Name: Ukrainians get creative to cope with Russia's nightly drone attacks | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T17:41:10.000Z
Duration: 6 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Ukraine says that at least one person has been killed and others wounded in a new overnight attack on Kiev.

Officials say drones struck apartment buildings and damaged the entrance of a metro station where people were sheltering.

Other Ukrainian cities also came under attack.

Russia has stepped up its recent airstrikes in weeks, and for Ukrainians, this means sleepless nights and fear for their lives.

But as Jan Philipp Schultz reports, it also means creative solutions to cope.

It almost always happens at night, air raid warnings and shortly afterwards, drones and missiles hitting the city.

For a long time, the residents of Kiev thought they had gotten used to this, but the massive increase in the past weeks is leaving its mark.

Recently it's become very stressful for me.

The strikes are not only happening more frequently, they are also becoming stronger and stronger.

I always try to sleep in the corridor with two walls of protection, but it's definitely not enough.

The Shahid drones have become much more powerful.

Kirill Obarashkov shows me around his neighborhood, a suburb of Kiev.

The airport is not far away from here, he explains.

This makes the area a hotspot for attacks.

Just recently, a drone hit a neighbor's house.

He shows me the little bomb shelter he constructed underneath his property, all by himself.

It's always open to all his neighbors too, Kirill says.

He wants them to feel more relaxed during air raids.

This place should be quiet, it should be comfortable, it should reduce the stress for the people, for the women, for the children, they should feel like home here, even hearing the bombs outside.

Katerina Storoschuk no longer waits for the nightly sirens to seek shelter.

Every evening she and her chihuahua retreat into what she calls her indoor capsule, a protective cabin made of steel.

She recently bought the construction from a specialist in Kiev for around 2,000 euros, unaffordable for many Ukrainians.

When I hear the shahad, sometimes it can be too late to go somewhere, you know, so that's why I'm sleeping here, that's why I made the place comfortable for me to sleep here.

Maybe if I had a family or a partner, I would be not so scared to sleep on the bed, but now it's just easier.

The cabin probably won't protect her from any direct impact, Katerina admits, but at least it offers her some protection from shrapnel and debris.

If this capsule helps me just to sleep and continue my life in my country, so I'm happy to have it.

And for me, this capsule is not an investment in my safety, it is an investment in my sleeping and well-being here.

Katerina says she would love nothing more than to sleep in her real bed again.

But as long as drones are hitting just 100 meters away, she'd rather stay in her little capsule.

And DW correspondent Jan-Philip Schulz is in the Ukrainian capital for us.

We understand it was another sleepless night in Kiev.

Yeah, it's been a massive air attack with dozens of drones and missiles, especially here in Kiev.

I woke up around midnight to heavy explosions and it continued all night long.

From what we hear, at least one person died, several persons have been injured, shops, even a kindergarten, many residential buildings have been damaged.

Even a subway station was hit, where hundreds of people took shelter.

There are pictures of smoke inside the station, but so far we haven't heard anything about injuries connected to this specific strike.

And we understand that Ukraine has proposed holding ceasefire negotiations with Russia next week, but so far no date has been set.

Yeah, we know that President Zelensky has suggested such talks that could already start in the coming days.

We also hear about discussions taking place between Russia's President Putin and Turkey's President Erdogan regarding such negotiations.

For the moment, the only official reaction by the Kremlin is that Russia is open to talks, but also not willing to shift from its maximalist demands.

And these demands include the full annexation of four regions in eastern Ukraine, partly occupied by Russia.

So yeah, there are new dynamics at the moment regarding peace talks, but the ideas, how an agreement might look like, are still very different.

It's been a week also since President Trump set a 50-day ultimatum for Russia's Putin to stop the aggression.

Well, I think there has been a slight decrease on airstrikes on some big cities in recent days, but nobody really connects this to Trump.

And as we just discussed, attacks have resumed in full force last night, and also the fighting along the front lines continue in full force.

So some observers say that the threat of secondary sanctions that could also affect countries such as India and China, important trading partners of Russia, has made some impression on the Kremlin.

But in the short term, what really makes a difference here on the ground are not such announcements of a 50-day deadline, but it's the decision by the United States to resume shipments of air defense weapons here in Ukraine.