There is a sound that Kyiv residents have learned to identify instantly. It is somewhere between a lawnmower and a moped engine — a characteristic buzz that carries across the city on still nights. When you hear it, you go to the shelter. When you hear the explosion that follows, you know the air defence systems missed that one.
That sound is the Shahed-136, an Iranian-designed one-way attack drone that Russia has deployed by the thousands against Ukrainian cities since the autumn of 2022.
What the Shahed is
The Shahed-136 (Russian designation: Geran-2) is an autonomous loitering munition — a drone that flies to a pre-programmed GPS target and detonates on impact. It carries approximately 50 kg of explosives. It flies slowly (around 185 km/h), at low altitude, and has a range exceeding 2,500 kilometres.
It is not a precision weapon in the traditional sense. It is a terror weapon — designed to strike civilian infrastructure, to create noise, to exhaust air defence systems with volume, and to wear down civilian morale over months and years.
Russia fires them in waves. Nights of 30, 50, sometimes 100+ drones targeting multiple Ukrainian cities simultaneously. Kyiv’s air defence network, built with Ukrainian systems, US-supplied Patriots, German IRIS-T units, and others, intercepts the majority. But not all.
What gets hit
The targets follow a pattern:
Energy infrastructure. Thermal power plants, substations, gas distribution hubs. Russia has spent two winters systematically destroying Ukraine’s ability to heat and light its population. The goal is not to destroy military capability — it is to make survival difficult enough that Ukrainians lose the will to fight.
Residential areas. Either by targeting residential buildings directly or as collateral damage when shot-down drones fall over populated areas. A Shahed intercepted over the city still falls somewhere.
Psychological continuity. The sirens at 3am. The uncertainty of whether tonight’s alert will pass without incident or end in something worse. The exhaustion of years of interrupted sleep. This is documented psychological warfare, and it works on some people, some of the time.
What we see on the Living History tour
On the east bank of Kyiv — the area east of the Dnipro river — the damage from drone and missile strikes is visible in ways that the tourist-friendly west bank largely is not. There are entire apartment blocks with floors collapsed, facades stripped off, windows still boarded months after a strike. There are memorials — flowers, photos, candles — on the pavement outside buildings where residents died.
We also visit areas where shot-down Shahed drone fragments are preserved as informal memorials. The locals who placed them there want people to see the hardware of what Russia is sending. The contrast between the ordinariness of the residential street and the wreckage of a military drone on a bench outside a children’s playground is something that photographs but does not photograph well.
You have to be there.
Why I show this specifically
A lot of war coverage focuses on the front line. Rightfully so — the fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine is where the existential contest is decided. But what Russia is doing in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities is a separate and deliberate campaign against civilians.
Showing this is not trauma tourism. It is documentation. It is a refusal to let the scale of what is being done to Ukrainian civilians be abstracted into statistics and forgotten in the news cycle.
The people who lived in those apartments existed before those strikes. Some of them still live nearby. Their continued presence — the woman tending flowers at the memorial on the pavement, the old man who waves from his repaired balcony — is the most important thing I can show anyone.