Hanna and Arkadii Rubin are trying to convince their daughter Leya, 2 years old, to go to bed, even if she does not want. They live in an apartment in Kharkiv where, a little over a year ago, part of the building was damaged during a missile attack.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
Kharkiv, Ukraine – Arkadii Rubin no longer tells his wife when there is an air raid mermaid at night. “Why could I wake her up? She has to sleep.”
Hanna Rubin, his wife, decided to withdraw the Air Raid alert app from her phone last year. She no longer wants to know if there are incoming threats for their home in Kharkiv. She prefers to try to sleep.
At this stage of war, the need for sleep overcome the fear of the night, explains psychologist Yuliia Krat who works with East SOS, a non -profit organization that helps people affected by war. She sees patients with sleep problems all the time these days.
This “bothers all the Ukrainians now,” she says. “No matter if they have been evacuated or (displaced internally). Or they are only residents of Dnipro … People come with sleep disorders or depression.”
His advice for them is the same as for anyone who suffers from insomnia: Store your phone, avoid distractions.
The city center of Kharkiv is filled with large historic buildings, but at night, after the curfew, things are barely visible due to the closure of the lampposts.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
But Ukrainians do not always have the possibility of avoiding distractions. Russian attacks often come at night – drones, missiles, artillery. In many cases over three years of war, people were sleeping or trying to sleep at home when acts of war broke at night.
Apart from these attacks, the darkness and calm in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, spreads strangely – which gives it, in certain regions, like a ghost city. It is not a question of mood: everywhere in Ukraine, the night is darker. Satellite images show A significant lighting of lights at night, while cities turn off the lamps to make the work of Russia more difficult, because Ukrainian power plants are destroyed in Russian attacks and people are simply leaving for other parts of Ukraine, in Europe – or more safe.
Hanna, Arkadii and their two -year -old Leya daughter were woken up before 7 a.m. in January 2024 by a strike in their neighborhood. A few minutes later, another strike hit the building next to it. The shock waves and the bursts of shells broke the glass in their own apartment, cutting the arms and back of Arkadii.
In the nights immediately after the attack, “we couldn’t sleep at all. Sleeping for 10 minutes at a time. After the start at the start, during the first three days, we did not sleep at all,” said Hanna.
Desperate for an appropriate rest, they left their house in Kharkiv and chased a few hours further from the front lines to stay in a hotel in the woods of Poltava. They always do it every few months, when the fear and exhaustion of living in Kharkiv overwhelm them. Just to sleep.
Hanna and her daughter Leya with their dog, Mia. Hanna says that their dog shows the most fear – tremble and sometimes urinate on the ground – when they hear explosions outside.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
Sleeping exhaustion, however, is not the same as sleeping without war.
“If before the war, we had what we can call full sleep, now it is the necessary sleep. Our brain takes as much as it needs to continue to be alive,” explains Krat.
This is how Volodymyr Lohinov says that he sleeps most of the time when he is passing as a firefighter, grabbing pieces of sleep if necessary. During the war, it still worsened.
“We spent three and four nights without sleep,” recalls Lohinov about the moment when the war started with the large -scale invasion of Russia in February 2022. “You have a free moment, you found a place, you sleep. That’s it.”
Volodymyr Lohinov is in his office at the fire station where he works in Kharkiv. He sometimes tries to sleep on the sofa in his office, but most of the time, he is standing at night to fill out details of the calls on which he released. He says it sometimes founds him after major disasters. The only night he was relieved to make documents was last April when his father was killed.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
He says that his fire fighting team noticed different models on attacks. “It varied a lot. We had a time when they had an exact calendar of their attacks. We knew for example that it is now 11 pm, and we are going to have ballistics (missiles) like the S-300 (missiles on the air surface) which arrived at us now. Then, they went at 1 am at 3 am after that, we were struck at 5 am”
But whatever the exact timing, many people find that the war has transformed a time which should be restful in a time filled with anxiety.
Lohinov’s father Vladyslav Lohinov was killed in a night attack last year. Also a firefighter, he was killed in service. It was a April night that the father and the son were both on calls responding to the city’s strikes, not far from each other.
While each man took care of the first cycle of destruction, the warning came from a new attack: the one who Kill Volodymyr’s father.
Lohinov is in a small museum for Kharkiv firefighters, which was never opened to the public because it was not finished before the start of the war. Now he has a wall that is dedicated to those who died in service during the war, including Lohinov’s father, Vladyslav Lohinov.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
Hanna and Arkadii Rubin are not talking about aerial raid alerts. They want to protect it as much as possible thanks to the stress of these night attacks and the trauma of war. They tell him that the sounds of war are in fact thunderstorms or discharging delivery trucks.
“She does not need to know how cruel this world is, at least as long as she does not understand it completely,” said Arkadii.
They play an imagination, but it is also true that real delivery trucks are no longer in the streets of Kharkiv at night. Lately, the city is calm after nightfall – more before the war. Most people are at home. The police apply a curfew at 11 p.m., so the lampposts are revealed and the streets are rid of civilians, with a few exceptions.
The darkness has also spread inside, because the power cuts became common during the war, especially in winter. People had to be satisfied with pocket lamps, candles and sometimes generators in the form of energy rationed by Ukraine.
Police stop cars in downtown Kharkiv who are on the road just after the 23-hour curfew. The only persons authorized after the curfew are in a few categories such as emergency workers, medical workers, soldiers and police.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
But even with this calm and this darkness at night, the healing of this night trauma takes time, says Krat. One of the great challenges she sees with people who come to her with sleep problems is to accept silence – and not to assimilate her to the anticipation of something dangerous.
“They need time to get used to the fact that it can be calm. And silent does not mean that something is about to explode,” she said. “It means they can sleep now.”
Lohinov uses a flashlight just to walk from one building to another at night at the fire station.
Claire Harbage / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Claire Harbage / NPR
