Katia, a 28-year old text editor, had spent Thursday afternoon on the beach by what locals call the Kyiv Sea, but which is in fact a huge reservoir formed by the damming of the Dnipro river north of the city.
At 4.40pm, as it was time to think about leaving, a message came through on one of the many Telegram channels through which the city’s residents can follow the progress of Russian aerial attacks in real time.
"A UAV of unidentified type is flying from Chernihiv region towards the reservoir. There may be an air raid alert in the region in the next 20 minutes.”
Katia climbed the riverbank hoping to catch a glimpse as it flew by, but soon more Telegram updates came in – the drone was already flying over the outskirts of Kyiv further south.
Driving back into the city, Katia followed along as a stream of messages charted the drone’s journey circling over the city at high altitude before, at one minute past six, flying off back in the direction it had come, towards Russia.
The drone was not a Shahed – the Iranian-designed and Russian-produced suicide drones – but a reconnaissance drone equipped with cameras.
But the lack of a lethal warhead is little comfort. The drone’s appearance over the city is a bad omen; the images it records will be pored over by its Russian handlers, potentially in real time, and fed into targeting decisions for an imminent attack.
As Katia’s Telegram channel put it in a message at 5.54pm: “Well, I think you understand that there may be ballistic missile attacks in the near future, don’t ignore the air raid sirens, especially at night.”
The warning proved accurate. On the night of Thursday, July 3, Russia carried out a record-breaking seven-hour bombardment of Ukraine’s capital city, launching a total 550 drones and missiles. One person was killed and 15 injured in the attack.
As many were quick to point out, the attack began shortly after a phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, where the US president said “no progress” was made – a stark reminder of the abject failure of diplomacy to bring the conflict to an end.
“I'm very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin, because I don't think he's there, and I'm very disappointed. I'm just saying I don't think he's looking to stop, and that's too bad,” Trump told reporters later. “I'm not very happy about that.”
The outside observer might assume that after more than three years of war the people of Kyiv have adapted to life under the constant threat of Russian attacks. In some ways they have – although Katia doesn’t like the idea of becoming inured to the danger: “Sometimes, this hiding in a shelter, it's just becoming routine. But I try to remind myself that it's not okay that I have to do it.”
But in the past month the size and frequency of the bombardments has entered a new phase of intensity, with Russia regularly breaking its own records for the amount of materiel it launches each night at Kyiv.
And Russia has changed its tactics: drones are still key and lead the onslaught, but they are used to deplete the air defence capacities and clear the way for a barrage of high precision missiles that follow, targeting key infrastructure, defence systems and weapons dumps. Russia used the same tactics at the start of last year when the US ran out of money for Ukraine and halted weapons transfers then as well. Once the skies were open Russia launched another huge barrage in March and destroyed all of Ukraine’s non-nuclear generating capacity.
This attack is even more ferocious than last year’s assault. That is reflected in casualty figures – one attack alone on June 17 this year resulted in the deaths of 28 people.
Drone rhythms
There is a recognizable rhythm to the attacks. By 8pm on Thursday, the first Shaheds were picked up by radar heading towards the city.
By 10pm the call and response of air defence machine guns and drones exploding in the sky could be heard in the centre of Kyiv, the pop and crackle of the former met with the dull thud of the latter, even at a distance producing window-rattling shock waves.
The Shaheds hitting Ukraine now are different to the ones that first appeared in the autumn of 2022. Those initial drones, supplied by Iran, could carry up to 15kg of explosives, and were propelled by four-cylinder combustion engines that made them sound like flying mopeds.
As bne IntelliNews reported, the Iranian design has come a long way since then, in the Bazarification of war. They have become cheaper and more sophisticated. Today’s Shaheds are now manufactured in Russia, and the Russians have upgraded them. Last year Russia produced 1.5mn drones and this year expects to double production again. The Shaheds only account for 2% of the total output, but that is still enough to fire 100 Shaheds against Ukraine every day. The new drones can now carry up to 90 kg of explosives and are powered by jet engines.
The advice during drone attacks used to be to shelter with two walls between you and the outside – an internal corridor or in your bathroom. But this no longer applies. The larger warheads means that Shaheds are capable of destroying several entire apartments with a direct hit.
Most worryingly, they are now fitted with cameras capable of transmitting a live feed via local mobile signal back to operators in Russia.
The Shaheds come in waves. By 11pm a 70-strong swarm was making its way across Ukraine. At 11.27 pm another update – “this will go on until the morning. More and more are coming from the Chernihiv direction.”
Katia had met her husband around 10pm “at a fancy wine bar”, and was out until close to the midnight curfew, when the city shuts up shop for the night and all Kyiv residents are required to be at home. She got to the shelter in her building – a Stalin-era reinforced-metal bunker - at ten to midnight.
Katia goes to the shelter not so much for its physical security – it’s only partially below ground, and probably wouldn’t withstand a missile impact – but rather for its soundproofing qualities. You can’t hear the racket when you’re inside, and it’s possible to sleep undisturbed.
Not all Kyivans go to the shelter during attacks. Nana, a 26-year-old film-maker and friend of Katia’s, was enjoying a romantic dinner for two on a third-floor balcony overlooking Kyiv when the attack began in earnest.
“We had dinner on the balcony, and it was stupid to ruin the moment, so we just decided to stay on the balcony and watch. I know it's stupid, but it was very romantic,” she says. After a slight pause, she adds: “And yesterday we did the same.”
Not all would agree, but the sight of the night sky over Kyiv can be an awesome spectacle, lit up by tracer rounds, air defence missiles, and intercepted projectiles.
“It was the first time I was on the balcony with such a good overview of what's going on,” says Nana, “so I stayed and watched all these red dots, all the PPO [air defence] working. And I even saw explosions from the drones being intercepted. And I know it's stupid, I know it's not cool, but I was a bit excited to watch.”
The first signs of incoming missiles came at twenty past midnight, when a MiG, one of the Russian planes capable of carrying cruise missiles, was spotted flying in Russian airspace. A few minutes later, two launches were confirmed – Kindzhals, each carrying several hundred kilograms of explosives.
Nana describes the sound that they make when they fly overhead – a whooshing noise, like a jet plane, only much closer and faster.
At 2.27am the attack moved into its most dangerous phase – “ballistics threat from Bryansk region – they’re going to fire at us.” Then one minute later, a rare all-caps message: “EVERYONE TAKE SHELTER.”
Whilst cruise missiles fly low and flat like a bird (literally “winged missiles” in Ukrainian), ballistic missiles are launched high into the atmosphere and come streaking down at extremely high speeds, making them much harder to intercept, and often leaving less than five minutes between alert and impact to make it to safety.
They are also much less accurate. Multiple times in recent weeks ballistic missiles have hit residential areas, levelling entire blocks of flats and killing those inside.
The only tool that Ukraine has to defend itself from ballistic missiles are American-made Patriot batteries. This week it was reported that the Trump administration has halted all new weapons deliveries including the ammunition for these batteries, as well as other military aid.
The story has since been refuted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but the confusion underscores just how precarious Ukraine's ability to defend itself has become since Trump took office. The current weapons deliveries going to Ukraine were assigned by the outgoing Biden administration, but since taking office Trump has made no new allocations of money or materiel and experts say that the current stocks and supplies will run dry this summer unless Trump signs off on a new package.
At the same time, Russia has been ramping up production of ballistic missiles. At the beginning of June, the Kyiv Independent reported that Russia's production of ballistic missiles has increased by at least 66% over the past year. Russia produced approximately 1,200 ballistic and cruise missiles in 2024, including short-range, intermediate-range, and long-range systems such as the Iskander-M, Iskander-K, Kh-series air-launched cruise missiles, and the Kinzhal aeroballistic missile. In 2025, military intelligence sources report that Russia is projected to increase missile production to 1,500 or more units. Western technology sanctions have failed to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to make weapons, which in the meantime have largely swapped Western chips and other tech for Chinese produced technology, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and others.
Taken together, Ukraine’s ammunition shortages and Russia’s prodigious missile output adds up to a potentially very bleak outlook in the coming months.
But despite the almost nightly attacks, it’s worth remembering that they are still only a small part of what it is to live in Kyiv. A much-repeated statistic of questionable authenticity is that you are more likely to die in a traffic accident than an aerial bombardment in Kyiv.
Regardless of the exact probabilities, it’s true that most of the time life in Kyiv continues uninterrupted.
By the time the sun came up on Friday morning, the air in Kyiv was translucent with smoke and the smell of burning. The Ministry of Environmental Protection put out an air quality warning advising Kyiv residents to stay indoors.
The city was soon drenched in hot sunshine however, and Kyivans were outside enjoying it, the beaches along the Dnipro increasingly well-populated as the afternoon wore on. Just after 10pm, the air raid siren sounded again, and by 11pm Kyiv’s air defence was audibly in action once again.