Valeriya Tkachenko was taking her son to school in central Kyiv when an air raid siren began to sound. Teachers quickly directed children and parents to the shelter, where the anxious lawyer remained with her son for the next two hours.

“All day, I’m terrified about what might happen to my child,” she said after leaving the shelter, knowing she was already late for work.

The previous day, a Russian jet-powered drone had hit a school close by. “I can’t make plans any more,” she said. “Living like this cannot continue.”

Elsewhere in Kyiv on Friday morning, IT specialist Artem Marchenko had to leave his car and walk for 20 minutes across the Pivdennyi Bridge on his commute after repeated Russian attacks damaged the route.

He worried that Russia could soon strike Kyiv’s remaining bridges, disrupting travel across a city of roughly 3 million people split in two by the Dnipro River.

Kyiv is moving into its hardest phase since the first months of the full-scale invasion, as heavier Russian attacks transform daily life in a capital Moscow is trying to push into darkness.

For weeks, residents had mainly feared the arrival of winter, when Russia was expected to again target Ukraine’s heat and electricity supplies. But the sudden rise in attacks has convinced many people that the conditions they expected later in the year have already begun.

“The capital is facing a deeply dramatic situation. We can no longer act as though life can continue as it did in peacetime,” Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Friday. “The enemy is ripping Kyiv apart.”

During this week alone, Russian missiles and drones have hit offices, data centres, a school, a hospital and one of the city’s major bridges. Moscow has also begun striking energy infrastructure, including a thermal power plant and other facilities, leaving several districts without electricity and water by morning.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed to what appeared to be a change in Russian strategy during an interview this week, saying Vladimir Putin had recently instructed commanders to abandon the usual limits of warfare.

“They want Ukrainians to leave the capital, and to prove that without the capital there is no country,” Zelenskyy told reporters in separate remarks.

Until recently, Kyiv had managed to preserve an appearance of ordinary life, while cities nearer the front line, including Kharkiv and Dnipro, endured the bulk of daily missile and drone strikes. Now residents make bleak jokes that the situation is reversing, with those cities sometimes seeming safer than the capital.

The city faces a particularly serious threat: a critical lack of Patriot interceptors against ballistic missiles, alongside a new generation of faster Russian jet-powered drones that are more difficult to destroy.

Kyiv is trying to accelerate the deployment of new interceptor drones designed to bring down the jet-powered models. According to three defence industry sources, some are already operating, although it may take weeks or months before enough are available to offer the capital substantial protection.

Meanwhile, Russia’s progress on the battlefield remains limited and has come at a very high cost.

Moscow seized around 361 square kilometres in September, according to military analyst Konrad Muzyka. The figure was higher than in previous months, but still well below the pace required to capture the rest of Donbas before winter, when offensive campaigns usually become harder.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has recovered about 126 square kilometres through a series of eastern counteroffensives conducted under the codename Vivaldi. That slower struggle on the ground increasingly contrasts with events far behind the front line, where pressure on Ukraine’s largest cities is growing.

“A country may achieve important results on land, but if its air defences are weak, especially far from the front, that is the weakness an opponent will exploit,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies.

Ukrainian officials have been alerting European partners to the scale of the approaching danger. According to reports, Ukraine’s energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, recently briefed European officials on an intercepted Russian plan involving up to 1,000 missiles, drones and bombs aimed at the country’s energy network. Potential targets included substations, hydroelectric and thermal plants, and boiler facilities, apparently intended to leave Ukrainian cities cold and dark while creating a humanitarian emergency.

“Russia intends to freeze Kyiv and force it back into a primitive existence,” said a senior western diplomat in Kyiv, who spoke anonymously.

Western diplomats publicly say they plan to stay in Kyiv, aware that departing would offer Moscow a propaganda gain and could suggest that Ukraine had been left alone. Privately, however, two senior diplomats said contingency arrangements were being prepared to move embassies to Lviv or eastern Poland if Russia began deliberately attacking foreign missions.

“It is clear that the situation is getting worse very quickly,” the diplomat said.