The people who sleep in the Kyiv metro every night

Apropos of today’s attack on Kyiv:

I’ve just read an Ukrainska Pravda article about people who sleep in the Kyiv metro every night, regardless of whether there’s an air raid alert or not. These aren’t people who don’t have a place to sleep. They do it preventively — in case an attack does happen.

Ukraine has three cities with proper subway systems — large ones in Kyiv and Kharkiv and a quasi-metro in Dnipro (with one line that leads from the railway station to an industrial district).

Sleeping in the metro was common in 2022, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when the danger was much greater — especially in Kharkiv, an eastern city close to the border with Russia, but also in Kyiv.

Since then, the metro has always been used as a shelter during air raid alerts, but apparently using it as a preventative night-time shelter was disallowed sometime in late 2022 after Ukraine had expelled Russian troops from the Kyiv region and most of the Kharkiv region. But in spring of this year the authorities allowed it once again as Russian drone attacks have intensified.

For most people, including myself, the risk tolerance is much higher. Sometimes we ignore air raid sirens, sometimes we make minor efforts like going to the corridor, and we go to a proper shelter only when it’s about to get truly dangerous (which, in Kyiv, is not really that often).

In objective terms, sleeping in the metro every night is like not flying by plane at all fearing a plane crash — i.e. exercising extreme caution to avoid a very unlikely negative outcome (only much more inconvenient, unless a plane-fearer needs to make frequent intercontinental trips). But there are all kinds of long-term psychological traumas Ukrainians are getting because of the war, and this is one of them.