As rockets hit, a radio station broadcasts the rage of a battered city

It was the middle of the night in early January when a Russian missile blasted in and exploded in downtown Kharkov, blasting walls and shattering windows.

The next day people went shopping and to work, went out to eat at restaurants and the streets were full of traffic jams, almost as if nothing had happened.

But behind the 'business-as-usual' veneer, the people of Kharkiv are seething. Over the past month, Ukraine's second-largest city has borne the brunt of Russia's missile campaign, which has killed and injured dozens of people, blown up buildings and unnerved everyone.

It is an almost daily torment. To vent, the residents of Kharkov have a special outlet: Radio Boiling Over, a new FM station.

“This is boiling over in the morning,” Oleksandr Serdyuk, the morning show host, said during a recent broadcast. “What are you cooking about today?”

In Kharkov, a sprawling city of universities and factories, coping has taken many forms.

Almost two years after the war, the city opens underground schools. Psychologists visit strike sites to calm residents. Plywood goes up immediately over blown-out windows.

“Keep calm and continue studying,” reads a sign at the entrance to a university.

Amid the carnage, Radio Boiling Over, which aired a year ago, is becoming one of the most popular local media outlets. It serves as a megaphone for the fears and frustrations simmering within a population under near-constant attack.

“Despite everything Russia does, the city is still alive,” says Yevhen Streltsov, the founder of Radio Boiling Over. But, he said, “people get tired because their nerves are not made of iron” and they want to complain.

While there are occasional complaints about local bureaucrats and inefficiency, most anger is directed at Russia, especially after strikes.

“Burn in hell to the seventh generation. Curse the unwashed Russians,” wrote one listener, Tetyana Arshava, on the station's Instagram page after a rocket attack that left many casualties.

The channel broadcasts hourly news updates and talk shows in the morning and evening, with an emphasis on missile attacks; interviews with soldiers on the front lines, about 100 miles to the east; investigations into Russian war crimes, and of course the anger of hundreds of thousands of people who have to worry about their safety every day. The station's name, Radio Nakypilo, can also be translated as Radio Fed Up.

It receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. nonprofit funded by the U.S. government, and the European Endowment for Democracy, with a mission to cover local news in a community that, even by the standards of Ukraine's battered cities , has endured a serious crisis. 23 months of harrowing.

Just 39 kilometers from the Russian border, Kharkov was an early target of invading Russian ground forces and was partially surrounded. People fled. Of the pre-invasion population of approximately 2 million, 1.2 million remain today.

A barrage of ballistic missiles flies in from once a week to daily, arriving so quickly that alarms can provide no more than 40 seconds of warning. Parents rush their children into bathtubs or at least away from the windows.

Over the past three weeks, Russian missiles have destroyed two hotels: Kharkiv Palace and Park Hotel; blew out windows at popular restaurants, which quickly reopened; and hit apartment buildings. Seventeen people were injured during the strike at the apartment complex early this month.

“This is our daily life,” Mr. Streltsov said.

But despite the deadly threat, ballistic missile attacks have become so common in Kharkov that Radio Boiling Over does not interrupt its music programming when even one missile has landed, Mr. Yevhen said. Announcers only intervene in salvos or a catastrophic attack.

Kharkiv is handicapped because the military's best air defense systems, including American-supplied Patriots, are largely reserved for the capital Kiev. So it has to do with the regular chaos that comes with being the closest major city to the Russian border.

“No one in the world has this experience,” Mayor Ihor Terekhov said in an interview. He said people generally handled it well. “There are strikes, yes, but don't panic.”

Mr. Terekhov has promoted a program to build schools underground to protect them from missiles. The school district has already built five subway corridors, called MetroSchools, and is close to completing a purpose-built underground elementary school for 450 students, with only the football field on the surface.

The Metro Schools are at once an uplifting scene of children, boisterous and happy, finally back in classrooms and among friends, and a post-apocalyptic vision of a world where schools are designed as bunkers.

“It's really surreal,” said Iryna Tarasenko, director of the city's education department, which oversees the underground school program. “This is the reality we live in, these are the circumstances.”

Radio Boiling Over's mission is to capture that reality, give people an outlet to let off steam and provide useful practical information. Recently, a rocket attack was reported in the Kharkov region, but not in the city. One woman was killed. The station took calls.

“We just start the program with a very important topic,” said the presenter, Filip Dykan. “Kharkov is being bombed. You've all seen it. Please call us and let us know what is boiling over for you.”

There are also service elements in the broadcast. A real estate agent stopped by to answer questions about a program of state subsidies for people trying to buy new apartments after their own apartments were blown up. Yes, it was frustrating, he said; 14 documents were required for the application.

Even attempts to help don't always go well. One listener was concerned about a post about how online theater shows provided an additional format for entertainment (live shows are usually banned). “What Additionally format?” she asked. “In addition to what's gone? Soon this will be the only format. Whatever.”

The government gave Radio Boiling Over space on the FM spectrum for two purposes: to report local news and to jam a Russian psychological warfare operation that had been broadcasting news on the same frequency. The Russian channel broadcast terrifying, bizarre content intended to unnerve civilians and soldiers, including repeating the phrase “We will kill you.”

With the switch to Radio Boiling Over, people started tuning in, Mr. Streltsov said. “People are listening because we are quick” with news of rocket attacks and fighting along the nearby front, he said.

Roman Korobenko, a reporter for the channel, said that people under the age of 40, who came of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were tired of Russia. Older residents had mixed feelings, he said, sometimes lamenting that war had come even though Russians and Ukrainians had previously lived in peace.

As he reports the news, Mr. Korobenko said, he looks for unexpected angles of the attacks, beyond the monotonous numbers of dead and wounded.

One such story involved bat hibernation. The rocket attacks disturb the bats, sometimes causing them to flutter in large numbers through broken windows into the apartments below.

After a recent attack, notable for being one of Russia's first suspected deployments of a North Korean ballistic missile, a man found a creepy scene of hundreds of bats clinging to the furniture in his damaged apartment.

A local animal shelter collects them, Mr. Korobenko reported, and now has 5,000 bats in a heated storage area; it plans to release them in the spring. That was a positive story, he said.

Some people are annoyed by the constant blaring of ambulance sirens, he said. Some simply become constantly gripped by fear.

Mr Korobenko said people are mostly angry. “Nowadays,” he said. “Everyone is boiling over.”

Natalia Novosolova contributed reporting.