I once watched a video about Australia titled: “Warning: Everything Here Wants to Kill You.” The presenter spoke about venomous snakes and poisonous frogs. By the end, it turned out that even the platypus — that endearingly odd little creature — is venomous. For the past four years, we have been living in an Australia of the mind: a place where something is always trying to kill us.
Not long ago, on my way to the gym, a drone was shot down overhead. Twice. I am fairly sure it was not the same drone — they fly much faster than I run, after all — but it all happened within the space of about ten minutes. Standing at a traffic light, I desperately waited for it to turn green. The eAir Alert app on my phone was blaring: UAV detected in your neighbourhood. As children, we used to scare one another with stories about the “coffin on wheels” — an urban legend about an unstoppable threat that gradually comes closer to you: first it is “in your country”, then “in your city”, then “on your street”, and finally “inside your flat”. Today, that role is now played by Russian ballistic missiles and jet-powered Shaheds: we track, minute by minute, the approach of a deadly machine, with one crucial difference — this time, every threat is very real. That morning, I broke into a run the moment the light turned green. The sense of exposure under the open sky is so absolute that what remains are no longer emotions, but pure instinct.
I have never been on the front line, never sat in a trench, and have only ever seen a kill zone in news reports. I have not come anywhere even close to the risks Ukrainian defenders face every day. And yet, despite that, in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, I live with the sense that everything falling from the sky wants to kill me.
Right now, I am sitting in a tiny bathroom where even lying down won’t allow me to stretch my legs. There is a blanket beneath me, a cat beside me. I am counting ballistic missile launches — this is the eighth. By the time I finish this paragraph, it will probably be “ninth.” I can hear air defence systems firing interceptors. Half an hour ago, a drone was shot down very close by, and I ran barefoot into the shared corridor. The eAir Alert app warned me that several UAVs were in our neighbourhood — hardly for the first time.
The sound of a drone closing in is worse than the whine of a dentist’s drill, worse than a power drill at seven on a Sunday morning, worse even than your parents telling you: “We need to have a serious talk.” Through the door, explosions roll across the night outside, and I find myself quietly counting how many drones have been intercepted and how many more might still be up there. I’m never right, but the act of counting is oddly calming all the same.
My friends and I belong to a generation of perpetually exhausted thirty-somethings, working three jobs, shaped by a childhood of social instability and financial insecurity. By the end of the day, I am often so drained that even the simple act of getting myself a glass of water feels out of reach. This is, admittedly, a rather long explanation for why neither I nor my friends — or at least most of them — do not go to shelters. Yes, even when an Oreshnik is layered on top of a Zircon, and a Kinzhal plays the third movement in this infernal composition. Right now, it is Zircons that are in the air. I know this missile was originally designed to strike ships at sea. But then again, as a famous Ukrainian song has it, “people are like ships.”
I live on Kyiv’s left bank, in a green residential neighbourhood. I know where our mobile air defence units are stationed, what our air defence systems sound like when they open fire, and what has fallen from the sky here — missiles, drones, or fragments of debris — and when. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when an explosion goes off nearby, I wake with a single thought: everything falling from the sky wants to kill me. Not me as some uniquely important individual, but me as a citizen of this country — one among more than thirty million “mes” who live here. If the windows begin to shake, I roll onto the floor beside the bed and try to steady my breathing. I already know I will not get enough sleep, and tomorrow is just another ordinary working day.
To me, the novel American Psycho — the idea that a yuppie might lose his mind and turn into a monster because his life is supposedly too consumerist and competitive — feels almost laughably naïve.
Real horror is when ordinary daytime life carries on alongside the knowledge that, at night, everything falling from the sky wants to kill you. By day, you still have to solve work problems, communicate ethically, be a normal person. By night, everything strips down to something far more basic: you have to survive.
Everything falling from the sky wants to kill you. It sometimes feels as though today’s Ukrainian schoolchildren absorb this harsh lesson even before they learn the multiplication table. Childhood is meant to be the time when safety matters most, when the world still feels held together by rules that make sense. Today’s Ukrainian children grow up with the knowledge that Russians are trying to kill them. If ten-year-old me had been told that people in another country wanted to kill me, it would have shattered my sense that the world was rational or fair. But now it is simply a fact of life.
Russians want to kill Ukrainian schoolchildren not because of anything those children have done, not even on some invented pretext — they no longer bother to come up with a new excuse each time — but simply because those children exist, because they live, because they are here.
And yet I believe today’s teenagers are more resilient than my own generation, those of us born in the 1990s. I sometimes think back to school, where the subject that struck me as most useless was life safety education. A close second was pre-conscription training for girls, where we were taught how to apply a “cap” bandage. Later, at university, in our occupational health and safety classes, we linguistics students ended up discussing deteriorating eyesight and scoliosis as the main risks in life. Back then, no one ever told us that someone might try to kill us.
Ordinary life remains ordinary life — but with an asterisk. These days, whenever I travel to a live radio or television broadcast, I automatically build in an extra hour for the journey. The metro stops running between the two river banks of Kyiv as soon as an air raid alert is declared. Getting around becomes complicated: you have to reach the Paton Bridge, which quickly clogs up like something from an American film about frazzled taxi drivers. Overhead, that familiar lawnmower-like drone begins to build. People look up into the clouds; I keep checking the time, because live broadcasts cannot be postponed, meetings cannot be cancelled, and work does not simply go away.
Yes, this is nothing compared with real hardships and challenges, especially those faced on the front line. But it is worth acknowledging that ordinary urban life is no longer ordinary. Because here, everything falling from the sky wants to kill you.
This is a thought that is difficult to explain to foreign audiences used to thinking in terms of rationality. It cannot be fully translated into words or neatly described. You simply carry it inside you, like a bitter pill under the tongue: something you cannot quite swallow, and cannot quite spit out either.
Now, outside my window, explosions ring out once again, while I scroll through photographs of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra in flames. Russians have damaged the Dormition Cathedral, and firefighters are trying to bring the blaze under control. If Tolkien were alive today, he would surely have had something wise to say about the Dark Lands in the East.
Not long ago, I travelled to Poland to present a book that included my essay on reading in times of war. We spoke about culture as the core of identity, about resistance, and about the trap of simplification. The room was full of intelligent, beautiful people. And then, as I was walking back after the discussion, an aeroplane passed overhead — an ordinary passenger plane, not even particularly loud. It was a stroke of luck that I was alone, because in that instant I instinctively crouched down, as if to take cover.
That should never have happened to me: after all, I do not even go to shelters in Ukraine. But I did not crouch out of fear; it was a basic reflex. There, in safe Kraków, I bent down and pretended to tie my shoelace — just in case someone had seen me. Suddenly, I felt a deep sense of shame at my own reaction, at my own fears. “Don’t make a scene,” people used to say when I was growing up. I did everything I could not to make a scene. But sometimes that sense — that everything falling from the sky wants to kill you — catches up with you even in a place where, by all logic, nothing is supposed to happen.
In one of his letters to his son Michael, reflecting on the Second World War, Tolkien wrote: “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Elsewhere, he wrote: “We are inevitably moving from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. This is no advance in wisdom.”
Tolkien saw the twentieth century as an age of machines designed to maim and kill on a vast scale. He called the Second World War “the first War of the Machines” — and he was not wrong in his numbering: it was only the beginning. The pilots and engineers whose work sends missiles and drones towards us do not see the faces of those they are trying to kill. I do not think they are driven by active hatred so much as by the everyday routine of killing. In that sense, they too have become machines.
By the time I finished writing this text, the nineteenth wave of ballistic missiles had already been launched at us that night. My city is not sleeping — and neither am I. My anxious cat, Bisyna, is awake. The neighbour upstairs, who has apparently chosen this moment to move furniture, is awake. Even the stray cats beneath the apartment block are awake.
Telegram channels I follow report Russian strikes on residential buildings. More than anything, I find myself hoping that no one dies tonight. And one day, I hope to see everyone who tried to kill us in the dock.
