More than four months after the Russian invasion, the wail of air-raid sirens warning of an incoming attack has become something of a background noise for some Ukrainians: annoying, alarming, but also ignorable.
However, a series of deadly rocket attacks by Russian forces in recent days that hit civilian targets has changed the calculus, prompting Ukrainian leaders to rush to reinforce the message that compliance with the advice to seek shelter saves lives.
“I beg you again, please do not ignore the air-raid sirens,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a national speech this weekend. “Adequate rules of conduct must be followed at all times.”
Many people in Ukraine still do not have access to air raid shelters. In Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, officials have said they have no plans to reopen schools in the fall, in part because not all schools have them. In Lviv, the western Ukrainian city near the Polish border where hundreds of thousands of displaced Ukrainians have settled, all new buildings must contain air raid shelters.
But many Ukrainians in larger cities have grown not only complacent about the danger, but too tired of the war to worry about the threat of attacks.
On Saturday night in Kharkiv, where Russian artillery strikes take place almost every night, young people in a popular bar drank at tables outside and listened to live music.
“My neighbors go to the basement; older people go, but young people don’t,” said one of the patrons, Maryna Zviagintseva, 28.
“I think in the first month everyone was scared and they would go on the metro or somewhere else,” said Vladyslav Andriienko, 29, a construction worker. “Now people are trying to live normal lives.”
In the deadliest attack of the past week, three Kalibr cruise missiles fired from a Russian submarine in the Black Sea hit the center of the provincial capital of Vinnytsia, kill 23 people and injuring 140 others. The dead in the strike on Thursday including Liza Dmytriyevaa 4-year-old with Down syndrome, and two other children.
The next day, at least 10 Russian missiles struck in the southern city of Mykolaiv, hitting two universities, a hotel and a shopping center. Later on Friday, three people were killed and 16 others injured when at least one missile hit a target in Dnipro, in central Ukraine.
Anti-aircraft batteries shot down one missile on Friday over the Kiev region of northern Ukraine and four others in Dnipro, Ukrainian military authorities said.
And on Saturday, a Russian missile struck a warehouse in the Odessa region, causing a fire, said a spokesman for the regional military administration, Serhii Batchuk. He said there were no casualties as the guards retreated to a shelter as soon as they heard the siren.
A senior US military officer said Friday that between 100 and 150 civilians were killed in Russian attacks in Ukraine that week. Moscow denies targeting civilians in what it says is limited military action in Ukraine aimed at ridding the country of Nazis.
However, Ukrainian officials say the attacks are primarily aimed at spreading terror and are part of a genocide campaign by President Vladimir V. Putin and his military.
“This is the extermination of the Ukrainians as a nation,” Oleksandr Motuzianyk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry, told television on Friday. “This is an attempt to break the spirit of Ukrainians and reduce the level of their resistance.”
Moscow’s recent military victories, particularly in Luhansk province in the eastern Donbas region, stem largely from the superiority of its artillery, but an influx of weapons from the United States and other countries is beginning to restore that balance. Mr Zelensky said the situation partly explains the increase in recent strikes.
“The occupiers realize that we are gradually getting stronger,” he said. “The purpose of their terror is very simple: to put pressure on you and me, on our society, to intimidate people, to do as much damage as possible to Ukrainian cities, while Russian terrorists still can.”