There is a sound that Kyiv residents have learned to identify instantly. It is somewhere between a lawnmower and a moped engine — a characteristic buzz that carries across the city on still nights. When you hear it, you go to the shelter. When you hear the explosion that follows, you know the air defence systems missed that one.
That sound is the Shahed-136, an Iranian-designed one-way attack drone that Russia has deployed by the thousands against Ukrainian cities since the autumn of 2022.
What the Shahed is
The Shahed-136 (Russian designation: Geran-2) is an autonomous loitering munition — a drone that flies to a pre-programmed GPS target and detonates on impact. It carries approximately 50 kg of explosives. It flies slowly (around 185 km/h), at low altitude, and has a range exceeding 2,500 kilometres.
It is not a precision weapon in the traditional sense. It is a terror weapon — designed to strike civilian infrastructure, to create noise, to exhaust air defence systems with volume, and to wear down civilian morale over months and years.
Russia fires them in waves. Nights of 30, 50, sometimes 100+ drones targeting multiple Ukrainian cities simultaneously. Kyiv’s air defence network, built with Ukrainian systems, US-supplied Patriots, German IRIS-T units, and others, intercepts the majority. But not all.
What gets hit
The targets follow a pattern:
Energy infrastructure. Thermal power plants, substations, gas distribution hubs. Russia has spent two winters systematically destroying Ukraine’s ability to heat and light its population. The goal is not to destroy military capability — it is to make survival difficult enough that Ukrainians lose the will to fight.
Residential areas. Either by targeting residential buildings directly or as collateral damage when shot-down drones fall over populated areas. A Shahed intercepted over the city still falls somewhere.
Psychological continuity. The sirens at 3am. The uncertainty of whether tonight’s alert will pass without incident or end in something worse. The exhaustion of years of interrupted sleep. This is documented psychological warfare, and it works on some people, some of the time.
The arithmetic problem underneath all of it
The reason these things keep coming is not that they are good. It is that they are cheap, and the defence against them is not.
A Shahed costs a fraction of what a modern surface-to-air missile costs. Firing a missile designed to stop a cruise missile at a propeller-driven drone made of plywood composite works perfectly and loses the exchange badly. Do that a hundred times a night and you run out of interceptors long before the other side runs out of drones. That asymmetry is not a side effect of the weapon. It is the weapon’s actual purpose: to make the defence unaffordable.
So Ukraine defends against them in layers, cheapest first.
- Electronic warfare tries to break the drone’s navigation before anything has to be fired at all. A Shahed that loses its satellite fix wanders off target or comes down short.
- Mobile fire groups are pickup trucks with heavy machine guns and searchlights, stationed on the approaches and on rooftops, hunting a slow low target in the dark. This is as improvised as it sounds and it accounts for a great many kills.
- Interceptor drones — cheap aircraft built specifically to ram or shoot down a Shahed — are the newest layer and the one that finally starts to make the arithmetic work in the defender’s favour.
- The expensive systems are held back for what only they can stop: cruise and ballistic missiles, which arrive faster and carry far more.
Understanding this ordering explains something visitors often find confusing: why an air alert can last four hours. The drones are slow. They can be tracked across the country for an hour or more before they reach the city, and the alert covers the whole of that approach.
How the city knows, and how you will
Kyiv runs on alerts, and they are not ambient noise. There is a national app and a set of regional channels that push a notification the moment the alert for your oblast is raised, with a separate signal when it is lifted. Residents read them the way other cities read the weather. Within minutes of an alert people know, informally, what is in the air and roughly where it is heading.
The distinction that matters most is between a drone alert and a ballistic one. A drone alert gives you time — you finish the sentence, pay the bill, walk to the shelter. A ballistic missile warning gives a minute or so, sometimes less, and the honest advice in that case is not to run anywhere but to get behind mass immediately.
Which is where the rule everyone here knows comes in. Two walls. Put at least two solid walls between yourself and the outside: a corridor, a bathroom, a stairwell core. The first wall stops the blast, the second stops what the first one turns into. It is not as good as a shelter. It is what you do when a shelter is not reachable in the time you have.
For a visitor, the realistic experience is this: you will very probably hear alerts, you will very probably see nothing, and the people around you will keep having their coffee while checking a phone. That combination is disconcerting the first time and is not bravado. It is four years of calibration.
What we see on the Living History tour
On the east bank of Kyiv — the area east of the Dnipro river — the damage from drone and missile strikes is visible in ways that the tourist-friendly west bank largely is not. There are entire apartment blocks with floors collapsed, facades stripped off, windows still boarded months after a strike. There are memorials — flowers, photos, candles — on the pavement outside buildings where residents died.
We also visit areas where shot-down Shahed drone fragments are preserved as informal memorials. The locals who placed them there want people to see the hardware of what Russia is sending. The contrast between the ordinariness of the residential street and the wreckage of a military drone on a bench outside a children’s playground is something that photographs but does not photograph well.
You have to be there.
Why I show this specifically
A lot of war coverage focuses on the front line. Rightfully so — the fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine is where the existential contest is decided. But what Russia is doing in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities is a separate and deliberate campaign against civilians.
Showing this is not trauma tourism. It is documentation. It is a refusal to let the scale of what is being done to Ukrainian civilians be abstracted into statistics and forgotten in the news cycle.
The people who lived in those apartments existed before those strikes. Some of them still live nearby. Their continued presence — the woman tending flowers at the memorial on the pavement, the old man who waves from his repaired balcony — is the most important thing I can show anyone.