It wasn’t meant to be Masha. Her husband, Danilo Ivzhenko, is the soldier of the family. As a medic with the 3rd Independent Assault Brigade in Ukraine, he made the decision to go to war despite the risks. Masha, a civilian, returned to her hometown in Kiev and was worried about her husband, who was on the front lines.
But it was Masha, 29, who was killed by Russian forces on September 25 when a powerful drone crashed into her office building in the Ukrainian capital.
That is an injustice that Ivzhenko cannot understand. “I’m a soldier and I’m fighting against Russia. If I die because of Russian drones or ballistic missiles or whatever, that’s natural. We kill the Russians and the Russians kill us. We’re military men and we know what we’re doing,” he told CNN.
“Killing a soldier is horrible, but it’s normal. But Masha was a civilian. She wasn’t building a drone, she wasn’t holding a weapon in her hand, she wasn’t wearing a military uniform. She was a civilian in a civilian city, and she was just doing a civilian job that day.”
Daily life as Kiev was known came to a halt on August 27, when Russia began bombarding the city with near-nonstop air raids. Since then, not a single day has gone by without an air raid warning being issued in the city. Air raid warnings occur an average of seven times a day. On some days, there were as many as 13 cases.
A severe lack of air defense weapons to shoot down Russian missiles and modern jet-powered drones has left the Ukrainian military unable to defend Kiev from these attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has appealed to allies for help, and the Ukrainian military is rushing to develop effective interceptors at home, but neither has yet led to meaningful changes.
In just over a month, from August 27 to October 4, at least 98 people were killed and 435 injured in Kyiv and the greater Kyiv region, a significant increase from the previous month.
During this period, several well-known buildings in the center of the capital were attacked by Russian drones, including the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, the National Academy of Sciences, the High Council of Justice, and data centers of television and internet providers.
Russia has consistently maintained that it only attacks military targets, despite ample evidence that civilian facilities are regularly attacked.
Russia had launched air attacks throughout the night under cover of darkness to minimize the chance of Kiev being intercepted. This meant that although people were often exhausted after a sleepless night in the shelter, they could continue to live relatively normal lives during the day.
But thanks to Russia’s latest jet-powered drones, it can now terrorize Ukraine at any time. And every time Russia fires on Kiev, air raid sirens sound and life in the capital comes to a halt. Many businesses and services will be closed, including some public transportation, and everyone will head to shelters.
The capital of Ukraine is divided in half by the Dnipro River. The right bank contains most of Kiev’s business centres, offices and government offices, while the left bank is mostly residential.
The bridge connecting the two countries is extremely important, with approximately 600,000 vehicles passing over it every day. And these important connections have become Russia’s latest targets.
Kiev’s South Bridge, which serves both ground transportation and the city’s metro network, was hit five times in two days on Thursday and Friday. The city’s Northern Bridge was hit twice on Saturday and Sunday. The chaos forced Kiev authorities to start construction work on a new pontoon bridge.
Children in Kiev are forced to run to evacuation centers after every Russian attack
Russia’s shift to this new strategy coincides with the start of a new school year in Ukraine, with children being the hardest hit by constant interruptions.
Officials in Kiev say about half of the city’s 250,000 children are attending school full-time in-person, with most of the remainder alternating between remote and in-person learning.
A small number of schools operate entirely online. Some schools have gone so far as to move all classes into basements. Some spend valuable learning time moving their children to evacuation centers.
On Thursday, Russian drones attacked one of Kiev’s schools while more than 100 children were in the classrooms, highlighting the enormous risks of bringing children into classrooms.
The school’s principal, Olena Ciorna, said the sirens had just started blaring again after an earlier air raid warning had been lifted. “We all rushed to the evacuation center and stayed there. There were 104 children in the evacuation center. We could hear the sounds of things being destroyed. The school was filled with smoke, but inside the evacuation center all the doors were closed and we couldn’t feel anything.” No one was injured, but there was significant damage to the building.
However, with alerts now much more common, many people are finding it difficult to continue to follow official guidance.
“We can’t stay in the evacuation center forever. We have to continue living and studying,” university student Sofia Zaremba told CNN.
Zaremba, 20, said the daily realities of living under gunfire are catching up with her. The day before she spoke to CNN, she witnessed a Russian drone strike next to a university building.
She explained that she knew there was an air raid warning, but that she had something urgent to do.
“It was unexpected. We’re used to the fact that there are drones flying around and there are different places nearby where they can collide…but this was so noisy that it caught us off guard,” she said.
She told CNN that all she can think at this point is that another explosion may be imminent. “I thought the alarm was still going off, but I didn’t realize that the next strike might be coming soon.”
Any sense of security she had left was shattered, she added. “I couldn’t get out of bed for half a day today because I didn’t have the mental strength to do anything.”
Russia’s current weapon of choice against Kiev is a new wave of jet-powered drones known as the Gueran-4 and Gueran-5. These killing machines resemble small cruise missiles, fly at speeds of up to 600 kilometers per hour (310 miles per hour), and often carry powerful warheads.
They are often too fast and too high for Kiev’s Mobile Fire Groups to shoot down, requiring the deployment of surface-to-air missiles, fighter jets, or interceptors, all of which are in very limited supply in Ukraine.
At the same time, the cost of manufacturing these drones is only one-tenth that of conventional cruise missiles, which means Russia can afford to launch dozens of them at the same time.
Russia launched 2,850 jet-powered drones in August and 3,177 in September, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yury Ifnat said.
Hear air raid sirens and explosions in Kyiv
Masha Ivzhenko was killed on September 25th when her office building in central Kiev was attacked by a Guerin 5 drone. Another jet-powered drone was circling the attack site at high altitude, providing radio signals to the equipment, said Serhiy Beskhrestnov, an adviser to Zelenskiy.
After the building was attacked, a second drone took off and attacked a McDonald’s warehouse on the outskirts of Kiev, Beskhrestnov said.
Ivzhenko told CNN that one of the things he likes most about Masha is the fact that they are both former journalists and always have something interesting to discuss. “She was my best friend, and my life was built around the fact that we had each other,” he said.
When Ivzhenko, who had worked as a volunteer medic since the war began, enlisted in 2024, the couple adopted a dog, Jesse, so that Masha would not be completely alone.
Despite the war, they took out a mortgage, bought an apartment, and were making plans for the future. “I bought Marcia a car because we were expecting a child,” he said.
Ivzhenko was in Kiev for several days last week. On the day of the attack, he drove Marcia to his office to retrieve her laptop so she could work from home. She stopped by for a few minutes and he took Jesse for a walk while he waited for her to return.
Then the drones attacked. First responders at the scene told Ivzhenko that his wife died on impact. His body was found under the stairs on the first floor of an office building.
“She wasn’t burned, she didn’t bleed to death. She died instantly. The blast threw her from the fifth floor,” he told CNN.
“I identified her and they released me. I buried my comrades and I’m ready for the fact that I’ll bury my parents when they get old. And that’s all normal. That’s life. But for killing Masha, they killed me.”
