Inside the Ukrainian City That Has Lived Under Russian Shells for Three Years

Kharkiv has been shelled by Russia almost daily for three years. Here is what life looks like inside a city that refuses to abandon itself.

The metro system in Kharkiv still runs — something that astonishes newcomers to the city who have experienced it only through the lens of conflict footage. Not with its full prewar frequency, and not without the adapted function of the deep stations as bomb shelters, but with enough regularity that the city's remaining 900,000 residents — down from 1.4 million before the full-scale invasion — can get from the northeast neighbourhoods to the city centre without walking in the open during daylight hours, when Russian drone activity is most concentrated.

Kharkiv is Ukraine's second-largest city. It sits 40 kilometres from the Russian border — close enough that conventional artillery has been used against it throughout the conflict, and close enough that the distinction between frontline and urban centre is not meaningful in the way it would be in a conflict fought over more strategic depth. It has been struck by missiles, drones, and guided bombs on a near-daily basis for three years.

And yet it functions. The university has maintained in-person teaching in its basement lecture facilities for more than two years. The city's research institutes — Kharkiv has historically been a significant scientific centre with a tradition dating to the Soviet period — have maintained partial operations, with some researchers working remotely from western Ukraine or from diaspora locations in Europe while others remain in the city on institutional loyalty and the specific impossibility of conducting certain research from anywhere else.

The people who remain in Kharkiv defy easy categorization. Some cannot leave — age, disability, responsibility for elderly relatives, inability to navigate the bureaucratic requirements of wartime displacement. Some will not leave — deep attachment to place that overrides the rational calculation of personal safety. Some have tried leaving and returned — to apartments that were theirs, to work that gave their lives structure, to a city that remained, despite everything, home.