What 15,000 anti-aircraft alarms tell about the war in Ukraine | International

The unmistakable ascending and descending tone of the alarms, associated with danger and destruction, has sounded every day somewhere in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, according to the analysis carried out by EL PAÍS of the application єТривога (Es Alarma). , which collects them from the beginning of the Russian invasion.

“The alarms made an impression and a lot of respect on me in the first days of February and in March. Then you get used to it, ”explains Cristian Segura, special envoy for EL PAÍS in Ukraine. Even so, they continue to cause apprehension: “On the afternoon of December 31, a Kalibr missile fell on a hotel 300 meters from my apartment. That led me to take the alarm at dawn from January 31 to 1 more seriously.

The sound has been noticed more by the regions (oblast) that have hosted the battlefront, such as Kharkov, Zaporizhia or Donetsk. The latter has accumulated more than 1,464 alarms throughout the conflict, an average of five a day. In Mikolaiv, in the south of the country, they intensified in spring and summer, and ceased after the Ukrainian counterattack in November.

Kharkov is one of the most affected regions: its border with Russia continues to witness the clash between the Ukrainian resistance and the Kremlin forces, as confirmed by the latest report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), of the February 19th. In Odessa, far from the front, the situation is calm, although its port capital has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

In the regions furthest away from the current battlefronts, the sirens have left room for silence. Putin's troops reached the eastern limits of Sumy at the start of the conflict. His removal from the area in April did not put an end to the sirens, which have sounded more than 500 times since then. He oblast Lviv, which borders Poland and was key in the refugee exodus at the beginning of the war, has not been a battlefield, but it has been the sporadic target of bombardments. It accumulates 249 alarms and registered the first death of a civilian in April.

The following map shows how the sirens have been heard throughout Ukraine (in the absence of data for the Crimea, Kherson and Lugansk regions), with special emphasis on the line that separates the areas occupied by Russian troops and those defended by the Ukrainian army. In Kharkiv they have activated more than 1,600 alarms at the regional level, without counting those that have sounded only in the districts (or raions) and municipalities (or hromadas).

two months underground

A Kharkiv citizen who had obeyed all the alarms launched in the region since March 15 would have passed at least 59 days of the last year in the underground. In kyiv, the total duration of the alarm periods adds up to 24 days.

Alert moments last an average of 60 minutes, but can last from a few seconds to several days. The civilian population must go to one of the shelters designated by the authorities: in the capital there are more than 4,000. They are basements, underground passages and metro stations such as Arsenalna, next to the Dnieper River, which at 105 meters below the surface is the deepest in the world.

Sirens, like war itself, do not attend to schedules. More than a third of the anti-aircraft alarms have sounded during the night, interrupting the sleep of the civilian population that is dragging the fatigue of having spent a year on constant alert.

According to a study by the Becker Friedman Institute, the population has stopped responding with equal urgency to these warnings of imminent danger. This is confirmed by the images of different Ukrainian cities, where pedestrians continue to walk, chat on a bench or buy an ice cream with the sound of alarms as a disastrous soundtrack.

“At the beginning of the war, almost all commerce closed during alarms, in any city. Not now, ”says Cristian Segura. One of the reasons is the improvement of anti-aircraft defense systems in Ukrainian cities, since their interception effectiveness has increased compared to the start of the invasion. "If I'm in kyiv and the alarm sounds, maybe what I think is that I wanted to go to the pool or the pharmacy and I won't be able to, because during the alarm they are closed."

However, the weakened obedience to the sirens continues to cost lives. According to the aforementioned study: "Between 8% and 15% of the civilian victims registered during the last periods of the conflict could have been avoided if the capacity to respond to government alerts had been maintained." According to data from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, at least 7,000 civilians have died since the start of the conflict.

Methodology

The data used in this article has been collected by the Ukrainian developer Vadym Klymenko and they come from the alarms sent by the application єТривога (Es Alarma) that sends this type of notifications to users throughout Ukraine based on their location.

Although the sirens began to sound in Ukraine the day the invasion began —earlier if we count the drills they did in some cities—, the application went live on March 15, so there are no official records prior to this date.

The graphs represent the total number of alarms in the territory, counting different administrative divisions (oblast, raion and local community). The alarm counts and durations included in the text are limited to alerts recorded at the oblast level, since warnings triggered in one particular location sometimes end up spreading to a larger area.

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