Observant residents of Kiev are rediscovering the joys of a good night’s sleep

Month after endless month, Kiev’s nights were punctuated by the blare of air raid sirens and the sound of explosions from rocket and drone attacks. Now, an unusually long lull in the nightly bombardment of the city by Russian forces is allowing residents to do something they’ve been dreaming about: finally go to sleep.

“I really feel the difference,” said Anastasia Tsvion, who looked rested after a good night’s sleep, undisturbed by the falling of rockets or the sound of sirens that forced her to seek safety in a nearby metro station. “I can live a normal life,” said Ms. Tsvion, 27, who works as an analyst for a group that tracks malicious Russian information campaigns. “I’m not physically exhausted.”

Air raid sirens sounded just six times in Kiev last month, the fewest since Russia’s full-scale invasion began last year. public facts.

Although no one expects the silence to last long, it is welcomed by the residents of a city that experienced more than 1,000 hours of air raid sirens from the start of the war until the end of September this year. Local authoritieswhile Russia sent waves of missiles and drones in an attempt to destroy crucial energy and military infrastructure and break the will of the population.

City officials say some 170 people have been killed since the attacks began last year, but health experts say the repeated attacks have also taken a toll on those who survive, causing sleep disorders and chronic stress.

Now that the attacks have stopped, Kiev residents say they feel healthier, are more productive at work and are less prone to nervous breakdowns.

Dara Molchanova, a 32-year-old employee of an information technology company, said she was initially surprised by the newfound calm over Kiev’s skies, but quickly embraced it. Her new morning routine includes workouts, and she said she can donate more to the Ukrainian military “because you work better and earn more.”

“It was a productive month compared to a month where sirens sounded regularly,” she said, sitting in a trendy cafe in a bright courtyard bustling with locals enjoying drinks on a recent afternoon.

Like many other Kiev residents, Ms. Molchanova said she associated her sleepless nights with May this year, when Russia launched barrages of missiles and drones on the capital, most of them at night.

Kiev’s powerful air defense systems, including Western-supplied Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, managed to repel most of the attacks.

But that hasn’t stopped the alarms from sounding constantly, either through a citywide system that blares monotonous sirens in Kiev or through phone applications that imitate their sounds and play chilling voice messages such as “Attention! Air raid alert. Go to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless, your overconfidence is your weakness.

“I was tired and exhausted all the time,” Ms. Tsvion said, recalling how she jumped out of bed at night, ran out of her building and into a bomb shelter in a subway station.

Blue-eyed people going to work in the morning became a fixture on the streets of Kiev.

Many residents developed techniques to squeeze in some sleep, including scouring social media to assess the risk of impending attacks after hearing air raid sirens. Drones that can be easily shot down? Back to bed. Ballistic missiles? Take cover. Some people said they eventually deleted their air raid siren phone applications.

Ms. Molchanova said that after a sleepless night, she would sometimes ask her employer for time off or “attend a meeting, and then say, ‘Sorry, I’ll take an hour to sleep.’” A doctor prescribed melatonin pills to help her sleep better, she said.

Daria Pylypenko, a somnologist from Kiev, said that since the war began, new patients had come to her and many had been diagnosed with insomnia.

Authorities have warned that a new air campaign against Ukraine’s energy network is highly likely – meaning the quiet nights could soon be a distant memory.

“We are almost halfway through November and must be prepared for the fact that the enemy may increase the number of drone or missile attacks on our infrastructure,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said. he said in his late-night speech on Sunday.

Kiev residents have already noticed a slight increase in the number of alarms recently. They have sounded ten times since the beginning of November and for the first time in more than a month the sirens went off after midnight on Wednesday.

“If there are no explosions for more than two weeks to a month, we are in a strong state of anticipation, which causes us to wake up at any noise and worsens sleep,” Ms. Pylypenko said.

Some residents said they had become so accustomed to the sirens that they now imagined the sound of them when they were not there – and woke up as a result.

This paradox is captured in a popular meme which recently spread on social media and depicts a conversation between a sleeping girl and her brain.

“Are you sleeping?” the brain asks the girl. “Yeah, so shh,” she replies.

“Guess what,” the brain continues, “is this siren real, or am I joking?”

The girl opens her eyes wide.