Resilience and scholarship under Russian drone attacks

The burst of anti-missile fire above Kyiv – like “fireworks but more intense” – sent Lydia Smith and her friend Dylan Kassin running from his balcony just after 1.30 am on the warm summer night of 19 July. They headed towards a makeshift bomb shelter some minutes away.

But before they reached the shelter, merely a passageway under a road, they heard a “huge explosion directly overheard”, signalling destruction of a Russian missile primed to hit nearby, likely by an anti-missile missile.

This brought the immediate danger that they would be showered by jagged pieces of metal weighing up to several kilograms, possibly white hot from the force of the explosive charge and propellant and moving at up to thousands of kilometres an hour.

As the debris plummeted downwards, “we ducked into an alleyway – hoping nothing fell on us”, Smith, one of three Americans on a three-month internship at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), told University World News.

Had Smith been at the apartment she shares with two other Americans, who, like her, are interns at the KSE, she would have been roughly two and a half minutes from a metro station that serves as a bomb shelter.

Built during the Cold War with the intent of it being a shelter from NATO bombardments, the station is so deep that “You don’t hear the explosions and don’t feel any shaking,” according to Otto Landsman, who is Manhattan-born and bred, speaking to University World News and one of Smith’s roommates.

But Kassin’s apartment is not near a metro station. Judging after a few moments that they were safe from the falling shrapnel, they resumed running toward “an underground passage under a road”, where they found between 20 and 30 people already sheltering, she says.

In an interview the week before this bombardment, Landsman said that after living in Kyiv for just over a month, he had adopted Kyivans’ attitude toward air attacks. His sangfroid owed much to his studies of military technology at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs.

Once alerted by an app that that attack was underway, “instead of fearing death instantly, my brain first goes to wondering what kind of munition is flying towards me, for which I can specifically adjust my level of fear,” says Landsman.

Accordingly, while his and Smith’s other roommate ran to the metro, Landsman stayed inside his apartment building’s main entrance, judging it to be safer than staying in their sixth-storey apartment, the top story of one of the building’s two wings that are separated by a central nine-storey tower.

“Our apartment is on the sixth floor [of one of the wings]. So we would be directly hit [if the missile were aimed at this wing]. If something got hit above us, it would fall right on top of us,” says the Columbia University MA student who came to Kyiv to work with KSE’s administration designing a masters in international affairs that is intended to be a dual degree with Columbia and other projects.

The shock waves from the explosions above and nearby shook Landsman’s apartment building.

“Most attacks involve only a few missiles, but this one was endless and felt different,” said Landsman, who did not believe it when his app signalled “All Clear.”

Instead, he went back to his apartment, grabbed both his and his roommate’s stuff, and made his way to the metro station.

According to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that night, “The enemy launched more than 40 missiles of various types – most of them against the capital – and 120 attack drones.”

Ukraine’s air force said that it “shot down or neutralised 126 targets, including 18 missiles and 108 unmanned aerial vehicles”, but that 23 missiles and 10 drones got through the capital’s defences and hit 20 locations.

The Guardian reported that the five-hour Russian pounding of Kyiv that night left at least six people dead and dozens injured and caused fires and damage across the capital.

The roadway and earth above might have protected Smith, her friend and a few dozen other people sheltering in the passageway from a kamikaze drone. It would have offered no protection against either a Zircon hypersonic missile or an Iskander ballistic missile (the two types the Russians fired at Kyiv) hitting the roadway.

Even had its warhead not detonated, had a Zircon missile hit the roadway, its weight, approximately 3,000 kg, moving at between Mach 8 and 9 (9,800 to 11,100 km/h), would generate enough impact force to collapse the roadway and carve a huge crater.

The same is true for an Iskander, which after launch traces a parabolic course, touching the edge of space, before plunging on a powered flight at over Mach 7 (7,285 km/h).

Because the passageway where Smith was sheltering “wasn’t very deep, we heard every explosion and the walls of the passageway and ground shook when the missiles hit nearby”.

At one point, someone realised that 9,000 km away, in Miami, Florida, the bronze medal World Cup game between England and France was still under way.

“Someone put the game on their phone. The juxtaposition of the explosions going on and the small crowd watching the World Cup was unlike anything I have experienced before,” says Smith.

Making connections

The purpose of the KSE Internship Program, which is in its second year, explained its director, Julian Gonzales-Poirier, an American, “is to bring American graduate students and American students here to show them what a Ukrainian university (that is starting a number of new programmes) looks like, to make connections with America and give them experience working in higher education somewhere other than America.”

“From our point of view, it's always interesting to have people come and criticise what we’re doing, bring their own experiences, bring their own thoughts, especially on sort of specific projects that we're working on with the interns, namely, national security projects.”

For both Smith and Landsman, the danger of being in Kyiv is worth it to be in the centres where, today, history is being made.

Landsman, who plans a career in the defence and international security space, applied to come to Ukraine both because he felt he could contribute to Ukraine through KSE and because he wanted to work in what he called the “hot zone in Europe”.

Especially with “the sabre rattling that Trump has been doing with NATO, which has put a lot of people on edge in Europe, this is giving me very hands-on experience”, he told University World News.

One of Landsman’s projects at KSE is designing a “Defense-Economics Wargame Briefing” board and dice game. In its present iteration, the game sees five teams, Ukraine, Russia, China, the US and the EU, playing out a series of international crisis scenarios. Each team has different limits across the seven resource values: for example, budget, political capital, industry, advanced systems and resilience.

Ukraine’s goal is to “survive, regenerate and convert external support into lasting military-economic strength”, while Russia’s goal is to “exhaust Ukraine, weaken Western support and sustain the war economy”. The EU plays to “keep Ukraine viable while preserving European unity and resilience”.

The game can end in one of three ways: Shared Western Strategic Victory, Russian-Chinese Strategic Victory or Defense-Economic Stalemate.

Smith, who hails from Virginia, earned her MA at Yale University and is now working on her PhD at University College, London, has more extensive European experience. In addition to holding a Fulbright-Hays fellowship from 2022 to 2023 during which she studied in Latvia, in 2024 and 2025 she held another Fulbright under which she taught English in Bulgaria.

Her masters thesis was on the treatment of Nagorno-Karabakh refugees in Armenia.

In 2024 and 2025, Smith was part of a Yale team working for the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OCSE), which developed software to help Ukrainian refugees identify human trafficking threats.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine during her senior year at Yale sparked Smith’s interest in “the periphery” of the old Russo-Soviet Empire.

“The full-scale invasion started, and I realised, ‘Oh my God! I’ve been studying Russia and the Russian language and culture. It is now the aggressor – it had already been the aggressor [in Crimea and the Donbass], but now it is the centre of the news’,” she says.

Her research at KSE will include studying internal refugees, national identity and national narratives. To understand these big public ideas, you also have to understand them at the individual’s level, she said.

“There are a lot of people, especially in the political science field, who write about topics they themselves have never begun to experience; there are a lot of armchair academics,” says Smith.

“I thought it was really important to at least go to the country you want to study and live there over at least a summer. I know I can’t understand what it’s like to be a Ukrainian in this situation. But I think I can understand to some degree what it’s like to live in Ukraine,” she says.

Toll of sleep deprivation

The effect of sleep deprivation caused by the missile and drone attacks was a common theme among Landsman, Smith and Oleksandr Liutyi, a student in this author’s course, “Issues in Public Memorialisation of War: Who Gets to Tell the Story” in KSE’s Memory and Conflict Studies MA programme, (taught via Zoom from Ottawa, Canada to Kyiv).

Speaking of the attack on the night of 18/10, Liutyi, who was in Kyiv on a month-long assignment because, in addition to his front-line duties, he is director of the Theatre of Veterans, described being ripped from sleep by the sound of exploding missiles and the air defences.

Despite becoming inured to explosions at the front, on that night Lituya found that the sound of the explosions caused his “body to go into some sort of panic. You are dreaming the sweetest dreams at that time, and suddenly the explosions force their way into your mind.”

For a few moments, “through your sleep, your sleepy mind, through your dream, the body begins to panic because you don't understand what is going on,” he says.

“After nights such as this, it is very difficult to manage anything in your life. It's extremely difficult to concentrate throughout the day,” he told University World News, yet he reported for duty at 7am.

Another of my students wrote to me that “even though staying physically unharmed, the brain/body/mind exhaustion lasts for days in the aftermath of such nights. It becomes particularly challenging to think, analyse, write, or produce meaningful academic work.”

When Smith and I spoke a few days before the bombardment, she explained that her experience of this phenomenological state has led her to question one of the central tenets of political science: the rational actor theory.

For international relations scholars, the idea that political leaders (and people) behave rationally is central to the view that they act in ways that prioritise their long-term goals. “But if you can’t sleep for three nights in a row or more, how are you supposed to behave in a way that prioritises long-term objectives?” Smith says.

Smith’s visit to Lviv in western Ukraine near the Polish border, an area relatively untouched by the war, showed her the differential impacts of the war on a country slightly larger than France.

“Nobody seems worried at night [about a missile attack]. People’s faces don’t look super-tired on public transit” in the city where, she added, there had been an anti-conscription riot a few days earlier (9 and 10 July).

“Inside a country, there are different levels of being impacted [by the war]. And, as a foreigner, my own positionality means that I’m impacted on the ground [eg, by an air raid] but not necessarily in my extended interpersonal circle,” Smith told University World News.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of social relationships – the way the war affects people’s social relations to their country and to their own countrymen and women.”

Smith’s American passport, as we discussed, defines her “positionality” since it means that barring military actions that would prevent her from doing so, she is always free to leave Ukraine.

“There are so many ways the war can affect you. Your entire family could be killed and your house bombed; you could be the only survivor. Or your condition of war could be living under a curfew. And between these extremes there are infinitely many experiences,” says Smith.

These realisations provide the ground, Smith says, to reconsider her own master’s thesis. While she believes its main findings are correct, she believes that she “was not able to capture the fact that there are just so many different ways of experiencing war insofar as there are so many different degrees of hostility and mental health and many other aspects.”

Liutyi’s reason for studying at KSE differs from Smith’s and Landsman’s, as does his analysis of the bombardment.

After realising that the Russians were attacking near Kyiv’s historic city centre, where he lives, he made his way to the basement of his five storey, “Soviet-style” building. The bomb shelter there is better, he says, than the metro because there are toilets and outlets to charge your phone.

Thinking it would be a short bombardment, Liutyi erred by not bringing water and his mattress and pillow, so he could not even try to sleep. Through the night, explosions shook the walls. He still seemed sleep-deprived when we spoke a few days after the missile and drone attack.

Liutyi’s habit of mind, honed by years as an international lawyer working for NGOs, was obvious when he anatomised the psychological difference of being in a bomb shelter during a bombardment and being under fire in the field.

He then turned the screw one more time and problematised that difference with an analysis of how the drone-infested battlefield of Ukraine has transformed the experience of front-line soldiers.

Waiting out bombardment in a shelter, he says, is more psychologically draining than being on the front line under attack. In the shelter: “Because you cannot see anything [on the surface], you have no understanding of which side of the building or city the shelling [Liutyi’s word for drones and missiles] is coming from.” Accordingly, you expect the missile to hit where you are sitting.

But, in the field, he continued, you have more information because of what you can see and hear of the battle. When you hear constant explosions for a month or two, your psyche changes, he says, as you “learn the sound of drones and rifles. It becomes routine.”

Or, perhaps, as soldiers in the trenches in the First World War put it: “You never hear the one that’s going to hit you.”

At the same time, Liutyi says: “There is a similarity between being in a basement and the modern drone war. The most dangerous thing you can expect [on the front lines, which is largely made up of trenches] is an FPV drone.”

Because these First-Person-View drones are directed by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle operator, who sees through the drone’s camera, these drones can be directed around a position, which allows them to attack from any side.

“So the situation is similar because you don’t know which side of your position the drone will be coming from. In the drone war, you are sitting in a basement as well, hiding from drones,” says Liutyi, who is a UAV engineer. Unlike in, say, the American army, Liutyi’s unit is designated as a frontline unit, and as such has often been sent to fight at the front.

Attending lectures on the front line

In addition to his duties as a soldat – or private, to use the term in the American and British Commonwealth armies – and director of the Theatre of Veterans, Liutyi is a full-time student at KSE taking a regular load of three courses per semester. This past semester, he was able to attend only one of our seminars live. The others he watched when he was off the front lines.

“When we are back from the direct [front] lines to our base, we usually have access to the Internet. That is when I try to download as much of the materials as possible, listen to the recorded seminars and write my responses,” he wrote in an email.

In answer to my question about why, given all his other responsibilities, he was studying at KSE, he answered in an email: “Managing the coursework can be quite challenging, but it helps me keep connected to civilian life.”

Liutyi’s personal reason for studying in the War and Public Memory Program is, perhaps, best understood in terms of Smith’s point about how there are so many ways the war affects people more than wanting to understand the geopolitical issues within an academic frame.

“It is important for me to understand the concept of memorialisation, the concept of public memory because I’ve lost so many friends already. I’ve lost many brothers [in arms] and relatives in this war.

“I will try to survive. I will try to work in the field of memorialisation and to rethink the concept of memory in Ukraine,” he says.

Liutyi singled out one assignment in my course, which asked students to do an oral presentation on one of the monuments or memorials on the battlefield where the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863 during the American Civil War. He chose the monument to Father William Colby, CSC, famous for having given general absolution to the Irish Brigade (New York’s 88th Infantry Regiment) prior to the battle.

“The monument to this famous American priest [shows] he was a great, kind man. A very empathetic person. It shows what I see among the military priests here in Ukraine. In studying it for the assignment, I saw it was all about humanity, about having human values.

“It’s about kindness, about seeing humanity even when everything is exploding in front of you,” says Liutyi.

What Liutyi found in the monument to Father William Colby is not unlike the practice Smith wrote about in an email a few days after the heavy missile and drone attack.

“After every massive attack like this, a few friends and I make plans for dinner together to remind ourselves that we weren’t alone through all of this, which is very cathartic. It has become a sort of ritual.”