‘Like a scene from Apocalypse Now’: I was there when the missiles shook Kyiv

The noise that repeatedly filled the air early this morning was extraordinary: shuddering, horribly percussive waves of sound that burrow down through your chest and into your stomach, writes Kit Macdonald

I was jolted awake at around 3.30am by an almighty boom and a blinding flash of light (EPA)

In the course of this long, loud spring of almost nightly Russian missile and drone attacks on Kyiv, everyone here has developed their own sleeping policy.

Some hunker down in shelters or their bathrooms, sleeping little (if at all), some go to sleep normally but set their air alert smartphone app to wake them if the siren goes, and some just shut their phones off, sleeping through whatever happens and catching up on it the next day. Last night the third option was removed from play – if anyone in the city managed to sleep through what happened, I don’t know them.

In the evening I did what every right-thinking person outside the US is doing on Monday evenings just now – watched Succession – before going to bed at about midnight. My bed is near a window, so the second of the above options is my usual go-to, but last night I sleepily defaulted to my non-war zone choice of airplane mode instead. I therefore missed the alert (the actual sirens in the streets aren’t loud enough to wake any but the lightest of sleepers) and was jolted awake at around 3.30am by an almighty boom and a blinding flash of light, both of which seemed to have come from just overhead.

Every one of the scores of missiles and kamikaze drones Russia has thrown at Kyiv in the past few weeks (last night was the eighth attempted attack this month) has been shot down, and in the rational light of day you know any explosion in the city these days is very likely to be air defence thwarting another Russian attack. In the seconds after being dragged violently out of sleep and into what seems to be a scene from Apocalypse Now, however, the rational light of day is very much a foreign country.

The same skull-rattling explosions and flashes of light kept coming as I leapt from my bed and raced into the hallway, where I found one of my two houseguests, who had been asleep in the bedroom beside mine, wide-eyed and making haste to our windowless living room. The other guest was (and we really don’t recommend doing this at home, kids) watching from the bedroom window, and at that moment he saw the flare-like lights of several air-defence missiles springing up into the night sky just to the south of us. One flashed on contact with a missile and the sound of the explosion rattled through the apartment a couple of seconds later.

The noise that repeatedly filled the air early this morning was extraordinary: shuddering, horribly percussive waves of sound that burrow down through your chest and into your stomach. A little later, as I collected myself over a herbal tea, I realised I’d heard the sound before, on the night of 4 May, the first time Kyiv’s much-celebrated new Patriot air-defence system had shot down a “hypersonic” Kinzhal missile, which Vladimir Putin previously said could evade any air-defence system.

That night just one of those explosions had me white-faced and scurrying for cover, and I have remembered it for its sheer intensity over every other explosion I’ve heard since (and there have been a fair few of those).

Last night, according to Ukrainian officials, six Kinzhals were fired at Kyiv as part of a concerted effort to overwhelm the city’s air defences with a combination of missiles and drones flying in from different directions at the same time. Three people were reportedly injured by falling debris, but the air defences again shot down everything during an attack the military has described as “exceptional in its intensity – the maximum quantity of missiles in the shortest period of time”.

After sitting through another air alert that came to nothing, I eventually managed to get some more sleep. Late this morning I found the streets of my neighbourhood looking entirely normal aside from some uncharacteristic late-spring rain, but it seems unlikely that last night will be Russia’s last attempt to knock out Kyiv’s life-saving new air-defence system.

Tomorrow, my houseguests are heading to the family dacha out in the countryside for a couple of days. In the pursuit of a decent night’s sleep, I might well join them.