Missile attacks in Kyiv were extremely heavy from Friday, July 31, through Saturday, August 1, with the Air Alert going off frequently, instructing the population to take shelter. Things were quieter from Saturday night through Tuesday, but Tuesday night was brutal. The Air Alert went off several times, but the crucial one came around 12:30 in the morning, when explosions could be heard just seconds later. The alert remained in place for about two hours, during which the explosions grew louder as they approached the hotel.
Repeated additional alarms also went off, warning of an increased threat in the vicinity. After the all-clear, we returned to our rooms, but the alarm went off again around 4:30 a.m. The bombs must have hit farther away because we couldn’t hear the explosions. Less than an hour later, the warning was over. As of Wednesday morning, things are quieter.
Despite the daily missile and drone barrages, Kyiv itself runs relatively normally during the day; attacks usually intensify at night, driving most people into shelters. Unlike other war zones where I have worked, Ukraine is not a failed state. Public and private institutions continue to function, schools and universities remain open, and people have jobs. Café culture endures, though the number of people walking the streets or sitting in restaurants and cafés seems small compared to the size of the city.
Kyiv’s population reflects two offsetting flows: people leaving the country and internally displaced people from other regions arriving in Kyiv. However, the net trend is downward. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko told the Kyiv Independent that by December 2022, the city had rebounded to roughly 3.6 million, near pre-war levels, including 300,000 IDPs who had arrived from other regions, after bottoming out at under 1 million during the March 2022 siege.
More recent estimates put Kyiv city proper closer to 2.9-3.0 million in 2026, with the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix showing the city still hosting an estimated 341,000 IDPs as of March 2026, the third-largest concentration of any Ukrainian region. IDP arrivals from the east and south have continued propping the population up, but not enough to offset losses from conscription and emigration. Those who left the country are mostly women, children, and draft-age men who departed before or around the declaration of martial law. The net result is a population roughly 15-20 percent below its late-2022 peak, with men aged 18 to 60 barred from leaving.
The thinner foot traffic noticeable on the streets is also a function of tourism’s near-total collapse. International visitor numbers have declined by more than 90 percent since the war’s escalation. What limited foreign travel continues consists mostly of journalists, humanitarian workers, volunteers, and business travelers.
Interestingly, foreign students are down sharply but not to zero. Ukraine’s Ministry of Education reports 21,271 foreign students from 127 countries enrolled as of January 1, 2026, up slightly from the prior year. In 2025, 5,475 new foreign students enrolled, versus 4,941 in 2024, but still far below pre-war levels. An earlier UACRISIS report put the decline at 40 percent by early 2024, with new applicants down roughly fivefold in the first full academic year of the war compared with 2021.
Government infrastructure investment continues alongside these shifts, with a significant share going toward shelters and safe spaces, particularly in schools and public buildings. Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers approved funding in April 2026 for shelter construction in 79 schools and kindergartens, part of a program building 113 school shelters nationwide in 2026 at a cost of nearly 5 billion hryvnia ($112 million).
The World Bank’s LEARN program has mobilized $451 million for Ukrainian education, including shelter construction, with roughly 12,000 students and teachers gaining access to shelters meeting minimum safety standards as of March 2026, and the EU has committed over €25 million toward modernizing and sheltering preschools.
On travel booking sites, some hotels now display photos of their shelters as one of their selling points. In some hotels, the shelters are just the bare concrete of an underground garage. In others, they contain sofas and other amenities for comfort.
Ukraine’s General Staff continues to report daily combat activity in the low hundreds of engagements along the front, with Russian forces relying on massed drone and glide-bomb strikes rather than large territorial gains.
On August 1, the Russian side carried out three missile strikes involving 31 missiles, 66 air strikes with 201 guided bombs, and roughly 6,659 attack drones. The Institute for the Study of War’s August 1 assessment states that Russia’s rate of advance has remained low two and a half months into its Spring-Summer 2026 offensive, without operationally significant gains. The institute also determined that Russian forces suffered their highest casualty rate of the year in July, with no proportional increase in the pace of advance. Ukrainian forces, according to the same assessment, continued long-range strikes against Russian oil and gasoline infrastructure into early August.
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