Back to the shelters - but we won't surrender

Nuclear blackmail and missile strikes across the country have shown that Putin has doubled down on his attack, but Ukrainians on the ground remain defiant. Tom Mutch reports from Kyiv

- Tom Mutch

IT’S 24.02 déja vu,” a friend texted me shortly after the missiles slammed into a university park, government buildings, and popular tourist attractions in Kyiv on Monday morning. She was referring to the day in February that the Russians launched their invasion, a date etched into the minds of Ukrainians across the country and indeed the world.

This week, hundreds of civilians crowded back into the capital’s underground metro stations to seek shelter for the first time since the war began. Troops and first responders could be seen all over the streets. Everyone’s phone was full of messages from friends and relatives making sure they were okay. Some received the news they had been dreading: at least 19 people were killed, and more than 100 were injured in the barrage of over 80 missiles fired throughout Ukraine Putin’s revenge for the Ukrainian army’s major battlefield successes in Kharkiv and Kherson last month.

“I don’t know how much longer we are going to be able to go on with this madness,” says Ira Hadetska, 28, a mediator originally from the city of Mykolaiv. She fled Kyiv after the war began, spending time in Cyprus, but returned months later after the city had been deemed safe. Now I know I'll be completely crazy once the war finishes,” she says, explaining how the bombing and anxiety of war chip away at your sanity.

It wasn’t Hadetska’s first close shave. Her mother is still in Mykolaiv near the southern frontline, which faces Russian rocket attacks almost every day. When Hadetska visited recently, rockets slammed into her old university three times in a week. Seeing it wrecked was heartbreaking. Russia are losing on the frontline and the informational front,” she says. They are so stupid trying to threaten Ukrainians, it is just hopeless.”