The sound arrives before sleep does. For millions of Ukrainians, the wail of an air raid siren has become one of the most familiar noises of the past four years, a signal that seeps into the body long before it reaches the ears. “It is very long. It goes on and on,” said Oksana Ruzhenkova, a 55-year-old Kyiv resident.
As Russia’s invasion of its southern neighbor grinds on, with no clear end in sight, the noise of war has become an inescapable backdrop to daily life, a soundscape of sirens, drones and explosions. For some, these no longer trigger immediate action, but something quieter and more dangerous: numbness. It is a survival response, a way to endure life in a war zone while clinging to fragments of normal routine.
“When the air alarms begin, I have only one desire: for the siren to stop. … I want to cover my ears,” Ruzhenkova said. “But drones, they are a whole other story.”
She has not slept in her bedroom for almost two years. “The attacks are so frequent now that we don’t have the strength to go to the bomb shelter every time the alarm sounds,” she explained.
Instead, she dragged her mattress into the hallway of her Soviet-built apartment, following the “two wall” practice, a widely used safety measure meant to protect against blasts. In that narrow space, she built a makeshift bed in what she believes is the safest corner of her home, often closing the windows to block out any sounds.
But silence rarely lasts.
On some nights, increasingly over the past year, explosions jolt her awake. “It’s hard to go back to sleep after the house shakes, and car alarms go off from the explosions,” she said.
On those nights, sleep becomes impossible. Ruzhenkova lies still, listening. The faint buzzing of a drone cuts through the darkness, growing louder, then softer. “If the sound gets louder, then it’s closer, but then starts to fade, and you feel a sense of relief: Bingo! I’m lucky this time,” Ruzhenkova said.
The sound, even as it fades, is a fresh wave of dread. For Ruzhenkova, a drone that has passed is not a relief but a terrible redirection. “It means that it is still flying,” she said, her thoughts tracking its unseen trajectory toward her three granddaughters, all aged under 7, who live in a different part of the city, about 18 miles away. “These thoughts can drive you mad.”
In four years of relentless war, the psychological toll of these sounds is the latest, most insidious weapon. It is a kind of sonic warfare. Russia’s drone strategy has created a nation on permanent, exhausting alert. Every Ukrainian is now an involuntary sound engineer, acutely sensitive to the ambient noise, trying to mentally calculate a threat’s distance from a high-pitched buzz or a faint whistle.
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