In Kyiv, Ukraine, a lawyer named Valeriya Tkachenko was dropping her son off at school when the air raid sirens began. Staff hurried children and parents into a shelter, where Tkachenko spent the next two hours trying to steady her nerves as her son sat beside her, frightened.

"I'm scared to death all day about what could happen to my son," she said afterward, emerging late for work into a city that no longer resembles the uneasy calm Kyiv residents had adapted to over more than three years of war.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko says that calm is gone. He has described an intensifying campaign of Russian strikes on the capital's civilian infrastructure as a "very dramatic situation," one in which schools, hospitals and bridges have become targets, and in which residents can no longer pretend they are living anything resembling "peacetime."

"The enemy is tearing our city apart," Klitschko said, a stark assessment from a mayor who has spent years trying to project resilience to both his constituents and the outside world.

A City Under Deliberate Pressure

The strikes described by officials go beyond the sporadic missile and drone attacks that have punctuated the war since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. What residents are now describing is a sustained assault on the systems that keep a city of nearly three million people functioning: power, heat, water, transport and medical care.

Bridges connecting districts of the capital have been hit. Hospitals, already strained by years of treating war casualties, have sustained damage. Schools, the very institutions meant to offer children a sense of normalcy amid the conflict, have become sites of emergency sheltering rather than learning.

For a population that has endured blackouts, curfews and the constant hum of air raid apps on their phones, the shift is not merely one of intensity but of psychology. Parents who had developed routines to manage daily risk, dropping children at school, commuting to work, are now confronting the reality that no part of the city feels insulated.

Echoes of a Familiar Strategy

Targeting a civilian population's essential infrastructure to break morale and degrade capacity is not a new feature of warfare, nor is it unique to this conflict. Military campaigns throughout the 20th century, from the aerial bombardments of the Second World War to more recent conflicts in the Middle East, have repeatedly shown that strikes on hospitals, power grids and food systems inflict damage far beyond the immediate blast radius. They disrupt healthcare, cripple local economies and displace populations long after the explosions stop.

In Gaza, Israeli bombardments have destroyed hospitals and infrastructure, leaving populations without reliable water or electricity for extended periods. This pattern demonstrates that infrastructure warfare, once unleashed, tends to produce humanitarian consequences that far outlast the stated military objectives.

Kyiv's residents and officials now fear a similar trajectory: that the destruction of hospitals and schools will not just be a momentary terror but a long-term degradation of the city's ability to function, long after any ceasefire is eventually signed.

A Test for Western Resolve

Klitschko's blunt language, warning that the city is being "torn apart," is also a signal aimed outward, toward Kyiv's Western backers. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly used moments of escalation to press allies in Washington, London, Brussels and other capitals for additional air defense systems, funding and political commitment.

The intensifying strikes raise pointed questions about the war's trajectory. More than three and a half years into the invasion, with the front lines largely static in the east, Russia's apparent turn toward sustained attacks on Kyiv's infrastructure suggests a strategy aimed at exhausting civilian morale and straining Ukraine's governing capacity, rather than seeking a rapid battlefield breakthrough.

For Western governments, the attacks present a familiar dilemma: whether to match rhetorical condemnation with concrete increases in military and humanitarian support, or whether war fatigue among Western electorates and competing geopolitical priorities will blunt the response. Ukrainian officials have long argued that hesitation or delay in supplying air defense systems directly translates into civilian casualties in cities like Kyiv.

Daily Life in the Shelters

For now, the war's trajectory remains a geopolitical abstraction weighed in distant capitals. For Tkachenko and parents like her, it is a daily, visceral calculation: whether it is safe to send a child to school, how long an air raid alert might last, and whether the building they are sheltering in will still be standing by evening.

"I'm scared to death all day," she said, a sentiment that, as Klitschko's warnings suggest, is becoming less the exception in Kyiv and more the rule.