Ukraine crisis: 15,000 people sheltering in Kyiv's subway

Taria, 27, pops out of her tent where she is living with her two children and other Ukrainian families below ground in a subway station. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

As the escalator glides down the final few yards into the subway stop deep in Kyiv's normally immaculate mass transit system, a sprawl of foam mattresses, suitcases and plastic bags filled with food comes into view. The space is surprisingly quiet, almost silent, despite the 200 or so people camped there to escape the bombing and artillery fire above.

They sleep three or four to a single mattress. The children push toy cars over the grey granite slabs of the station floors, watching their mothers scroll endlessly on their cellphones, searching for news of the war.

Little hands and feet stick out from underneath blankets, although it is noticeably warmer in the station than above ground. Volunteers come and go, bringing food and other necessities of life. One mother sets up a tent, for a modicum of privacy.

"It's not so comfortable," admitted Ulyana, who is 9 and has been living in Dorohozhychi station with her mother and their cat for six days now. "But you see, this is the situation, and we just have to put up with it. It's better to be here than to get into a situation outside."

Ukrainians rest in a train car at one of the subway stations on Wednesday. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

As many as 15,000 people, the city's mayor said Wednesday, most of them women and children, have taken up residence in Kyiv's subway system to escape the grim conditions in the city as Russian forces bear down.

And the subway is not the only subterranean refuge. Doctors at Maternity Hospital No. 5 in Kyiv, for example, have set up chambers in the basement to provide women a safe place to give birth. So far, five babies have been born in this way, said Dmytro Govseyev, the clinic's director.

Six days into the conflict, the Kremlin's war plans remain unclear. The movement of tanks, artillery guns, armoured personnel carriers and other heavy weaponry toward Kyiv, with a population of about 2.8 million before the exodus of evacuees, is raising grave alarms about the potential onset of bloody street fighting.

But Russia might instead settle on a grinding siege punctuated with shelling and the cutting off of food supplies, water and ammunition in hopes of breaking the resistance without the destruction and killing of a frontal attack.

Either way, life underground in Kyiv, already difficult, is likely to get even harder.

Ukrainians have lived for days in cramped, communal conditions; they include women and children of all ages, along with men too old to join the fighting. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

Above ground, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who had been handed rifles just a few days ago were busy preparing for the Russians' arrival.

Preparations were evident on nearly every street: Concrete barriers blocked roadways, tires to set alight to form smokescreens lay everywhere and, in a new development Wednesday, signs warning of anti-tank mines dotted roads hastily closed to civilian cars.

A bullet-riddled SUV lay abandoned on the side of a road near a checkpoint manned by civilian volunteers, apparently after having raised suspicions that it was carrying Russian saboteurs.

A cold, slushy snow fell, and the thud of explosions could be heard on the city's outskirts.

A Ukrainian mother who had just delivered a baby is comforted by her husband in a makeshift maternity ward in the basement of a hospital. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

Although most people in Kyiv remain in their apartments, thousands have chosen to hide from the dangers above by taking cover in the subway system. They have lived for days in cramped, communal conditions, women and children of all ages, along with men too old to join the fighting above.

Olha Kovalchuk, a veterinarian, 45, and her daughter, Oksana, 18, a university ecology student, have been taking turns sleeping on a coveted wooden bench in the Dorohozhychi stop. "This is our space," Kovalchuk said.

Nearby, people crowded around a hastily improvised cellphone charging station. Fortunately, the subway system has well-appointed public restrooms.

The stop is deep in the system's green line — the escalator ride to the station takes about a minute — and the stops ahead sound promising: the Palace of Sports, the Golden Gate, the Caves and Friendship of the Peoples. Yet, while trains do still run sporadically, nobody here was going anywhere.

A Ukrainian mother tends to her newborn in a maternity ward in the basement of a hospital in Kyiv on Wednesday. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

"It's bad for the children," Kovalchuk said, surveying the scene. "I am just a veterinarian, not a doctor, but I can understand how bad this is for them. They are under stress. They cry at night."

Kovalchuk said she had been under such stress that she hardly slept. And she was seething with anger at the man who started the war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. "I don't want to swear," she said. "I just hate that man with all my soul. Look how much pain he brought us."

Ukrainian officials have in recent days pleaded with Western nations to intervene by imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a request that has been rebuffed, because it would risk sparking direct conflict between NATO and Russian forces. But Kovalchuk liked the idea.

"Please close the sky," she said.

Warning signs of Russia's intentions had been clear for years, not just during the military buildup that began in the fall, she said. "I don't understand why the world didn't listen to Ukraine before."

Ukrainians make molotov cocktails on Wednesday as they prepare to fight Russian forces advancing on the capital. Photo / Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

Estimates of civilian casualties are unreliable, easily manipulated by both sides in the information sector of the war. A Ukrainian government agency that oversees fire departments and rescue services said in a statement Wednesday that 2,000 people had died. But the agency later issued a correction, saying in what may be the most reliable account, that it had no idea how many people had been killed. Earlier estimates were in the hundreds.

Lyudmyla Denisova, the human rights ombudswoman in the Ukrainian Parliament, issued a statement saying that 21 children had been killed and 55 others injured.

In the subway stop, Yulia Gerasimenko, a lawyer who had worked in Kyiv's now moribund real estate market, moved into the subway stop with her daughter, Ulyana, last Thursday evening, the first day of the war. By chance, her 6-year-old son had been staying with his grandmother outside Kyiv when the Russian incursion began. They made it out and are now in Germany. Her husband, a career military man, is fighting with the Ukrainian army.

She was glad her son was safe, she said. "But I wish I were near to him now."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Andrew E. Kramer
Photographs by: Lynsey Addario
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