Late in the afternoon of March 1st, a gray, damp day in Kyiv, I heard—or, rather, felt—a chest-thumping burst from outside the window of my hotel. A spiral of black smoke floated upward, past office buildings and apartment blocks. Russia had targeted the city’s television tower, a thousand-foot landmark of the Soviet era that rises above the western edge of the city’s skyline.
The explosion left much of the surrounding area charred, including grounds on the edge of a complex dedicated to the thirty thousand Jews who, in 1941, were murdered by the Nazis at a site known as Babyn Yar. The irony was impossible to miss: a military campaign that Vladimir Putin had declared, in a grim and rambling televised address, was aimed at the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine came perilously close to bombing a Holocaust memorial. What made the destruction utterly tragic was that five people who were walking below the tower died instantly; four of them were effectively incinerated.
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By the following morning, the United Nations put the number of confirmed civilian deaths at two hundred and twenty-seven, noting that the true count is “considerably higher.” (On Facebook, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service had said that more than two thousand civilians have been killed, but it later removed the number from the post.) Many of those deaths came from air strikes, whether from artillery shelling or missiles. As a result, across the country, especially in the cities where Russia’s onslaught has been particularly intense, underground spaces—cellars, parking garages, bomb shelters left over from the Cold War—have become precious. Every night in Kyiv, metro stations fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.