STORY: It’s evening in Kyiv.
Like clockwork, 27-year-old Daria Slavytska packs up a stroller.
In it – a yoga mat, blankets and food.
Several times a week, she makes her way down into the Ukrainian city’s subway with her two-year-old son, Emil.
Not to catch a train, but a few hours sleep – safely below ground – while air raid sirens wail above.
:: Daria Slavytska, Kyiv resident
“We used to come here less often, about once a month, once a month – that was six months ago. Now we come here two or three times a week.”
For the past two months, Russia has unleashed escalating drone and missile assaults on Kyiv as part of a summer offensive.
The attacks have left the city’s 3.7 million residents, like Slavytska, exhausted and on edge.
She remembers when Emil used to hear the sirens.
The air raid alerts on her phone would send the little boy into bouts of shaking – crying, “Corridor, corridor, mum I am scared.” A doctor recommended she turn them off.
Back in April, a strike destroyed a residential building a couple of kilometers from Slavytska’s apartment block.
She says the threat of losing her home suddenly became more real.
Now, she takes her identity documents with her underground.
And has bought a lighter stroller to make her dash into the station easier.
“I do not remember the exact figures. If we remembered everything we would have all died long ago – so we simply used to sit here, we just sat here. At 5 a.m. then we went home and got some sleep, it was ok. Now it is no longer ok, unfortunately every single attack brings casualties.”
During the nights they spend in the subway, Slavytska curls up on her pink yoga mat with Emil by one of the columns lining the tracks.
But given how often they are sleeping underground, she has started looking into buying a mattress that would be more comfortable.
One Danish retailer told Reuters demand for inflatable mattresses, camp beds and sleep mats has increased.
:: Ruslan, Sales manager, JYSK
“The biggest jump in sales has been registered in Kyiv during the last three weeks of June. The demand has grown 20-25 percent.”
The number of people like Slavytska taking refuge in one of Kyiv’s 46 underground stations skyrocketed after large-scale bombardments slammed into the city five times in June.
The subway system recorded 165,000 night visits during that month.
More than double the visits in May, and nearly five times the number in June last year, its press service told Reuters.
Kyiv’s city military administration told Reuters more people were heading to the shelter because of “the scale and lethality” of attacks.
It said strikes killed 78 residents and injured over 400 in the first half of the year – and now sleeping in a shelter has become the norm.
But some are taking more extreme measures – like Kateryna Storozhuk.
With no shelter within three kilometers of her home, Storozhuk has invested over $2,000 in a “Capsule of Life.”
It’s a reinforced steel box capable of withstanding falling concrete slabs.
She sleeps in it every night.
:: Kateryna Storozhuk, Kyiv resident
“The capsule protects me from debris and fear. It makes it possible to sleep in a safe cubicle.”
Storozhuk knows the capsule would not withstand a direct missile hit.
But the sleep deprivation from the attacks was causing her intense stress.
“I have become anxious and fearful and at some point I was not able to control it any more. I simply became an insomniac because of the fear.”
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