UPDATE from UKRAINE: Basements, Bombs, and Bravery
Guest article by Ken Harbaugh – reporting from Ukraine
One of the first questions every visitor to Ukraine asks is, “How quickly can I get to the bomb shelter?” I have been here enough times to add: “…and how good is the Wi-Fi?”
Hotels are different in Ukraine. Their chief selling point is not the breakfast buffet or the rooftop view. It is the basement. That is where you go when Russian drones and missiles begin to rain down.
In my early visits, I spent long hours underground. Over time, I adopted the stoicism of my Ukrainian friends, anticipating the wail of air raid sirens not with fear but with resignation. In Kyiv, where the defenses are superb and the hotel beds comfortable, I sleep through most alerts. But one night in Odessa changed that.
It was two days after Operation Spiderweb, when Ukrainian intelligence used suicide drones to destroy nearly a third of the Russian bombers terrorizing their cities. In anger, Putin unleashed a furious wave of attacks.
That first night, I was pinned down with a Ukrainian kamikaze drone team beneath the ruins of a bombed-out apartment block near the Dnieper River. During a pause in the assault, we slipped away in a pickup with its lights off, racing across shattered streets. As we crossed the final bridge, our drone detector screamed its warning, indicating an approaching Russian craft. The wreck of another vehicle, struck earlier, smoldered on the roadside.
Once clear, my interpreter and I decided to press on toward Odessa, arriving at 3 a.m.—just in time for the city’s largest raid of the war. “Shaheds” buzzed overhead as air defenses opened fire. The sound of these flying bombs tells you where they will land: a sudden rise in pitch means the dive has begun. That night, the Doppler whine of their engines climbed so high they drowned out the warning sirens.
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And so, once again, the basement. This time, beneath the “Wine and Pillow Hotel,” accompanied by the full complement of guests. This attack, all agreed, was not one to sleep through. Yet their Ukrainian stoicism remained, leavened by humor. A toilet flushed above, rattling pipes and shaking walls, scaring both the children and the Americans cowering below. Our fellow basement-dwellers reassured us. “Not a Shahed,” someone said. “Just sh!t.”
Basements hold a special place in the history of the Ukrainian people. In a largely agrarian society, cellars preserved food through lean winters. That tradition remains. But today, “the basement” has come to mean something else entirely.
I first saw this in Izium, speaking with a pastor who shepherded his congregation through nine months of occupation. At the war’s onset, they sheltered beneath their church with food, water, and medicine. A Russian bomb destroyed the sanctuary above, yet everyone below survived. Winter came, and without electricity they would have frozen—except that the smoldering timbers of the church above radiated warmth into the cellar.
Other basements offered no such redemption.
Viktor, once an aid worker, was seized by Russian soldiers for the smallest of crimes: bringing food to his neighbors. His family was told he had been “taken to the basement,” a phrase that now means torture. In the darkness, Viktor was wired to a generator. Electrocution, he told me, is the Russians’ favored method. It leaves no marks but seizes every muscle in silent agony. When the current stops, the victim lies incapacitated, bowels released, body broken.
Miraculously, Viktor emerged from the basement after several weeks. His interrogators simply tired of him. He was not a soldier, and so had no value in a potential prisoner exchange. His captors waved him out the door—not out of mercy, but out of indifference.
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Ukraine’s soldiers face harsher fates. Shaun Pinner, a Briton who joined the Ukrainian military to defend his family in Mariupol, was captured after his commander ordered survivors to break through to friendly lines. Days into the trek, Shaun stumbled into enemy hands. Outnumbered, he raised his arms. A Russian soldier drove a knife into his thigh, deep enough to cripple but not to kill. Later, in a basement filled with prisoners, Shaun saw others with identical wounds. It was standard practice, a calculated mutilation to hobble captives.
I have spoken with many victims of Russian torture. All of them refer to their time in “the basement.” A psychologist who specializes in PTSD helped me understand the use of such euphemisms. It is a psychological adaptation, a coded language that allows survivors to acknowledge something so horrific that the old words cannot describe it.
Near Kherson, I met a girl my daughter’s age who apologized for her stutter. “I did not used to have this problem,” she said, “until the Russians took me to the basement.” What they did to her I will never write down. Her scars, physical and psychological, will last forever.
For all the basements filled with horrors, for all the bombs that Russia sends nightly into their cities, Ukrainians endure. They do it with resolve, with humor, but most of all with a bravery I struggle to describe.
In Kharkiv, I met a firefighter who sprinted into a burning building, attacked moments earlier, to save an elderly woman’s cat—her only family. I talked to children who spied on Russian troops, reporting movements to Ukrainian intelligence. I watched volunteer gun crews on rooftops man air defense batteries, downing Russian drones before they strike apartments and hospitals.
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Bravery here is not an abstraction. It is lived, daily, in acts large and small. Ukraine has too many basements with too many stories—but also a surplus of courage. If Americans grasped a fraction of what I have witnessed, we would never again underestimate the value of democracy, or doubt the power of ordinary people to defend it.
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