Despite talk of peace, Ukraine is still under a barrage of deadly attacks
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Over the past few months, Ukraine has been caught in geopolitical jostling at the highest echelons of power. It is one of the most astonishing moments that we have ever seen happen inside the Oval Office between these world leaders essentially shouting at one another.

A significant couple of statements from Vladimir Putin saying that Russia agrees with a Ukraine ceasefire. With world leaders gathering for the papal funeral at the Vatican, a peace summit of sorts for President Trump and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky. Just this week, the Trump administration signed a deal to share revenues from Ukraine's mineral wealth

tying the U.S. even more closely to negotiations over the country's future. But these are political machinations. What about daily life on the ground in Ukraine, more than three years after the Russian invasion? Well, Kyiv, the capital, is bustling, at least by day.

It's a city that's absolutely alive and full of creativity and resilience. There's wonderful coffee shops, wonderful restaurants. You see people on the streets all the time during the day.

People going to work, kids going to school. That's Joanna Kakissis, NPR's correspondent in Ukraine. On weekends, I'll go to the theater. We'll walk along the Dnipro River. You'll see these elderly couples dancing on the shore, like doing the waltz. And you think, like, this doesn't feel like a city at war.

But every night, practically, there are drone attacks. You're like jarred awake by the fact like, oh yeah, this is war. We're at war and it's happening practically every night.

Consider this. As diplomats try to negotiate a peace deal, Ukrainian civilians are still dying from Russian airstrikes. So today for our Reporter's Notebook series, we'll get on the ground with Joanna, who's been living and working in Ukraine for almost the entire war.

We'll hear how everyday Ukrainians have adapted to a new normal and how the country's military is trying to revolutionize drone warfare. From NPR, I'm Don Gagne. ♪

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It's Consider This from NPR. A little over a week ago, at one in the morning local time, ballistic missiles started falling on the city of Kiev. The bombardment continued for the next 11 hours, killing 12 people and injuring around 90.

Forty-year-old Maria Rumyantseva scrambled to evacuate her elderly mother before a Russian missile destroyed their home. How do I get my mother, a disabled person in a wheelchair, down from the second floor to the first floor to the bomb shelter alone in eight minutes? It was the deadliest attack on Kyiv since last summer.

But missiles fall on the Ukrainian capital almost every night, a new normal that residents have endured for more than three years since the Russian invasion. Today, we'll hear what it's like to cover the war at this moment from NPR's Ukraine correspondent, Joanna Kakisis. We'll pass it off to our co-host, Scott Detrow, who started by asking Joanna about those near-nightly aerial attacks.

people in the early months, everyone, an air raid sire would come and the whole city would, would troop down to air raid shelters. Does that still happen after several years of this? Not that many people go like they used to go in the beginning. It was every time. Now it's not as, not, not as often. People have just gotten really used to it. I've,

I remember interviewing this woman who said that she was so tired after days and days of not sleeping that even though the explosion like was rattling her windows and actually blew out one of her windows, she didn't want to go downstairs to the shelter. She's just like.

like, honestly, I don't care if I die. I'm just too tired. I'm too tired. I need to sleep. It's really worn people down, the fact that they hear this every night. And they've just gotten used to it, as have I. So that's life in Kyiv.

What is the best way to describe what it's like when you leave the Capitol, when you go elsewhere in the country, especially as you move more toward the Eastern Front, where the active, increasingly trench warfare war is taking place? Right, right. You can really tell there's a big difference there.

When I'm in Kharkiv or in the Donetsk region, I definitely notice the difference. And for one, there are many, many more explosions. And you also have the fear of something called guided bombs, like glide bombs, which are very, very destructive. And Kharkiv has suffered from a lot of them. And I've also visited Kherson there because the Russians are also nearby there. They'll send over drones that like attack people, like hunt them down and attack them on the street.

So it's much more dangerous. I know a couple in in in her son who I've been in touch with for a while. He's a journalist and she's an illustrator. And she hasn't left the house in two years because she's too afraid to leave her apartment. You know, it's such a strange war. And I'm wondering how you see this from your perspective, because on in some ways it is a very old style of war. Right. With this this static battlefield and trenches and landmines. Right.

And then it is a war that is being fought in so many ways by this modern technology, like both sides aggressively using drones and fighting a war that way. Yeah, that's true. It's incredibly modern in some ways and incredibly World War I in other ways.

Drone warfare is really the main stage right now. I'm not saying that infantry don't have a role anymore, but drones are increasingly becoming the weapon of choice by both sides. And

And especially, you know, the Ukrainians have invested a lot of money in making cutting edge drones or using drones in cutting edge ways because, remember, the Ukrainians are vastly outnumbered by the Russians. There are many more Russian soldiers than there are Ukrainian soldiers. And Ukrainians can't lose soldiers. So to them, investing in warfare that will help them get an edge on the battlefield without losing more soldiers or investing more soldiers, that's where it's at for the Ukrainians. Right.

And I understand you recently did some reporting where you saw some of these new drones up close, specifically something called a land drone. Tell me what a land drone is. I saw two of them, actually. I should explain. Let's start with the big drone. The big drone is like, looks like a truck with six wheels. And it's about the size of a large bumper car at an amusement park, if you can think of that. And then there's a small drone that looks kind of like a child's play truck, like one where a little person could fit, you know, sort of.

use a steering wheel to move it around, although there is no steering wheel on this one. The big drone carries supplies and it has like, you know, ammunition, it has food, it has, you know, whatever the soldiers need, they load it up and they send it in there. The smaller drone, that one is just filled with explosives and it's got a one-way mission and it's to kill the enemy. So it's sent in there

and the explosives are detonated once they're close to Russian infantry. Tell me a little more about the specific unit that you spent time with with these land drones. Sure. Yeah, they were part of the Kharkiv Brigade, which is based in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, and it's like part of Ukraine's National Guard. It's got a lot of innovators in its ranks, like a lot of young men in their 20s with PhDs in mathematics and engineering and molecular biology.

I spent a lot of time with this 26-year-old evolutionary biologist whose military call sign is Pan, like the Greek god of shepherds and hunters. And he had this thick black hair and a gaze that just reflected a lot of steeliness and a lot of pain. He'd lost close friends in the war. And he's from part of Ukraine in the east that's been under relentless attack. And he told me a lot about how these land drones work because he himself has modified them so they can work for Ukraine.

What is he doing right now? He's setting up his equipment for testing. We are testing how far can it go. Our war is a competition between quantity and quality. And we are quality. It is not only because we have no choice, it is also because we have a capability to use such technology. We have smart people who can use it.

Jonah, I want to end with this. This war has been going on for more than three years now. I'm wondering how you approach this beat and how you think about finding new stories in a war that just keeps going on and how you fight the fatigue on your end and how you think about it editorially. Well, I think the challenge is that you still have to keep up with the news. And there's only one of me. So the news is always takes precedent.

But what I really want to do and what I really try hard to find time to do is to tell stories about people. This is about human beings and how they're living through it. I was giving them the food and they were like crying because they said that I had no food for the three days because I was running from the bombing and

This isn't a war just about, you know, politics or who kicked who out of the Oval Office or, you know, things like that. Because of the attacks, I am very worried.

So is my family. But I live close to the subway, and so the way to rehearsals is also underground. It's very hard for me to sit here while my fellow soldiers are out there. This is my country, and if I don't defend it, who will? You know, at the end of the day, I don't need to listen to politicians and to even to policy wonks so much. I need to talk to people, because it's people who are experiencing this.

That was NPR's Ukraine correspondent, Joanna Kakisis, talking with All Things Considered host Scott Detrow. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Don Gagne. ♪

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