A woman in Kyiv walking in front of captured Russian military vehicles.
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It’s party time on the banks of the Dnipro. House music is thumping from the speakers, Kyiv women in colorful snowsuits are drinking mulled wine and the air smells of grilled meat and wood smoke. Children slide across the frozen river. A few hundred people have gathered here in the snow, a scene which, from a distance, looks like a winter painting by Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel. Up close, it is more reminiscent of an après-ski party.
It is a Saturday afternoon in January, in Kyiv's fourth winter of war. Russian missiles are destroying the city's heating plants, and a sharp frost has turned apartments into refrigerators. The subway has just suspended service for the first time in years because of a lack of sufficient electricity. In my apartment, the heat has gone out, as has the water.
But on the Dnipro, people are celebrating as if the war didn’t exist.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 9/2026 (February 20th, 2026) of DER SPIEGEL.
It’s a bit disorienting for many, myself included – even though I have made repeated reporting trips to Kyiv over the last several years. I was there in the first days of the war, when Russia's President Vladimir Putin sent his troops pushing toward the capital, and I was there a few weeks later, when they withdrew from the region and left behind murdered civilians in the suburb of Bucha. It was a life in crisis – frightening, stripped of familiar routines.
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Four years have passed since then, and the people of Kyiv have been forced to adapt their lives to the constant state of crisis. It often astonishes me how well they manage. The everyday life of a great city – buses running, concerts taking place, traffic lights changing, children playing, neighbors exchanging greetings – is a collective feat of strength, wrested from catastrophe.
A victory, but a temporary one.
At night Putin destroys normality; by day the people of Kyiv build it back up again. For me, Kyiv is this constant struggle between normality and catastrophe.
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