KYIV -- Anna fled to the Ukrainian capital with her 9-year-old son Misha to escape Russian bombardment in Kharkiv, where her home on the northern edge of the city sits some 20 kilometers from the front line.But, she says, the intensity of recent Russian attacks on Kyiv is comparable to those she fled from. And there’s often nowhere to hide.“The basements are usually overflowing. It's not just that there's nowhere to lie down. There's nowhere even to sit or stand,” she told Current Time this week. “People come and there’s no place for them. They send people away. There are not enough places anywhere in the whole neighborhood.”
Anna lives in Kyiv’s Desnyanskiy district, a sprawling area of Soviet-era housing blocks in the northeast of the city, which has the biggest shortfall of shelters. Most of the residential buildings have no basements --increasing demand on shelters beneath hospitals, schools, or kindergartens with capacity for less than half the local population.Another local mother, Marina, told Current Time she usually spends Russian attacks hiding in the hall with her 18-month-old child.“There is a shelter we could have gone to, for example, at a school. But it takes eight minutes to reach it on foot,” she said. “Walking there at night with a child under fire is a bit of a challenge.”Russia Steps Up AttacksWith Russian forces making minimal advances on the front lines this year, Moscow has stepped up its air campaign against Ukrainian cities including Kyiv. This week, 17 people were killed in a single night of strikes on the Kyiv region.Ukrainian air defenses did not manage to bring down a single Russian ballistic missile in this attack, drawing attention to its critical lack of interceptor missiles.But the increasing civilian death toll -- the UN recorded 1,396 fatalities in the first six months of this year, a 37-percent jump on last year -- also underlines the shortage of shelters.Official figures say there are just 4,000 shelters in a city where there are currently more than 3 million inhabitants. Some of these are inaccessible or derelict.
