In a Kyiv bunker, 2 July 2026 – courtesy of the Russian proclivity for bombing civilian targets in the wee morning hours
Lubomyr Luciuk
July 9, 2026
Convenient if not exactly comfortable — the air-raid shelter felt more like a sepulchre than a sanctuary. Blaring sirens and loudspeakers made it clear that I had to go underground. As these came during the early morning hours, my sleep was disrupted. This was irritating. But the alarms provoked neither panic nor fear, just annoyed resignation.
I shuffled down, pillow in hand, finding a spot on a cold floor, two stories below street level, in the comparative safety of a garage repurposed to shield people from the Russian bombardment soon going on above — an attack I heard as muffled booms and thumps, even this far down. The cavern I found myself in was a kind of twilight zone, populated by whispering people shuffling about even as others tried to find peace. I couldn’t. The air was stale, somewhat suffocating, infused with a faint odour of cold metal, rubber, motor oil and exhaust fumes. Still, I was hopeful. Having discovered a secluded corner, I dropped my pillow, propped my back against a partition wall and then tried to secure a modicum of rest.
It didn’t work out, for I had settled in the near vicinity of an overly large man. Earlier he had taken possession of a cot and a blanket and was fast asleep well before I arrived. That was made manifest by loud snoring, which echoed through the chambers of this makeshift bunker. So much for any of the rest of us catching shut-eye. So I sat, half-awake, and just waited. And listened. On this particular night, the all-clear didn’t come for several hours. It felt much longer than that.
Over the course of a recent visit to Kyiv, I went through a similarly exhausting scenario several times. Each episode left me drained — the next morning I would be moving just a little bit slower, my mind foggier than usual. Then I would catch myself and remember a simple fact: while I was down below, safe and sound — oh yes, I know, how inconvenient it could be — other people in the city were being murdered, asleep in their beds.
Daily, the Russians are committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine, continuing with the “special military operation” the KGB man in the Kremlin started, a conflict that has now lasted longer than the First World War. Yet Putin’s ambition of subjugating Ukraine and extinguishing its independence has failed. The evidence of that failure was visible everywhere I went in Ukraine. Ukrainians know they are fighting a just war against Russian aggression.
In late June, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a 40-day operation targeting Russian refineries and energy infrastructure. Its stated purpose is to pressure Moscow to end this war. The results achieved already cannot be dismissed. Ukrainian drones have struck many of Russia’s largest refineries, including the massive Omsk facility in Siberia — some 2,500 kilometres from the front line. Russia’s geography was once assumed to provide protection.
Ukrainians have undone that myth. Russia’s size is now a vulnerability — Moscow cannot protect every strategic asset across their so-called Federation.
Ukrainian strikes targeting Russia’s military-industrial complex — not civilians — have triggered fuel rationing across most of the country, forced a state of emergency in occupied Crimea, and left about 50 million Russians — more than a third of the population — short of gasoline. Their inconvenience is, frankly, deserved. But their discomfort will not end Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians. Only Putin and his confederates can stop this war. All he has to do is climb out of his bunker and order the retreat of his legions from all of the occupied territories of Ukraine. Sooner or later they will have to. Getting out now will be less costly in terms of men and materiel.
Kyiv’s choice of a forty-day campaign is apt. In the Bible, in the Book of Jonah, the prophet entered Nineveh — the capital of an empire that terrorized its neighbours — and proclaimed a forty-day warning before judgment. Whether Kyiv’s planners had that story in mind, I do not know, but the parallel is suggestive: Russia, which began this war, has been given time to choose repentance or suffer the consequences.
Eventually, I heard the all-clear. This attack had ended. Climbing back upstairs, I caught a faint smell that reminded me of the gunpowder and scorched debris that lingered through my childhood neighbourhood after Victoria Day fireworks. I went up to my room, wondering whether I could still salvage some sleep. I tried — pulling my bedding onto the floor, arranging it between two walls in case another attack began, then settled down hoping for a few uninterrupted hours. Even in the comparative comfort of a spot on the floor, I woke once more to lock the door chain. It wouldn’t do to have my head bashed in by a maid coming around to clean the room. That wouldn’t count as a war wound.
I learned the next morning that the 2 July strike on Kyiv was one of the deadliest of Russia’s attacks on the capital since the war began — dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones had struck the city, hitting a nearby hotel and apartment buildings, killing more than twenty people and wounding scores more.
I was inconvenienced, although in exchange I got a story to tell. But I cannot forget that even as I had the protection of a secure shelter, the relative safety afforded to a hotel guest, most of Kyiv’s three million residents were living through another act of Russian terrorism. And some were dying.
For more than four years, Ukrainians have lost sleep, friends, and innocent children to the enemy, a butcher’s bill so constant it has become background noise to everyone but those surviving it. And yet this sacrifice has done something else, less often reckoned with. It has forged a society unlike any other in Europe — a country that manufactures more drones than most militaries on the continent combined, that has learned to hit targets deep inside the bowels of ‘Mother Russia,’ and that has prevailed against an empire that sought to efface it.
Grateful as Ukraine remains for the weapons, loans and solidarity that have come from its allies — and none of this should be minimized — Ukrainians are increasingly taking their fate into
their own hands. Theirs is not the posture of a people waiting to be saved. It is evidence of a country that has, out of necessity, built itself into something new: not merely a shield absorbing blows at the gates of Europe, but a spear with which Ukrainians have begun wounding their historic foe.
Nobody chooses to become what Ukraine has had to become. The cost, measured in the tens of thousands of dead and wounded civilians and soldiers, kidnapped children, and destroyed cultural sites and infrastructure, has been staggering. Yet these sacrifices, of a country that refused to be erased, may end up defining the 21st century — for while Ukraine is still a land where sleep is often disrupted, it is also a place where those who dream have created a nation-state that is redefining the geopolitics of Europe. Soon enough, Ukraine’s example may even change the world.
