People in Ukrainian capital are exhausted and struggling for normality amid a dramatic rise in bombardment

At 1am on Thursday, Dartsia Liuba went to the basement of her Kyiv apartment building with her two children and husband, Roma. The air-raid siren had gone off. A Russian attack was coming. Liuba scooped up her seven-month-old baby daughter, Halyna, and woke her bleary-eyed nine-year-old, Orysia, and they staggered down three floors to wait in sticky darkness.

Soon explosions began. There was an ugly whine in the sky immediately above their district of Podil. It came from a Shahed kamikaze drone. The streets echoed with booms and rat-tat-tat machine-gun fire as Ukrainian air defence units tried to bring it down. The moped-like buzzing stopped – and then resumed as more drones appeared, in a swarm too big to count.