KHARKIV, Ukraine -- Just 30 kilometers from the Russian border, Kharkiv is under air-raid alert more often than it is not -- particularly as Russian forces pound the city from the air and invading ground troops advance in a new offensive to the north and east.
So when the sirens went off on a sparkling spring afternoon on May 3, people in the center of Ukraine's second city didn't even look up. But the boom and crash that echoed across Kharkiv just before 2 p.m. was impossible to ignore.
It was, according to Mayor Ihor Terekhov, one of the many aerial bombs -- shorter-ranged than the cruise missiles that swarm across the country, but bigger, nastier, and notoriously inaccurate -- that Russian forces have been dropping on the city.
This one struck an overwhelmingly residential neighborhood near the heart of Kharkiv, killing an elderly woman in one home, shattering blocks worth of windows, and bringing the roof down on Viktor's head as he sat in his living room.
As blood ran down the side of Viktor's nose, firefighters filled his yard and those around it, wielding hoses and fire axes to bring the blazes under control. They carried his TV to the dirt road. One handed Viktor a cigarette and a cell phone.
"Don't cry," he said repeatedly once he reached his daughter. "The house, the car -- everything's burned up, nothing's left. But I'm alive."
The Rescuers
Fighting fires is a high-stakes business in any situation. In Kharkiv these days, the stakes are arguably even higher.
The vibe back at the city's main firehouse was recognizable, like a clubhouse with a strong undercurrent of tension -- which has grown greater as Russia steps up its bombardment of the city.
The job has changed radically since Oleh Samoylenkov joined the force 24 years ago.
"Before, we hardly ever worked on demolitions -- really only if a gas line somewhere blew up, God forbid, or something like that," he said back at the station, referring to clearing rubble, fighting blazes, and picking up the pieces after a building has been badly damaged or destroyed. "Now, that's our main work."
"It used to be just fires. Now it's fires under fire. And everything that's going on has some sort of military character," said Viktor Danylenko, another firefighter at the same station.
Samoylenkov said that the most frightened he remembers being on a call was the first time he had to answer one as shrapnel flew. But for better or for worse, he says, he's gotten used to it.
These days, the firefighters don flak jackets on top of their normal gear, and military helmets as well. Bohdan, who guards the trucks when he is not driving the one with the medical supplies, has to put that armor on whenever there is an air alert on, which he waits out near the big glass doors of the station's garage.
When combined with the fireproof jackets, gas masks, and oxygen tanks that are part of their more traditional gear, the firefighters of Ukraine are heavily laden, resembling old-fashioned scuba divers -- but facing a very different element.
It's almost a relief when they have a regular fire to respond to -- someone's been starting fires in dumpsters, including one that necessitated a late-night response. "Child's play," said Samoylenko, with a wave of his hand.
The day before, the station's lights were out in keeping with region-wide blackouts until someone got a generator running. Then they could at least see the clock that hangs over the combined locker room and sitting area as its hands crept up on 7:30 a.m. -- the end of their 48-hour shift.
"It's a matter of chance. It might not happen, it might happen. Roulette," Sasha, a younger firefighter, said around dawn. "Today's the second day, so everyone's a little on edge."
When their shift ended, the next team of 20-odd men arrived, taking up their posts in the other locker room, and these firefighters headed home.
Easter Sunday Attacks
Kharkiv is a city on edge. Russian forces occupied swaths of the surrounding region after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but they never took the city and Ukraine recaptured most of that territory in a major counteroffensive later in the year.
Now there is fierce new fighting in the Kharkiv region: Last week, Russia opened up a new front in the region by pushing across the border northeast of the city and seizing several villages close to the frontier, prompting a wave of evacuations.
Visiting Kharkiv on May 16 after cancelling foreign trips due to the renewed fighting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the situation in the region was "generally under control" but remained "extremely difficult."
Officials and military analysts say Russia is unlikely to be able to seize the city itself, and that may not be the aim of the offensive. But residents have been living with attacks from Russian glide bombs like the KAB-500, a Soviet-era weapon named for clocking in at 500 kilograms.
"Kharkiv today is much more than a city. Kharkiv is a symbol of the fortitude of Ukraine," Terekhov wrote on Telegram on Orthodox Easter morning, May 5. "The lives of over a million people are at stake."
Another aerial bomb later that day wounded at least 15 people. Strikes from S-300s, an antiaircraft system that Russia uses as artillery at close range, would cause more damage in the early morning of May 10.
On May 2, a bomb hit a factory in Derhachi, a village about 15 kilometers north of central Kharkiv. Out of range of the fire brigade, it still hit home for Viktor, who lives in Derhachi and whose wife works in a grocery store within a block of the strike.
The Kharkiv region's governor, Oleh Synyehubov, said on May 9 that Derhachi was one of the key locations from which authorities were evacuating residents.
Fire Escape
Fighting fires sparked by Russian attacks is far from the only experience Samoylenkov has had with the war.
At the outset of the full-scale invasion, he lived even further north, and the initial Russian advance pushed him under occupation.
His 21-year-old son, Kyrylo, joined the army six months before the invasion. Russian soldiers found Samoylenkov by frisking and checking the phone of one of Kyrylo's friends, he said, finding a photo of his son in uniform and demanding to know where his family was.
They took Samoylenkov to a makeshift prison in the very early days of the invasion. When they released him, he realized that he was still in occupied territory. After being turned back while trying to cross into the city of Kharkiv, which Russian forces never seized, he eventually managed to sneak through, riding a bicycle on a backroad.
Kirill was killed in action that December, Samoylenkov says as he flicks through photos on his phone -- a series of images in which a blond teenager dons camouflage and visibly ages in a span of months.
"I still have a family, thank God," he said, making a spitting gesture over his shoulder three times -- the equivalent of knocking on wood. When he was in Russian custody, his wife and toddler daughter made the trek through Russia and then Lithuania, eventually stopping in Germany. They're still there, waiting to come home, he says.
Killing Time
Along with the grim realities of wartime emergency response, the firefighters of Kharkiv -- like those in cities around the world -- are stuck biding long stretches of time between fire alarms. A lot of the activity in the intervals are chores. They wash equipment. They clean floors, walls, furniture, repeatedly. They sweep the driveway repeatedly -- though it's old, the place is spotless in a way you might not expect from a zone that constantly houses 20 men.
On this May morning, someone got a generator working. With electricity back on, the crew discovered that the water heater was broken, and Samoylenko and Danylenko wrestled with it for a while before getting it fixed.
In the kitchen, Andriy Talanov deftly peeled potatoes before handing them to Viktor Veretelnyk, who diced them. The two firefighters repeated the procedure with radishes and cucumbers which they dump in chicken broth into which they whisk a blend of sour cream and mayonnaise.
Whole bags of green onions and dill go into the cauldron of "okroshka," a popular cold soup that goes into the refrigerator for an hour and change before becoming lunch for the squad on shift.
This constant maintenance is interspersed with a continuous rotation of smoking breaks out on the ramp at the back entrance to the station. The men make guarded comments that it's been quiet. These are always followed by a trio of dry spits over the shoulder -- a ritual designed to foil a devil on your shoulder who might have heard your optimism and been on his way to ruin it by doing some mischief.
For the superstitious, the stakes of such mischief are palpable. As 7:30 a.m. rolled around, one of the firefighters set up shop near a sign-in sheet in the locker room. He was going through a separate roster, written on an envelope he had stuffed with bills, mostly small. He was checking that everyone on the shift now heading home had contributed to a fund they're gathering for one of their comrades, who died in a Russian attack less than a month earlier.
