Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/KYIV: The missiles streaked across Kyiv’s skies one mid-February today; a group of high school pupils sat against a metro station’s walls, scribbling away in notebooks and focused on their teacher Olena’s instructions.
To avoid a lesson being disrupted by another Russian attack, she quickly moved her class underground when the air-raid sirens sounded.
“We teach math, biology, chemistry, everything according to the usual schedule,” Olena, who declined to give her last name, told Reuters.
This and similar signs of calm resilience, be it the bars packed despite the threat of missile and drone attacks and the guides who have adapted city tours to the dictates of war, become increasingly commonplace in Kyiv.
Kyiv and other cities stand resilient
A year after it began, Russia’s invasion upended life and rallied a nation in Kyiv and other cities.
In the days after February 24, much of the city of around 3 million citizens sheltered indoors and underground as Ukraine’s military fought off Russian military troops on land and in the skies.
Tens of thousands of others citizens fled along clogged highways and swarmed onto railway platforms.
“Those first days were the hardest,” said that metro worker Tamara Chayalo, who helped transform the system into a sprawling network of shelters. “Everyone was worrying.”
She said that she did not go home for three weeks.
Ukraine forced a Russian retreat, but a city has been back under fire since the previous autumn when rockets began raining down on infrastructure and other civilian targets, part of what Kyiv says is a Kremlin campaign to break Ukrainians’ will.
