24 hours in Kyiv

Photographs by Fabian Ritter

Pinchuk is influential in Ukraine and the west. He advocates tirelessly for Ukraine to join the EU, chiefly through his relationship with the Clintons and his annual Yalta European Strategy meeting. He also owns the Pinchuk Art Centre, one of Kyiv’s most prestigious galleries, which has invited The Observer along.

I’m surrounded by dignitaries, analysts, politicians and military experts. Everyone’s eating food that is too small to eat in two bites but too large to eat in one. People stretch their mouths awkwardly for rocket tartine and doughnuts stuffed with sea buckthorn. On my table, a retired colonel recalls how he used to covertly monitor people suspected of war crimes in the Balkans. He worries Vladimir Putin will look towards Moldova’s forthcoming election next.

We’re apprehensive. Ukraine’s capital has, until recently, remained more or less safe – at least compared with the country’s eastern regions – but now attacks are becoming an almost weekly occurrence. A few days ago, Putin sent hundreds of drones and several missiles towards Kyiv in the largest aerial bombardment since the war began. They even hit a government building. On 10 September, article 4 of the Nato treaty was invoked after Russian drones were shot down in Poland.

It’s dark and raining as we board the train. I’m shown how to download the Air Alert app, which tells you, region by region, what type of military hardware is coming to kill you and how far away it may be. In Kyiv, civilians don’t get much warning (about four minutes for missiles and 15 for drones). In Kharkiv, they get even less. The English version of the app is voiced by the actor Mark Hamill. “Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter,” Luke Skywalker announces, then: “The alert is over. May the Force be with you.” At the start of the war, it’s explained to me, the rule was that two walls between you and the street was enough protection, at least from drones. Apparently, that’s not true any more.

On the train, bedroom compartments come with a paper bag containing chicken and potatoes, water, salad and two half-litre bottles of wine. The VIPs occupy a restricted section at the front. You can smoke between the carriages after the soldiers come to check your passport. I finish my wine and fall asleep reading Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Babel lived through pogroms in Odesa and was executed in 1939 after being accused of spying for Austria and France. In his twenties, he was advised to enlist in the Polish–Soviet war as a means of enriching his writing.

I close my eyes as the train passes over the borderlands where Babel fought and killed. And as they close, I’m galloping through never-ending yellow fields – even at midnight the sky bursts through.

In the autumn of 2023, about 18 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, a moose was found wandering around the Kyiv Institute of Automation. It had fled a forest fire in the neighbouring countryside and had been ambling through the city for days. It was photographed by the Ukrainian artist Anton Saenko: some people saw the moose as an omen.

The moose heralded a change in Kyiv, which has become strange. Often, daily life appears normal; mothers go by with children, hipsters sip coffee and drink beer in the sun. But there’s always something there, underneath, usurping this normality. Couples report increased quarrelling because of the lack of sleep; they lash out at each other and don’t know why. Every morning at 9am there’s a moment of silence and the radios and classrooms and televisions go quiet. Death is everywhere, both mourned and celebrated.

Then there are the limbless men. In Kyiv, people have got used to men without arms, without legs – sometimes without arms and legs. An estimated 50,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs since 2022. A few months ago, a journalist was taking his morning coffee when he tripped over a prosthetic leg someone had left in the middle of the walkway. He remembers how the amputee smiled and kept smiling as more people kept tripping. It was like he wanted them to trip, as if he was saying: “Look, I still have a leg.”

After disembarking at about 9am, one of the first Ukrainians I talk to is a veteran whose unfilled right sleeve dangles from his shoulder like an empty sock. He was in Donetsk and managed to save his friend from shelling, but not his arm. He lost consciousness, went missing for two days and was presumed lost. He served for two more years after that and still feels a tingling sensation in his phantom limb. “It’s like when you sleep too long on your arm and it goes numb,” he tells me. You can get used to anything if you’re not dead. I ask if he’s optimistic about the war. He says he’s “realistic”.

War has forced people into double lives. In the lobby of the InterContinental hotel, waiting for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to address the conference, I speak with a young woman named Kseniia. She was a florist before the invasion broke out; now she makes drones. “I adore these drones,” Kseniia says. She wants her drones to be beautiful, even if they’re “kamikaze” – even if they last 15 minutes. “People say to me,” she exclaims proudly: “‘You used to have a flower boutique – now you have a drone boutique.’ We have standards.”

At the conference, Zelensky doesn’t speak for long; he has urgent business. The embattled president is good at radiating a sense of patriotic defiance. He even jokes, citing Ukraine’s secret weapon, better than any drone interceptor: Lt-Gen Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. “Whenever [you] are in Kyiv,” he says, addressing the visiting American officer, “local residents can finally get some sleep … I am ready to grant General Kellogg citizenship. We can give you anything you might need – an apartment, anything.” Zelensky leaves the stage to thunderous applause. From the press room, I watch Johnson clapping like an orangutan in the front row. They like “BoJo” in Ukraine; they named a street after him.

Zelensky knows the war is taking its toll. Ukraine has struggled – sometimes disastrously – with the delicate task of “Trump-whispering”. Words such as “victory” are used less and less in conversation these days. The Ukrainian army is also experiencing a manpower shortage. Men fear the draft, which can be forced upon them after committing a minor offence, or just by taking a wrong turn on the way to the shops.

No one quite knows what’s going to happen to you if you get drafted. Men hide indoors, sheltering from the officers who patrol the streets handing out notices. They scroll through Telegram channels for updates on the draft’s whereabouts. One journalist tells me that after two conscripts swapped places at a holding centre, it’s now forbidden for men to visit them before they are bussed off to training.

After Zelensky’s speech, the director of the Pinchuk Art Centre, Björn Geldhof, takes me for lunch. Geldhof moved here in 2009. His children are half Ukrainian and he lives between Kyiv and his home in Brussels. The art centre recently exhibited a film about the draft.

After one artist was called up for training, his contemporaries wrote a joint letter imploring the military to find the best use for him. “[He’s a] very fragile young boy,” Geldhof says, “[a] really beautiful person but super fragile – part of the LGBTI community. He made really rough work, but if you [touch him], you’d be afraid to break him.”

As the war drags on, drafted soldiers have less and less autonomy over where and how they fight. “This idea of autonomy existed in the beginning,” Geldhof says, “but it’s a frontline of more than 1,000 kilometres [620 miles]. If you ask everybody: ‘What would you like to do?’, you might have a problem.” That said, Geldhof wants to stress that there is humanity in the army and that people will try to find the right place for you. “It’s not just ‘Here’s a gun, run.’”

This year, David Chichkan, a prominent anarchist artist, died in Zaporizhzhia repelling an infantry assault. He was a mortar operator. More than 200 cultural figures have been killed since the invasion began.

Lunch concludes with a tour of the art centre. Directly after the full-scale invasion, visitor numbers dropped to about 350 people a day and Geldhof considered closing, but they’re now back up to 1,000. People have started turning up, Geldhof says, “because they want to live”.

As well as providing an exhibition space, the Pinchuk Art Centre also employs full-time researchers and archivists. It’s their job to help decolonise the culture. This isn’t an easy task and involves a radical reappraisal of history. Spoken Russian has been dropped across the country. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and, most of all, Pushkin (whose statue was erected over the unmarked graves of civilians in Mariupol in 2022) have been soundly rejected.

Other Russian cultural influences are more difficult to discern, such as the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who has Ukrainian family roots, or abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, who, despite his work in Russia and his Polish heritage, is widely accepted as Ukrainian. Gogol, it is explained to me, has “two souls”. He was a Ukrainian who was forced to write in Russian because of political circumstances. But, unlike Mikhail Bulgakov, “he always loved Ukraine”.

What has emerged from this disentanglement process is a modern Ukrainian artistic legacy, carried forward by multiple generations, each residing in the fallout from politics: first, the fall of the Soviet Union; then 2004 and the Orange revolution; then, 10 years later, Euromaidan; and, in 2022, the full-scale invasion.

One of the exhibitions I’m shown is a solo show by the painter Lesia Khomenko, who graduated into the Orange revolution. Khomenko mostly paints people: her ex-husband in military uniform, figures dressed like secret police. Perhaps most poignantly, she paints her friends partying. The paintings are draughted from old photos of her mates getting drunk. Something they can’t do in quite the same way any more.

Upstairs, a curator, Daria Shevtsova, explains the strange inversion of gender roles brought about by war: “Before, and now, we have a lot of feminist exhibitions, but at the beginning of the invasion, there were several exhibitions dedicated only to men. I couldn’t imagine this before.” Shevtsova says, for the first time, it was men who had to suddenly sacrifice their careers; they became vulnerable.

And how are you, I ask? Are you OK? “Yes, I’m fine,” she replies contemplatively, “[The war] influences your physical condition. So we are all on antidepressants … On some physical level, it’s always there.” After the invasion, Shevtsova drove herself half-mad searching for Davines shampoo. She needed it for some kind of reassurance.

Geldhof tells me how the Ukrainian people are feeling a responsibility to spend their money. “If you have €100 [£87] a month, you can spend, you’re going to give it to a very specific person, who’s going to equip a very specific brigade,” he says. “This group of friends is supporting that brigade. Another group of friends is supporting this brigade.” The war has also affected the country’s oligarchs, who, according to Forbes, lost 45% of their wealth almost immediately after the full-scale invasion.

The rest of the evening is spent eating modernised Georgian food with Geldhof and his wife. After that, I meet some friends of friends for a drink in a bar called Kashtan. This place could be anywhere in western Europe: people lounge about, smoke rollies; the same two enthusiasts play table tennis outside without fail everyday, even, by all accounts, in winter, when the weather drops to almost -10C (14F). Despite the midnight curfew, bars here still stay open later than London’s pubs.

The friends of friends are aid workers who moved to Kyiv a couple of years ago from Europe and the US. They’re exhausted and tell me how it feels to be chronically besieged by drones. “It’s terrifying,” one of them says. “The missile happens so quickly, you don’t hear it before it hits – you just hear the explosion and the two pumps of the Patriot missiles. But with the drones, you hear this fucking buzz.”

The Shaheds, Iranian-designed loitering munitions – kamikaze drones – visit Kyiv in swarms. They sound almost like a moped (nobody drives mopeds here any longer). “It’s fucking ominous,” the aid worker continues. “You know the theme tune from Jaws? It’s sort of like that.”

A Dutch journalist, also present, talks about how Kyiv changes your threshold for terror. “You become used to hearing automatic gunfire all night. Ukraine’s military shoots [the drones] down at an impressive rate … So, simultaneously, they’re a threat, but you’re also like: ‘OK, the chance I’m going to get hit is not that big; I have to go to work tomorrow’ ... So you start changing your perception of danger.”

Midway through our evening, a young guy in a vest and a dress interrupts to tell us about his exhibition in the church across the street. He shows us his watch. “This watch is from an American sniper,” he proclaims proudly, “who was also the bodyguard for [the actor]Ryan Reynolds … Also, it’s covered in blood from when I beat a hooligan! You see? Red blood! Dried blood!” Then he’s gone.

At 10:45pm, everything stops and everyone goes home. I couldn’t even find a shop selling beer. The streets empty and the sound of traffic dies away. That night I’m so worried that I’ll wake up (or won’t wake up) under rubble of the Dnipro hotel that I barely sleep at all.

When we hear about the frontline, and words such as “trench warfare”, we think we can imagine what that’s like, based on history books and films – but we can’t. Ukrainians and Russians are killing each other in a new kind of conflict: an electronic war dominated by drones. Human bodies only do a fraction of the killing in this electronic war, but they do all of the dying.

The land between about three and nine miles (5km-15km) on either side of the zero line – the area closest to enemy territory – is now referred to as the “kill zone”. This is where the air is so thick with drones that nothing can survive for more than a few minutes out in the open. “Anything you can see, you can kill,” is a common phrase among military personnel. Well, now you can see everything, and to avoid being seen, infantrymen have to live and operate almost entirely underground. The most dangerous moments at the front are not necessarily engaging the enemy, but simply moving from one place to another: even going to the toilet can be risky.

In this new war, heroes and gamers are beginning to overlap. Last year, Robert Brovdi, a drone unit commander known by his call sign “Magyar”, launched a scheme in which drone pilots can accumulate points for hitting Russian targets, which can then be converted for new equipment.

After breakfast, I speak to a soldier who was inspired to volunteer by defenders of Mariupol and the Azovstal. He was studying business and physical education before he joined. “The Russian drones are looking for you every second, every minute, every day. You have to build a whole city under the ground to survive. If we are talking about urban fighting, you need to tunnel between houses.”

What’s that like?

“It’s dark,” he replies, “but if you have Starlink [Elon Musk’s satellite network], it’s perfect. You can watch the news on YouTube and how the world lives on TikTok … But that’s probably only 1% of the time – mostly you’re preparing for another attack.” The soldier tells me, having lived through hell, he does not fear death. “Almost all military guys already died in those trenches.”

I have two studio visits scheduled for my final hours in Kyiv. It’s instructive to speak with artists; days after a crisis, the best quotes come from first responders, but years later the imaginatively minded have begun to intuit the world around them. The first visit is to the home of Anna Zvyagintseva, who sits in the half-light in a jumper and trousers and a pair of thick woollen socks. This is her family home. In 2023 she moved back to Kyiv from the safety of the Netherlands. She moved back for many reasons; in part, because she wanted to be closer to people she loved.

“When the full-scale invasion happened,” she says, “I realised that, until the end of my days, all of my works will deal with the topic of war. It occupies everything. You can’t plan properly, your friends can be gone … Somehow, I need to deal with it in my practice.”

Sometimes, Kyiv feels to Zvyagintseva as it always did; the bars are full, particularly in the city centre. But she finds the contrast between this and the capital’s scars disturbing. In the Lukianivska metro area, for instance, the entire station and the surrounding area have been destroyed. People suspect it’s because there’s an underground weapons factory many layers beneath the street. Local people have renamed it “Shahed-ivska”, after the drones.

We discuss how there are two levels to living in Kyiv; on the surface, people get on with their lives, but there’s something else beneath that keeps bubbling up in the form of fear and anger and exhaustion. “You see sad women, crying women on the phone,” she says. “For sure, the mood is different … When I came back from the Netherlands, I was probably more sensitive to that. But in order to survive, your skin becomes hard.”

Artists such as Zvyagintseva have felt pressure to be of more use to the war effort. When the full-scale invasion began, she was paralysed. She didn’t know how she could make art any more. “But then I thought: “OK, what does war try to do? It tries to kill, and if it can’t kill, it tries to freeze people … How can serving a coffee stop the war? How can making a drawing stop the war?’”

For days, Zvyagintseva could not cook for her kids. It was only when her daughter asked her for fresh food that something clicked. “I realised I had stopped being a normal mother … and that’s what they want. The enemy wants this … That [realisation] helped me to jump out of my depression … After that, I worked a lot. Dignity came back.”

The second studio I visit belongs to a very different artist. While Zvyagintseva’s work often explores forgotten moments of everyday life, Yarema Malashchuk makes bold video work with his collaborator Roman Khimei (who has a side job with the ministry of foreign affairs). The pair often film themselves pretending to be dead Russians. For a recent show in Slovenia, they exhibited a new film in which they found a young boy from Zaporizhzhia who had fled to Poland and allowed him to revisit his home in the form of a military-grade robot reconnaissance dog.

Malashchuk explains how the idea to play dead on film was inspired by western liberals attempting to empathise with Russian conscripts. Malashchuk wanted to mock this. “People tried to pity these dead Russian soldiers who were coming on to Ukrainian land … This romantic idea that you can go even further than empathising with the victim but empathising with the enemy. It seems so sublime, so sophisticated.” It’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic.

Zvyagintseva and Malashchuk both make work about war but in different ways. “If you are in a country at war,” he explains, “and you’re doing art, your art will always be about war. So even if you paint a vase on a windowsill, this work will definitely be about war because what the fuck are you doing painting a vase on a windowsill.” I laugh. He doesn’t.

Malashchuk tells me there’s a lot of resentment in Ukraine (though I suspect he might be referring to the self-resentment popularly known as guilt); that people always believe they can do more. “There is a ladder of different resentments,” he says. “For instance, you left Ukraine, so you feel resentment that you are not in your country. If you are in western Ukraine you feel resentment that other people suffer more. If you are living in the east, you feel resentment that you are not a soldier. If you are a soldier, you feel resentment that you are not on the frontline. If you are in the trenches, you feel resentment because you didn’t die. It’s never-ending.”

With three hours to go before I depart, I opt to spend what remains of my stay at a rave. Before the curfew, K41, a club housed in a former brewery, would have been open until Monday morning. Now, only on Saturdays, it gets going at midday, people are spangled by 5pm, then it closes at 10:45pm. It’s the only dedicated queer club in the capital and was intended as a rival to Berlin’s Berghain. People dress in dark mesh and half-frame sunnies. Regulars have had to weather difficult circumstances. K41 has survived Covid, drone attacks, even blockades by the far right.

At the door, they forgive the fact that I don’t really match the dress code and let me in. There’s standard entry rules: be respectful, no photos, etc. Though one stands out: no sudden loud noises. There’s also a mandatory donation towards the military – not something I’m used to seeing in spaces such as this.

K41 asked that I keep reporting to a minimum once inside, which I respect. All I’ll tell you is that I couldn’t help thinking that the muscles on show may soon be put to grimmer use, and that, amazingly, despite all this death and carnage, people carry on dancing to techno chuggers, getting fucked up, and making out with each other just like they always did, and will continue to do for as long as they can.