It all started around 8 a.m. on Monday. My husband and I were going about our usual morning routine. I was making an omelet and coffee when we heard the first explosions. We rushed to the window, not able to believe this was happening again (even though the air-raid sirens had already been wailing for an hour and a half). When we opened the window, we heard rolling thunder, even though the sky in Kyiv was completely clear. The sound of exploding missiles always reminds me of the sounds of a storm, but it is far more menacing knowing that death is coming, not rain.
I searched online to figure out what had happened, and whether my relatives and friends were okay. We realized we had to get dressed quickly and prepare to go to the shelter. Soon, there were more explosions. Only the cats remained calm. I ate the omelet quickly, despite my sour stomach.
I got a call from my cousin Oleksandra Mendel, who is 24. She left her home in Kherson village back when the Russians came and, since then, she’s been living with my grandmother in downtown Kyiv. She told me that she’d been heading home from the train station in a cab when she heard the whistling of a missile. It hit about a block away with a tremendous explosion — and was soon followed by a second one.
The driver stopped and they both jumped out, joining the frantic crowd of people on the street looking for a place to hide. “I couldn’t tell where the missile had hit”, she told me. “We didn’t know if the attack was over, if there would be other missiles”. In the end, she and her taxi driver got back in the car and drove away. She spent the next three hours in a bomb shelter.
Despite the Kremlin’s efforts to terrorize our people, their reaction has been extraordinary. The citizens of Kyiv are scared, it’s true. You can’t not be scared. But at the same time, they haven’t given into hysteria. The German ambassador to Ukraine, who spent hours in bomb shelters on Monday, too, tweeted: “With hundreds of Kyivans in a shelter. I am amazed at the calm that prevails here while Russia is shelling playgrounds in the center of Kyiv”.
Monday’s attacks gave some of us flashbacks to when the war started back in February. But this time, the situation feels very different. While we can’t get used to the fact that someone is trying to kill us just because of who we are — no one could ever get used to that — now we know we can fight back. We understand that our enemy is doing this because he is desperate.
People are determined to go about their lives. When the invasion began, everything shut down. But today, many of the shops have stayed open. Grocery stores, coffee shops, even a beauty salon in my building — they all kept working.
The city of Kyiv and the surrounding regions had blackouts on Monday, some for a few hours, others longer. Later in the day, when it seemed that the attacks were over, I visited a maternity hospital outside of town. My friend Maryna gave birth to a daughter there three days ago, and she is still there recovering. She was worried but still in a state of absolute happiness. She moved to the European Union when the war started but decided to come back to Ukraine to have her baby.
Monday morning, she didn’t hear the explosions. When the doctors invited her to go downstairs to the bomb shelter, she declined. The elevators weren’t working because of the lack of power, and she didn’t have the energy to make the trek. So she and her baby girl just stayed in their room, hoping that everything would be all right. (The mayor of Kyiv said that at least five health-care buildings were damaged during Monday’s missile strikes.)
Earlier in the day, I ran into two people who decided get out of Kyiv because of the attack. One person was talking on the phone near the entrance to my building; I heard him say “it’s time to leave”. Someone had piled up a bunch of luggage in the entryway. I got into the elevator with a neighbor, who said he was very angry and wanted to blow up the Kremlin. He told me that he and his family were leaving for the countryside for a few days, believing there would be more attacks soon. “The Russians are shelling residential buildings”, he said. “It’s terror!”
He was right. The mood among civilians is that they want to put a stop to this terror — and the only way to do that is by stopping the war. Everything we have is under attack. Our loved ones have been killed, wounded and terrorized. Parts of our country have been occupied, subjected to lawlessness and state-orchestrated violence. Our very existence has been doubted and attacked. So people have good reason to be angry. They want all of this to stop. They are under incredible stress. But they are not hopeless or desperate.
“We have to be patient”, is how my cousin Oleksandra put it to me. “This is [Vladimir] Putin’s final death agony and we are about to win. This is happening because we have successes on the battlefield, so we must be patient and believe in our army”. This morning, when the missile hit, she was returning from the southern front line on a train. Her husband serves in the military there.
This is the atmosphere in Kyiv. People are angry, and they’re not going to give up.
Iuliia Mendel is a journalist, the author of “The Fight of Our Lives”, and a former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.