Staying Put in Mykolaiv: Life Under the “Russian Alarm Clock”

Hanna Chmelyova is a resident of Mykolaiv who decided to remain in her city in spite of the daily shelling and air raid sirens that have been terrorizing inhabitants since the onset of the Russian invasion. She gave us an interview to offer our readers a glimpse into daily life in a city under Russian occupation. 

Hanna works as a children’s librarian and a hospital clown and takes great pride in her role as plastun-senior of the “Plast” in Mykolaiv (the Ukrainian Scouting Organization). Hanna’s husband distributes humanitarian aid with the Ukrainian military elsewhere in the city. They have two sons. 

“Each Mykolaiv resident now has a very special ‘alarm clock,’” Chmelyova explains. “It goes off not at the time you set it to wake you up, but at the time when the Russians launch a missile.”

This is the kind of humor that helps people in Ukraine survive during trying times. “These alarm clocks scared us a lot, especially in the beginning,” she says. “We don’t have a basement, but there is a rule of two walls: you must place two walls between yourself and the outside. For us, that means a closet. When we hear explosions, my youngest son and I run to the closet. This is our shelter, even though we don’t fit in together.”

During the first two months of the year, before the invasion started, the Plast members, or plastuns, underwent training for what to do In the event of a war. In mid-February Chmelyova attended a training course in Bucha, where she learned how to evacuate properly and how to provide pre-medical assistance. Even then, she says, she did not believe a full-scale invasion was imminent. “On February 24, I remember telling my husband, ‘Can you hear a plane? It’s so close,’” she remembers. “It’s only now that I realize: that was a Russian missile.” 

Chmelyova knows the war has in fact been going on for eight years, since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. But many fellow Ukrainians did not perceive the full threat until that fateful day in February.

“Until February 24 we lived peacefully in Mykolaiv,” she says. “After that horrible day, we all saw the enemy’s face — the true face of Russia. Back in 2014, most people didn’t believe me, even when I said that it was Russia that occupied Crimea. Maybe they didn’t want to understand.”

Back in March Chmelyova’s brother took his family out of Matviivka, their home village in the Mykolaiv region. He kept asking her when she would do likewise. She considered it, she says, but in the end felt her place was in Mykolaiv.