My Night in Dnipro

Ukraine's heartbreaking resilience and the sickening excitement of danger.

Drone scars in Dnipro.

“Just don’t be an idiot,” she said.

My friend and colleague Chloe, one of the Washington Post’s talented photo editors, was giving me advice about going to Ukraine.

“I’ve worked with a ton of photographers, and some of them are just addicted. The worse it is, the more they are drawn to it,” she said. “My husband has been in these situations, and he always says that if something feels bad, just trust your gut. Stay safe, dude.”

I was sitting in the office with my bags packed. I was headed over as part of a junket organized by the Ukrainian NGO, Razom. The flight to Warsaw was that evening. For whatever reason, I wasn’t worried.

I had a sense that being in wartime Ukraine would be different than what the news stories might have you believe. Friends had gone. A year or two ago, even though Kyiv would regularly get hit with drones and missiles, they said it was a party town. Western politicians would come to get photographed somberly paying their respects at Bucha. Though you stood the chance of seeing haunted veterans on the streets, you also stood the chance of running into José Andres in a bar.

The atmosphere was more somber now, I was told. The attacks were more frequent and more intense. The power grid, the primary target of Russian strikes, had finally started to buckle. Blackouts were more common. But it wasn’t exactly Dresden.

“We are very, very tired,” Viktoria told me.

You could see it in her face. You could see it in all of their faces. I was sharing a sleeper car with three Ukrainian women, one in her early thirties, one in her forties, one probably in her early sixties. They were consultants of some sort, coming back from Warsaw — from a conference planning the country’s reconstruction. We were stopped at the border while first Polish and then Ukrainian guards checked our papers. It was the middle of the night.

“It’s all the time. When the alerts come, you have to wake up and move your children,” said Elena.

The conventional wisdom is that if the alert is warning about Shahed suicide drones, you should go into an interior bathroom or the hallway. The drones are armed with explosives, but if you put two walls between yourself and it, you should be OK. If the alert is for missiles, however, you go hide in the basement.

All three of the women lived in Kyiv. Not in the well-defended center where all the government buildings were — where I’d be staying in a hotel which advertised its well-appointed bunker. They lived in the periphery.

Elena, the middle one, had a basement, and she told me she had put a bed down there, even though it wasn’t a comfortable place to spend time, especially in winter. Viktoria, the younger one, didn’t have that luxury.

“Honestly, sometimes I don’t even wake up any more with the alerts,” Viktoria said. “You take your chances.”

Tatyana, the oldest one, didn’t speak much. She said she understood English, but wasn’t comfortable speaking it. She finally asked why I was going to Ukraine. I told her I was on a trip with some journalists.

“Thank you for coming.”

Kyiv had gotten hit the night before we arrived — in Warsaw, my air raid alert app informed me it was both missiles and drones — but in the morning light it looked as if nothing had happened. It’s a big, sprawling city of 3 million, and even a big attack doesn’t target the whole. It took us some time to get to the hotel due to the bad traffic.

There’s a curfew in place for most parts of Ukraine: you have to be off the streets by midnight. Most bars stop serving at ten, but a few are open right up until the deadline. The mood is not exactly exuberant, but the bars are packed. Indeed, even though the country is plagued by longer and longer rolling blackouts, in downtown you would be forgiven for thinking it’s not that big of a deal. That’s because basic infrastructure — street lamps, stop lights, the metro — are prioritized. And all the stores and bars and restaurants have long ago put in generators and battery banks. In our hotel, the lights flicker off for only a few seconds when the blackout hits before the backup power kicks in.

It’s a different story in the suburbs. We visited the rubble that once was the home of Mark Sergeev, one of Ukraine’s most popular evangelical youth pastors. His whole family was in the building when the missile hit in September, Mark tells us. His son was on the top floor. But miraculously no one was killed. Like Viktoria, they had no basement. The nearest shelter is a metro station, but that’s 20 minutes away on foot. You’re not going to haul your family out of your house every single night there’s an alert. Especially at the current pace at which the Russians are attacking, it’s not sustainable. You take your chances. Mark, too, looked tired.

During my time in Kyiv, the attacks were mostly drones. You quickly adapt to those. One night Russia mustered a serious missile barrage which the alert system thought could be headed for Kyiv, so I went down to the comfortable basement and slept. The missiles, it turned out, were headed for western Ukraine. One hit a residential building in Ternopyl, killing dozens. The others further damaged the grid. The rolling blackout schedules published the next day were extensive.

Though we were mostly in Kyiv, we visited Dnipro for one day. Unlike Kyiv, Dnipro is closer to the front, some 60 - 90 miles away. That front is not as active as elsewhere, but given how stretched Ukrainian defenders are, Russia has made quiet gains there in recent weeks. Security people warned us against spending the night in Dnipro, as it’s getting hit quite regularly. And given its proximity to the fighting, the warning time for incoming is much shorter.

Rather than doing a ten-hour round-trip drive, we stayed in a colorful roadside motel outside Poltava. It was self-consciously Ukrainian kitsch. Think “biggest ball of twine” for a U.S. equivalent. We got there just ahead of curfew, too late to eat at the restaurant, which is supposed to be terrific. As we arrived, our apps lit up. Dnipro was getting pummeled.

The next day, we went and saw a fresh smoldering ruin. A drone had hit Dnipro’s public broadcaster’s TV station. Alex, a young local journalist covering the attack, was surprised to see so many foreign journalists milling around. He wanted to talk. Why were we here? I just wanted to find out what it was like living here under fire, I said, pestering him for details. The attacks were a regular occurrence, he shrugged, bleary-eyed. What can you do?

I thought of Alex a couple of hours later.

The attacks usually come late at night. Russia launches its drone swarms then, presumably because they’re trickier to shoot down in the dark. But missiles can come whenever. We had finished our last meeting and were heading back to Kyiv. It was 5:30pm. Traffic in downtown Dnipro was completely snarled.

Suddenly, the apps on all of our phones lit up simultaneously. “Air raid alert, seek shelter.” Then, shortly thereafter, “Missile attack, seek shelter immediately.” We were in two vehicles. “Advice?” I typed into Signal to our group. “The advice is to exit the city as quickly as possible,” one of our guides typed back. I didn’t want to laugh. It felt inappropriate.

Helplessness is a profound feeling. I had quickly gotten used to the drill in Kyiv. It all felt abstract in my tight and comfortable little security bubble. This was different. I suppose we could have abandoned the car and gone looking for a metro station. But with missiles incoming, GPS was being jammed and Google Maps was useless. Nothing to be done. What can you do?

“It’s not in my hands,” I said to myself. And immediately a calm washed over me.

We were all still glued to our phones, trying to find updates from various Telegram channels that publish up-to-the-second reports about incoming attacks, when we heard what sounded like a somewhat muted explosion somewhere off in the distance. It felt like maybe it was accompanied by a slight change in pressure, though maybe I imagined that. Maybe the missile hit, maybe it was intercepted. But between the alert and the explosion, only a few minutes had passed.

The sound pulled me away from my phone. I looked at our surroundings. No one had abandoned their car. And on the sidewalks, people went about their business. It was a relatively warm if somewhat rainy night. A couple on a date were standing outside a coffee shop holding hands. An old lady was walking home, pushing a cart overflowing with groceries. The alert hadn’t lifted, we didn’t know if more missiles were incoming. But no one flinched. No one was trying to hide.

I still think about that scene, now weeks later. It filled me with a profound sadness then, and still does. These poor people. Brave? Yes, but that’s not the word, exactly. These poor people, just living their lives every night as if it’s normal. It’s not normal. None of it is normal. But what can you do?

A few days later, back in Kyiv, I found myself at a party thrown by one of my Post colleagues. Lots of foreign correspondents were there. I found myself talking to exactly the kind of TV journalist that Chloe had warned me about. He was telling me about being on the front near Kharkiv a year or so ago. The shelling. How he and his team had gone in to examine the damage right after a salvo, and had seen a leaking gas main near one of the craters. As they were leaving, another salvo came in and ignited the gas. Big explosion behind them. His eyes were gleaming.

The story that shaped my trip was the announcement of Trump’s peace plan. I spent most of my time in Kyiv trying to figure out the politics after that bombshell. Big things are afoot. A corruption scandal is loosening Zelensky’s grip on power. Some are seriously talking about land concessions to Russia, even as they admit that any stop in the war would be temporary. As I write this, that drama is still unfolding. I left Kyiv amazed at the timing of my trip. So much had happened while I was there.

But that night in Dnipro is still with me. It still defines the trip.

When I got back to Warsaw, the alert app lit up. Kyiv was under attack — a much bigger one than I had experienced while I was there. Missiles, drones. It lasted for hours. A friend was texting me that she was hearing explosions.

I’m not going to lie, I felt a sinking feeling. I wanted to be there. I was missing out.

On what, exactly? I slapped myself. “Don’t be an idiot,” Chloe said. There’s nothing glamorous about any of this.

I’m more than a little ashamed. It’s sick. But that trip made me feel alive. I still don’t know what to do with that feeling.

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