Olena Konoplia spent weeks looking for a place to hide from the war. Her checklist was short: no factories, no warehouses, no railway station. Anything Russia might want to hit, she wanted far away.
She found it in a village about two hours from Kyiv, and she has already moved into a cottage there. “I decided the better option will be a little village without any factories, any [warehouses] and any railway stations,” she told the BBC. When the broadcaster’s team visited, she was ferrying supplies in and overseeing the fitting of a new door. A priest had come to bless the house, as custom asks.
The cottage has gas convection heaters, and a stack of firewood in the barn is her insurance against power cuts. She has installed fast internet because she works for a Kyiv charitable foundation. Then there is the quiet. “After several nights here, when I can sleep, just sleep, without any explosions, without any sirens, I feel better,” she said. “I can work, write my articles, I feel good.”
A city under attack around the clock
Her departure follows a hard autumn. Kyiv residents say the attacks changed character in late August and early September, when the capital came under fire day and night. Mariia Shostak, a mother of two, described how drones and missiles used to be shot down on the outskirts. “Now it was happening in the centre, right above our heads,” she said. Through September the strikes reached filling stations, generating plants and major Dnipro bridges, and Mayor Vitaly Klitschko spoke of a “very dramatic situation”.
Shostak is not waiting for the cold. She is taking her children, aged four and two, to Hurghada on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, which she says is cheaper than Europe and warmer too.
Iryna, who asked the BBC not to print her surname, has a different worry. Her three-year-old daughter Polina has developed severe anxiety since two blasts hit near their apartment block on the north-western edge of the city, one in early June and another a month later. The girl suffers vomiting and uncontrollable shaking. Iryna’s husband is in the army, and she may be able to work remotely from Poland.
Who can afford to go
Pollsters at Gradus surveyed Ukrainians in September and reported that 40% of Ukrainians were weighing a move should conditions keep deteriorating. Another 35% said they would stay put, and 25% were undecided. Gradus founder Evgeniya Blyznyuk said people are worried about more than blackouts. Russian strikes on big logistics centres have raised fears about food supplies as well.
She does not expect a mass exodus, though. Most people, she said, “will postpone it until conditions become really unliveable”.
Money is part of the answer. Denys Trubetskyi, a Kyiv-based journalist who writes for Die Zeit, told Meduza that friends of his had looked at flats in Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi, only to find prices had shot up. Wages are being cut while costs rise, he said. Last winter, he noted, temperatures sometimes fell to minus 25 degrees Celsius and whole districts on the left bank of the Dnipro went weeks without power or heating.
The authorities are making their own preparations. Places are being set aside for older residents and mothers of small children in sanatoriums and rehabilitation centres that have been converted, out among the trees on the city fringe. About 15 small power plants have gone up around Kyiv over the past 18 months, built in fortified bunkers and shielded from drones by huge steel cages. A single plant can power and warm several hundred tower blocks.
Sources
- Russian strikes and approaching winter force some in Kyiv to pack bags and flee (BBC)
- Kyiv has learned to live between air raid alerts (Meduza)
- Meduza interview, later passage
