“The residents of Kharkiv were required by emergency decree to darken their homes at night, so as not to provide Russian planes or artillerists with targets. If they had to keep a light on — if they were lucky enough to have electricity — they covered their windows with blankets or plastic tarps or shards of broken furniture. Though Kharkivites may have known to do this anyway, without the decree, and not only because the war had knocked out their windowpanes, along with their power, and heating, and water. They just seemed to have an instinct for how to act under siege. So when the rocket struck Lesia Serdiuka Street after sunset, in the last week of March, a month into the war, the sky above the city was not like an urban night sky, but more rural, the ambient light absent. The starlight was obscured by the sodden cloud cover of early spring. The rocket hit a gas main, and the blast reverberated through the city. It shook the panes of my hotel-room windows two miles away. The flames rose and were reflected in the clouds, turning the sky a hellish scarlet. ...”
Near the rocket strike on Serdiuka Street in the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv.
