therapy’—cat therapy, clay therapy, flower pot therapy, theatre therapy. But I don’t think that’s accurate.

I googled the word ‘therapy’. It means a return to a previous, healthy state.

Two theatres in Lviv are staging my play Balance. It’s a story about how I used to pack my friends’ bodies into bin bags at the front. Theatre critics say this production is true art. But my friends are still dead. This play hasn’t helped bring them back to their previous, healthy state.

Sometimes I forget about that. Then I get the illusion that it’s possible to carry on living. As if I can adapt, and life can just go on. Then I go to visit the parents of my fallen friend. I arrive from the outside world and, from the doorway, start offering:

‘Would you like me to buy you anything? Do you need any medicine?’

And his mum says:

‘No, we don’t need anything. Our son has died.’

These visits really help me stay connected to my people. To keep my feet on the ground.

I would like to take foreign delegations to their flat. For example, in April, I might bring a couple of people from UNESCO with me. If you have contacts with people like that who would also be worth bringing along, please do write to me.

In my course at the Veterans’ Theatre, I sought out talented veterans and taught them how to write. The course culminated in a festival of performances based on their texts. A total of eleven people graduated. I hope they go on to become writers, screenwriters or playwrights.

Today, there’s a massive missile attack. I’m sleeping in a shelter in Lviv.

And I dream that I’m standing on the bridge in the underground tunnel, right on the edge of Sviatoshyn station. And in front of me is Yura. And he says:

‘How are things here? What’s new?’

‘Ms Kateryna is here somewhere in the shelter. She’ll tell you the news about Trump, come with me,’ I say.

‘I’m not going. I don’t go to shelters because I’m not afraid of missiles. The Russians have already killed me,’ Yura laughs and doesn’t go.

But I go.