In Russia’s ‘city of zombies’, drone strikes have lost their power to shock
When Alyona, a young woman from Moscow, awoke to a loud bang at 4am, her first thought was that a crane had fallen over.
“It was such a loud sound – I have never heard anything like this before, even at a Rammstein gig,” she said, referring to the German metal band.
Across the road from Alyona’s home in a suburb in Moscow’s south-west, a Ukrainian drone had smashed into a block of flats. The attack in May that jolted her out of bed was one of the first to hit the Russian capital since the war in Ukraine began.
After the first Ukrainian drones crashed into the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace, they began raining down on the city with increasing regularity, becoming an almost daily occurrence.
But where once drone attacks caused fear and panic, for many in the Russian capital, they have become a mundane fact of life.
Alyona, who refused to give her surname for safety reasons, said she could not get back to sleep after the explosion and lay in bed scrolling news websites and neighbourhood chats for clues. As dawn broke, she went out on her balcony and looked at the white and red high-rise block across the street. Its top floor was charred by the impact of the strike.
“I felt really scared that day. I was scared of going out of the house,” she said. “You got the feeling that there was nowhere safe to hide.”
Roman, a young Muscovite who fled Russia in the first weeks of the invasion, witnessed one of the attacks after returning to the country earlier this summer to apply for a work visa to immigrate to Europe.
One morning in July, he too was jolted from his bed by a thud and then a bang. “My immediate thought was that it was a drone attack because there had been a few in Moscow already,” he told The Telegraph.
He went back to sleep but when he woke up in the morning he saw the news: a drone had crashed into a brand new office block a few miles away from his house in south-east Moscow.
After returning to Russia following more than a year abroad, Roman feared being arrested for his anti-war views or called up to serve. The first thing that greeted him at the Moscow Sheremetyevo airport’s arrivals hall was a giant poster of a soldier advertising “A Job for Real Men”.
Having now spent almost two months back in Russia waiting for his visa application to come through, Roman struggles to fall asleep until after 4am – the time drone attacks typically occur.
“It’s really scary to be here. The Moscow I left last year was my favourite place – now it’s like a city of zombies who are merely trying to survive,” he said.
Roman said that his friends and family who have been in Russia through the invasion have become desensitised to the horrors going on in Ukraine, however anti-Putin or anti-war they are.
The drone attacks have similarly lost their ability to shock, he said.
“Most people in Moscow have heard those bangs by now – they are very loud, louder than fireworks, and it feels like the air is shaking. You can’t mix it with anything else.”
Anna, a psychotherapist from Moscow, said the loud bang in the night that woke her up in July was instantly recognisable. “I immediately knew something happened – it wasn’t a sound you hear in daily life but it’s the sound you’d recognise,” she said.
The day after the attack, neighbours were offering help, exchanging information and contacts for emergency services, and there appeared to be no ill will toward Ukraine for sending its drones to the Russian capital.
Ukrainian officials have claimed that strikes deep inside Russia are intended to wake its people up to the reality of war.
But survivors of the drone strikes doubt the attacks will change the minds of Russians, especially those who back the invasion.
“Unless it affects someone personally, it could leave people indifferent or it could cause an even sharper polarisation of views: I suspect when a drone flies into your house, those who were not pro-war or were undecided may start to side with the government,” Anna said.
One of the hardest-hit districts in Moscow is Moscow City, the capital’s financial hub, where several office blocks and residential towers have been targeted by Ukrainian drones in recent weeks.
While multiple estate agents have reported viewings for Moscow City apartments being cancelled, many residents and those who work in the district seem completely unfazed.
“When a [drone] hit for the first time I never heard anything,” Vladislav Ivanov, a resident, told APTN only hours after a fresh attack last Sunday.
“When it happened just now – I didn’t hear anything either. So what should I be afraid of?”
The daring first attack – and the historic breach of Moscow’s air defences that it represented – shocked the Russian government.
After a brief mention of the drone strikes in their morning broadcast, state media dropped the subject altogether under apparent pressure from the Kremlin.
But the rhetoric coming from Russia has shifted dramatically as the intensity of Ukraine’s strikes has risen.
Over the course of the last few months, officials have gone from threatening Ukraine with debilitating retaliatory missile strikes to downplaying the attacks and essentially admitting there is not much they can do to prevent them.
“There’s the special military operation going on – so that’s not surprising at all,” Andrei Kartopolov, chairman of the defence committee at the Russian parliament, told the Moskva 1 news website last week.
A weekly survey by Russia’s state-owned pollster FOM that maps perceived anxiety in Russia did show a sharp rise in reported levels of anxiety in the week after the May 3 drone attack on the Kremlin, but subsequent polls do not indicate any significant public reaction to the drone hits that ensued.
Anna said her job has become increasingly difficult since the war started. Some of her therapy clients, she said, have been experiencing higher levels of anxiety while others have shut down emotionally in the face of the devastating events around them.
“One thing I hear a lot is, ‘This has nothing to do with me. I have no energy to engage with it until a drone flies into my yard,’” she said.
“This is a natural defence mechanism for people to survive with everything that has been going on for the past 18 months.”
