Sleep deprivation in Kyiv: long term effects of 3 a.m. Russian attacks

Millions of Ukrainians are slowly suffering the long term effects of this damaging phenomenon. It has long been a component of torture – and a tool of authoritarians to break people down.

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A smoke trail from a rocket launch could be seen in the evening sky in Baryshivka, Ukraine, in March 2022. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES via Getty Images)

On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten under the covers utterly exhausted from a day spent working, ready – begging really – for a good night’s rest.

And as I just begin to drift off to sleep, the edges of this blaring sound begin to play: the air alarm going off, indicating another Russian attack. 

Just as I was about to get some much needed shuteye. 

The best way I could explain it for anyone who has never been to wartime Ukraine is to imagine that sudden, lacerating feeling that happens to your nerves when the first sharp note of your iPhone morning alarm begins to play… multiplied by ten. 

It’s startling, it’s anxiety-inducing – and even when it ends, your mind still races, unable to find the cusp of slumber that you had been so close to right before. 

The seemingly random timing of the Russian military’s middle-of-the-night attacks does damage not only to the targets of the missiles. The effect of these attacks over the last two years has caused collective harm to the psyche of millions of Ukrainians: wounds without physical markings.

Dr. Yevhen Poyarkov, the head of the sleep center at the Dobrobut medical network in Ukraine, said that he has seen a surge of Ukrainian patients suffering from sleep-related problems due to the war.

"After the onset of the full-scale invasion, the prevalence of sleep problems among the population rose significantly," he told The Counteroffensive. “[Russian attacks have] resulted in a widespread decline in well-being due to insufficient sleep.”

A child sleeping in the corridor of an apartment during an air raid in a residential building damaged by Russian drone strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 25, 2023. (Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Previously, people used to visit him mostly due to sleep cycle disorders – people working overnight shifts or suffering from sleep apnea. Now, he's seen a surge of people presenting with anxiety disorders – the unfortunate effect of the missile attacks that plague Ukrainian cities. 

The air alarms do two things that disrupt natural sleep: they wake people up in the middle of the night, disrupting the sleep cycle, and they create persistent anxiety, making it hard to hard to fully relax into slumber.

The doctor began listing off the damage that these frequent air alerts will do to innocent civilians: in the short term, things like fatigue, anxiety, irritability, along with a decline in concentration, attention and memory. 

A view of the city during the blackout on March 25, 2024 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Due to a Russian attack, the city was temporarily left without electricity. About 700,000 consumers were left without electricity. (Photo by Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

The body keeps the score, and over the long term the alarms create even worse problems. They begin to dig into the body's critical systems – and can create problems for the digestive system, the heart and the brain.

It’s not for nothing that sleep deprivation has long been used in interrogations: it brings with it a creeping psychological and physiological toll. 

“Sleeplessness befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own ‘I,’” writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in ‘The Gulag Archipelago,’ listing it as one of more than 30 methods that the Soviet Union used to break prisoners down.

In fact, some legal scholars view depriving people of sleep as an illegal form of punishment: with usage by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  

“Sleep deprivation is a method of torture,” wrote Ergün Cakal, an expert in international law, in ‘Torture Journal.' “It becomes so when prolonged or inflicted in combination with other methods (e.g. threats) and conditions (e.g. disruptive environment or time of day).”

And the results of Russian attacks mimic the terror that has befallen other generations. During the Nazi blitz, when bombers would strike British cities on a nightly basis, a lack of sleep became a principal concern of civilians – tens of thousands would leave their homes before sunset, moving to the edges of the cities in order to get a good night's rest, a process known as ‘trekking.’

A cat sleeps at the front line positions held by the 24th separate mechanized brigade near New York, in the Donbas region of Ukraine on August 08, 2023.

Neither me nor my colleague Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova ever used to have trouble falling asleep. But both of us have been talking recently about how we stay up for hours, dead tired, but unable to cross the threshold. 

I’ll lay there, eyes closed, trying to find salvation by listening to some droning history podcast. 

Myroslava has a different evening habit.

"Every night before I go to bed, I watch the telegram alert channels," Myroslava told me. "They usually tell me if there is a threat of missile attacks that night. Usually, a few hours before a missile attack, the radar shows the Russians getting their planes in the air… Then we prepare in the evening for the fact that we have to get up at night."

You may remember that Myroslava’s housing complex was bombed recently – adding more stress and apprehensiveness about whether there might be a repeat incident. 

“I want to sleep, but I feel uncomfortable, hot or cold, and sometimes I can't fall asleep for hours,” she said.

The sporadic pattern of air alarms has become an unwelcome and discomforting ritual – a trumpeting that sounds both outside, and often, on our phones as well.

“We usually lay down in the hallway, a room protected by two walls. We put down yoga mats, some blankets and sleeping bags to keep warm and make it a little softer,” she explains. “When the explosions start, you just lie there and listen and hope that the air defense system will shoot everything down and that you won't get any debris in your apartment.”

Myroslava and her husband have put together this ad hoc sleeping pad in the hallway to turn to during Russian air attacks.

When I started The Counteroffensive one year ago, I was coming off a restful cycle of healthy sleep – full of energy and creativity. Earlier this week, a friend who hasn’t seen me in a year remarked that in comparison to then, I look spent, exhausted and without vigor. I can’t say I disagree.

Of course, it could be worse. And Myroslava and I are sharing these experiences not to argue that we are uniquely suffering in the world, but to point out the cumulative invisible injuries that are coming about from more than two years of air raids.

Myroslava repeats a maxim that’s become routine in post-invasion Ukraine – one that reflects the much greater sacrifices that others are making.

“It's a sin for me to complain,” she said. “Because the sleeping conditions of Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches are terrible.”

After the paywall: My fears for the anniversary of The Counteroffensive as a publication; details for Tim’s events for subscribers in Toronto, D.C., New York City and Chicago. And today — a cat of conflict!