After a year of war, air raid sirens have sounded more than 15,000 times in Ukraine (2024)

The unmistakable rising and falling pitch of air raid sirens, warning of danger and destruction, have sounded every day somewhere in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, according to EL PAÍS’ analysis of the єТривога air alert notification app, run by the Civil Defense System, which has been collating air raid alerts since the beginning of the Russian invasion.

“The alarms made a big impression on me and I respected them a lot in February and March. Then you get used to them,” says Cristian Segura, one of EL PAÍS’ special correspondents in Ukraine. Even so, they continue to cause apprehension: “On the afternoon of December 31, a Kalibr missile hit a hotel 300 meters from my apartment. That made me take the alarms more seriously on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.”

Air raid sirens have been heard more regularly in front line regions such as Kharkiv, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. In Donetsk, there have been nearly 1,500 air strike warnings throughout the war, an average of five per day. In Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, warnings peaked during the spring and summer of 2022 but stopped after the Ukrainian counter-offensive last November.

Kharkiv has been one of the worst-affected regions: its border with Russia is the scene of ongoing fierce fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces, as confirmed by the latest report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), published on February 19. On Odessa, away from the front lines, the situation is considerably calmer, although the strategic port city has been a regular target for Russian attacks.

In those regions farthest away from the battlefronts, the sirens have given way to silence. Russian troops reached the edge of Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine, at the outset of the invasion but their subsequent withdrawal from the area in April did not bring an end to the air raid warnings, which have sounded more than 500 times since then. Lviv, a western region that borders Poland and was a key exit point for the exodus of refugees at the beginning of the war, has not witnessed battlefield combat but it has been a sporadic target for Russian shelling with 249 warnings. The first civilian death in Lviv was reported in April.

The map below shows the distribution of air raid warnings throughout Ukraine (in the absence of data for the regions of Crimea, Kherson and Luhansk), with special emphasis on the front lines separating areas under Russian occupation and those defended by Ukrainian forces. In Kharkiv, more than 1,600 alarms have sounded at the regional level, which does not include warnings restricted to districts and municipalities.

Two months underground

A resident of Kharkiv who had heeded every alarm in the region since 15 March, 2022, would have spent a total of at least 59 days over the past year underground. In Kyiv, the total duration of every air raid warning since the beginning of the war stands at 24 days.

Warnings tend to be in place for an average of an hour, but they can last from a few seconds to several days. When the sirens sound, the civilian population have to make their way to a shelter designated by the authorities. In Kyiv, these number over 4,000 and are located in basem*nts and subway tunnels and stations like Arsenalna, in the capital’s historic neighborhood next to the Dnipro River, which at 105 meters below street level is the deepest subway station in the world.

The sirens, like the war itself, do not adhere to any timetable. Over a third of the total number of air raid alarms have sounded during the night, adding to the fatigue of a civilian population that has now spent a year in a constant state of alert.

According to a study by the Becker Friedman Institute, the Ukrainian population has become inured to warnings of imminent danger. This is confirmed by images from various Ukrainian cities, where passers-by continue to stroll, chat on a bench or buy ice cream to the ominous soundtrack of the blaring of alarms.

“At the beginning of the war, almost all business shut down during the alarms, in every city. That’s not the case now,” says Segura. One of the reasons for this is improvements to anti-aircraft defense systems in Ukrainian cities, whose interception effectiveness has increased considerably compared to the beginning of the invasion. “If I’m in Kyiv and an alarm sounds, maybe what I’m thinking is that I wanted to go to the swimming pool or the pharmacy and I won’t be able to because they will be closed.”

However, this customization to air raid warnings continues to cost lives. The Becker Friedman report notes: “Our results suggest 8-15% of civilian casualties observed during the later periods of the conflict could have been avoided with sustained public responsiveness to government alerts.” According to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, at least 7,000 civilians have been killed since the beginning of the conflict.

Methodology

The data used in this article has been collated by Ukrainian developer Vadym Klymenko and comes from alarms sent by the єТривога app to users across Ukraine based on their location.

Although air raid sirens began to sound in Ukraine on the day the invasion started - earlier taking into account drills carried out in some cities – the application went live on March 15, so there are no official records prior to this date.

The graphs show the total number of alerts in Ukraine, counting different administrative divisions (region, district and municipality). The alarm counts and durations included in the text are limited to alerts recorded at the regional level, since sometimes warnings triggered in a specific place are later expanded to a wider area.

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