After narrow escape, air raid sirens spark panic for a Kyiv child

For Ukrainian survivors of Russian drone and missile attacks, each air raid warning can be a source of fresh distress.

Across the country people have grown accustomed to the wail of sirens - both real and on phone apps linked to national warning systems - as Russia launches strikes with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles several times a month.

Some rush to the nearest shelter or take precautions at home. Others choose to ignore the sirens, reflecting fatigue after more than four years of war.

For 6-year-old Natalia, who narrowly escaped a blast that hit her apartment in the latest major attack on Kyiv earlier this week, the alerts bring a sense of panic that she did not experience before.

"This event triggered something," said her mother Olha Mudra, speaking in the kitchen of her apartment after she had swept up the debris.

On the day after the nighttime attack, Mudra, 35, left Natalia at a friend's home while she tidied up. When a siren sounded, Natalia asked her friend if her mother was safe and kept saying she wanted to be taken to the bomb shelter.

"In the evening, when there was an alarm around 9-10 p.m. (1800-1900 GMT) we were at home ... she suddenly panicked and said 'let's go to the shelter, let's go to the shelter'," Mudra told Reuters.

"Straight into hysteria: 'let's go to the shelter'. We went to the shelter."

Mudra, who works in a print shop, has been trying to restore a semblance of normality to home life. Plastic sheeting covers the shattered windows and shrapnel marks are visible on the kitchen wall.

Outside, workers and volunteers clear away the remnants of the rubble left by the explosion.

The blasts temporarily knocked out gas supplies in the flat, so Mudra collected meals from a distribution point run by a charity.

On her phone, she flicked through photographs of her and Natalia taken on the night of the attack, their hair and faces covered in dust and soot.

"We didn't understand where anything was flying from," she recalled. "I think it was a miracle that we survived.

"I went up to my floor, saw my neighbour, and the neighbour hugged me and said: 'You are alive, we thought it was all over'."

-Yurii Kovalenko/Reuters