It's a sign Kharkiv is alive'

The city of Kharkiv, just 18 miles from the Russian border, is a paradoxical mix of tended-to and broken.

- Charlotte Higgins

Public sculptures are wrapped and coddled in sandbags to protect them from missiles. Flowerbeds in parks are punctiliously maintained. The life of the streets is several notches quieter than you would expect from a European country's second city - and yet bookshops, coffee shops and restaurants are open and doing a steady business.

But the signs of Russia's unrelenting attacks on this frontline city are omnipresent. On the roads are rusted lines of the spiky metal tank obstacles known as "hedgehogs". The magnificent 1920s Derzhprom building, a constructivist masterpiece and the architectural pride of the city, is now badly battered.

Across the city, windows blown out from buildings by nightly explosions have been replaced by sheets of chipboard. One panel in the city centre has been pasted over with a paper cutout of two enfolding arms and the words "I love you, beloved Kharkiv".

Cultural life clings on. But it has largely burrowed below ground: the basements of theatres are now their main stages; bookshops' event venues are subterranean.

One Kharkiv visual artist, Kostiantyn Zorkin, has created an apt metaphor for the atmosphere of this underground world. A series of his works imagines wartimen Kharkiv as a ship alone in stormy seas, its inhabitants huddled, in relative safety, in the vessel's hold.

The city's population now consists of those who have moved here from places even more dangerous; and those who have stayed either because they must, or from a refusal to let Kharkiv's urban life die.

Such resolve involves having made a personal accommodation with the proximity of death. Air defences are few and Russia is near. By the time the air-raid alarm sounds, often the missiles are already falling.