Rules of engagement

The Trump administration has thrown European security and the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into disarray. Andrew Gunn reports from Kyiv and Listener correspondents update the fallout in the UK and Germany.

- Andrew Gunn

I am briefly woken by the wail of the air raid siren, but manage to get back to sleep. Call it disassociation, or what you will, but like many others in Kyiv, I have given up on taking shelter every time I hear the siren. It's a sound we have recently heard most nights of the week.

A crude whirring overhead rouses me again: the sound of a Shahed drone on its way over our suburb. At least, I assume it is on its way elsewhere. As the whirring grows louder, I begin to doubt myself. My heart rate picks up. The drones weigh about 200kg and are just shy of 4m long. I count slowly to five, hoping to hear the air defence kick into action.

I hate these intervals - the sense that the drones have not been spotted yet, and are circling freely 100m or so above you, like mechanical birds of prey. The whirring fades away. The booms and the rat-a-tat-tat of the air defence begins. Suddenly, the blasts are far deeper. The windows rattle, betraying that we are under more than just a drone attack.

I check the Telegram messaging platform to see exactly what is incoming. "Kyiv, Kharkiv and Pavlograd are under a massive combined attack. In Kyiv were used: 6 Iskander M/KN-23 ballistic missiles, 6 cruise missiles 3M14 Kalbr, unspecified number of strike UAVs."

The balistyka continue to come. Amid the flurry of updates, one of the moderators simply posts "hold on" with a link to the Gloria Gaynor song I Will Survive. We wake the following day, April 25, to watch the death toll climb. Thirteen died; at least 90 were wounded.

In April, the mouth of Zvirynetska, our local metro station, becomes an informal marketplace. The headscarved old women have gone from hustling pussy willows to tulips. A woman propped up on crutches is busking in the stairwell, singing a folk song a capella. Her right leg has been amputated; the leg of her pants is hitched up around her stump.