Living in Kyiv, you learn to put up with air-raid alerts. Sirens wail over the city, and an app blares from your phone, warning you to shelter from incoming missiles. In the industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, 25 miles from the front line of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, people shrug off the sirens, which sound a half dozen times a day and often more. “It’s just Russian music,” one local official joked when I visited recently, “bad Russian music.”
What matters in Zaporizhzhia: not warnings but actual explosions, which have left ugly scars across the city, including many boarded-up buildings on the main street. Yet few people take shelter even when they hear a nearby blast or see a plume of dark smoke on the horizon. “I used to be afraid,” explained one young woman who runs an online business. “But you get used to it. Everyone is used to it. Now we just get on with our lives.”
For many, “the front” evokes World War I trenches at Verdun and the Somme or the carnage a generation later at Stalingrad and the Battle of the Bulge. Zaporizhzhia isn’t on the line of contact; there are no trenches or firefights in the streets. But the fighting outside town hangs over the city, ever-present and menacing in a way you don’t feel in Kyiv.
I’d been to Zaporizhzhia before—two trips last spring before the start of the counteroffensive—and I returned this fall full of apprehension. It’s a city with a long history of warfare: first, as the home of the 17th-century Cossack fighters who defended the territory that is now Ukraine from Russian, Polish, and Crimean invaders and then, later, the site of bitter battles between the Nazis and the Red Army. What I wondered now: How was the city holding up as the grinding counteroffensive dragged into its fourth month?
