This wasn’t how Daniil Ivashchenko expected to spend his 10th birthday.
As midnight arrived, he was tucked between his parents on a sleeping bag on a granite floor, next to a staircase in one of Kyiv’s subway stations. He watched gaming videos on YouTube, his headphones blocking out the hubbub of hundreds of people settling down around him for a long night.
Russia was conducting another massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv that June night. More than 40,000 people were sheltering in the city’s subway stations, such as Dorohozhychi, where the Ivashchenkos sought safety.
As Russia’s army struggles on the front line in Ukraine’s east, Moscow is escalating its airstrikes against Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, pounding them periodically with huge barrages of missiles and long-range drones. On Thursday, Russia launched one of the biggest barrages of the war, killing at least 30 people in Kyiv and wounding some 99.
A Shelter
Dorohozhychi is a popular place to shelter. Opened in 2000, it is more spacious and modern than many of Kyiv’s Soviet-era stations. That night in June, parked cars crowded the streets outside after the first wave of Russian drones was detected. Residents trickled in, bringing pets and helping the elderly.
By 11 p.m., the nodes of Kyiv’s subway had turned into underground towns, with regulars, newbies, friendly banter and occasional disputes.
The Ivashchenko family came early to snag their favorite spot in the corner of the main lobby. During the previous attack, they had left home too late, found the station already overflowing, and had to use an underpass for shelter.
Daniil’s father, Oleh, a coffee-shop owner, greeted friends and neighbors inside the station lobby.
His wife, Tetiana, a doctor, was reminded of how people sheltered in the London Underground during German bombings in World War II. “You feel like a character in a movie about Britain,” she said.
Throughout the night, the impact of Russian ballistic missiles in the city entered the Dorohozhychi station as dull thuds.
“It’s wild, scary,” Tetiana said of nights in the subway. “But there are these cute moments, like when you see people carrying cats and dogs.”
Olha Novoseltseva, a 19-year-old medical student, brought her homework and her rescue dog Busia to the station. She settled down for a night of exam prep on a camping chair by the lobby staircase.
Her mother, who lives in western Ukraine, called around midnight to check in—and to ask for a photo as proof that Olha had heeded her warnings and gone to the shelter.
Around her, people snored, babies cried and dogs barked.
Novoseltseva was seven years old when her family fled their home in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, during Russia’s 2014 invasion of the region. She fled again in 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion turned her new hometown of Bakhmut into a battlefield.
Her student life in Kyiv isn’t as vibrant as she had hoped. Curfews forbid meeting her classmates late in the evenings. The nights in the subway leave her drained.
“It makes me very sad to realize that the best years of my life are passing by like this,” she said. “But what can I do? I have to adapt to this, find happy moments in this kind of life somehow.”
Near her chair, an escalator ferried people to and from the station’s lowest level, 230 feet underground. Down there, a maze of tents and sleeping mats left little space to walk along the platform.
Children hugged their pets. Latecomers put their pillows ever closer to the platform’s edge. Some people watched the soccer World Cup on their phones.
Andrii Pismenov, 25, was trying out the Dorohozhychi station for the first time. It reaches deeper underground than the station near his home. But he came too late to find a good spot to sleep. He and his friends lost time eating a midnight shawarma near the station entrance.
“I wasn’t expecting this—all the hustle and bustle,” he fretted. “I have to go to work today.”
Svitlana Luhinets came better prepared and set up by a wall near the escalator. She needed to leave the station around 4 a.m. to catch the first tram to a kindergarten where she works as a chef.
“I try to make sure my kids don’t go hungry,” she said. But after nights like these, some of the children are so sluggish that they barely touch their breakfast, she said.
This subterranean dormitory is run by Halyna Mysnyk, a 44-year-old subway employee in a red hat and a navy fleece. She hands out camping chairs, decides when it is safe to use the escalator, and de-escalates spats between people squabbling over a patch of floor.
She has been organizing the nights in the station since early 2022, when the Russian army was marching on Kyiv. She didn’t expect it to be a shelter for over four years.
Back then, the subway staff would also use the trains, which weren’t running, to host more people. But now, when the clock shows 5:29 a.m., the station transforms back to a commuter hub, and Mysnyk returns to her day job.
“Tomorrow we need the trains to run on schedule,” she said. “The safety of our passengers during the day, and of our citizens at night—that’s what matters most.”