Thursday, August 27, was the first day of the new normal, but it didn’t yet feel normal to any of us in Kyiv.
I counted 11 air raid alerts between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Each time, the sirens in my quiet residential neighborhood would tear through the air—an ear-splitting wail, impossible to ignore even after nearly five years of war. The next sound was often machine-gun fire—Ukrainian air defenses downing incoming drones and missiles—or, in other cases, a great booming thud as enemy munitions exploded not far away.
Sometimes it was several hours before the all-clear signal; in other instances, just a few minutes. But by Thursday’s end, the shocks had added up—I was a wreck, hardly able to concentrate. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Moscow had launched 140 attack drones that day.
Ukrainians are no longer surprised by nighttime air alerts. That’s been normal since 2022, albeit growing worse every year, with the number of incoming drones and missiles sometimes swelling to 700 in a single night. They’re also used to Iranian-made Shahed attack drones and the better-engineered Russian version known as Gerans. The Ukrainian military has developed highly effective layered defenses—electronic jamming, jet fighters, traditional anti-aircraft guns, truck-mounted machine guns, and a new generation of innovative drone interceptors—that can shoot down up to 90 percent of these slow-flying triangular platforms, generally just over 10 feet long with an eight-foot wingspan.
