More than four months on from the Russian invasion, the siren warning of an impending air strike has, for some Ukrainians, become a sort of ambient noise: annoying, alarming, but also can be ignored.
A series of deadly missile attacks by Russian forces in recent days against civilian targets, however, have changed the calculus, prompting Ukrainian leaders to try to consolidate message that heed the advice to seek shelter to save lives.
“Once again I beg you: Please do not ignore the warning signals in the air,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a national address this weekend. “Suitable codes of conduct must always be followed.”
Many Ukrainians still do not have access to bomb shelters. In Kharkiv, the nation’s second-largest city, officials say they have no plans to reopen schools in the fall, in part because not all schools have them. In Lviv, the western Ukrainian city near the Polish border where hundreds of thousands of displaced Ukrainians have settled, all new buildings must include bomb shelters.
But many Ukrainians in larger cities were not only complacent about the danger but were too tired of war to worry about the threat of attacks.
On Saturday night in Kharkiv, where Russian artillery strikes almost every night, young people at a popular bar drank at outdoor tables and listened to live music.
“My neighbor went down to the basement; Older people go, but young people don’t,” said one of the patrons, 28-year-old Maryna Zviagintseva.
“I think for the first month everyone is scared and they will go down to the subway or somewhere,” said Vladyslav Andriienko, 29, a construction worker. “Now people try to live a normal life.”
In the deadliest attack of the past week, three Kalibr cruise missiles launched from a Russian submarine in the Black Sea hit the center of the provincial capital Vinnytsia, killed 23 people and wounded 140 others. The dead in the strike on Thursday including Liza Dmytriyevaa 4-year-old with Down syndrome, and two other children.
The next day, at least 10 Russian missiles crashed into the southern city of Mykolaiv, hitting two universities, a hotel and a shopping mall. Late on Friday, three people were killed and 16 others injured when at least one missile hit a target in Dnipro, central Ukraine.
Air defense forces shot down one missile in the Kyiv region of northern Ukraine on Friday and four more in Dnipro, Ukrainian military officials said.
And on Saturday, a Russian missile hit a warehouse in the Odesa region, causing a fire, according to spokesman for the regional military administration, Serhii Bratchuk. He said there were no casualties as the security guards retreated to a shelter as soon as they heard the siren.
A high-class United States military officials said on Friday that between 100 and 150 civilians may have been killed in Russian air strikes in Ukraine that week. Moscow denies it targeted civilians in what it said was a limited military action in Ukraine aimed at destroying the Nazi country.
However, Ukrainian officials say the airstrikes are primarily intended to sow terror and are part of a genocidal campaign by President Vladimir V. Putin and his army.
Oleksandr Motuzianyk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry, said on television on Friday: “This is the destruction of Ukrainians as a nation. “This is an attempt to break the morale of the Ukrainians and reduce their level of resistance.”
Moscow’s recent military gains, especially in the Luhansk province in the eastern Donbas region, have largely come from the preponderance of artillery, but a host of weapons from the United States and other nations are beginning to seep through. restore that balance. That situation partly explains the recent increase in strikes, Mr. Zelensky said.
“The occupiers realized that we were gradually getting stronger,” he said. “Their terrorist goal is simple: put pressure on you and me, on our society, threaten everyone, do as much damage as possible to the cities of Ukraine, while the terrorists Russian father can still.”
