On a Sunday afternoon, the Shevchenko City Garden in Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv presents a picture so idyllic you have to pinch yourself: Citizens perambulate along wide pavements, diners spill out of its alfresco restaurants, and children romp on brightly colored plastic jungle gyms. Kharkivans are famously proud of their verdant, sprawling parks—where weekends happen.

But this tranquility is regularly shattered, at least for an outsider like me, when several times an hour piercing air-raid sirens wail across Ukraine’s frontline metropolis, a target that the Russian military for three and a half years now has pummeled unremittingly with artillery, airpower, drones, missiles, and rockets. The previous night, one of the latest-generation Shahed-136 drones—an unmanned Iranian-made aircraft that Russia has upgraded—hit two neighborhoods away from my hotel, the blast so loud and its impact so forceful that it jolted me upright in bed before I scrambled down into the basement. Although the Russians have let up some on Kharkiv—doling out destruction more recently to the likes of Kyiv, Sumy, Odesa, and Lutzk—the city, just 20 miles from the front, is hit day in and day out.

Nevertheless, the screeching sirens and thundering announcements of “Attention! An air alert has been declared in the city!” doesn’t faze the park goers. They don’t bat an eyelash or pause their conversations—even parents don’t betray the slightest concern. “The sirens go off all the time,” Anastasiia, an NGO staffer who asked that her surname be withheld, tells me. “We can’t be in constant panic mode or we’d never last. They warn us that drones or a missile are headed our way. Our air defenses get most of them, and if something does get through, we hear it coming. We recognize the sounds of, say, a Shahed, and then we do move, very fast.” Ukrainians, a thoroughly tech-savvy people, are aided by an app that informs them about the location of the missile’s launch, the type of projectile, and when it will reach them. But, as Anastasiia says, it’s the lawn-mower-like whizzing of a drone or the terrifying, high-pitched squeal of a Shahed that disrupts their otherwise endless poise.

The Kharkivans’ general nonchalance in the face of danger (since the February 2022 full invasion, there have been 6,640 Kharkiv civilian casualties) is more than either resignation or courage. It’s a form of defiance and an expression of self-respect: No matter what Russia throws at them, they will live their lives with a modicum of decency and conduct daily affairs as normally as possible, for example by partaking in the pastimes still available to them. Russians expecting them to cower in bomb shelters for days at a time or to desert their country should just forget it. So much of their lives is skewed by the war, these activities are few but all the more precious. That’s why this city, just 18 miles from the Russian border, has the park lawns trimmed to perfection, the fountains sprouting water, and the grounds immaculately clean—sights that are jarring when just across the street a gigantic government building looms like a ghoul, shuttered since the spring 2022 invasion when the Russians stood at the city’s outskirts. From the steps of my three-star hotel, the building facades in either direction are badly scarred from the battering, only about a quarter of the windows intact. Until this year, when USAID ended its window replacement program, the city had been fairly good at switching windows in shortly after Russian explosives knocked them out.

“We have two priorities,” Yurii Terehovs, a representative of the Kharkiv city administration told me. “First, to defend the city—that’s most important—and second, to preserve it as a place where Kharkivans live and work. That’s why so much has been rebuilt even though we’re constantly under attack. This is why people have returned to Kharkiv.” And there are other perks, too: Start-ups incur no taxes; public transportation is free; jobs exist in the city administration for those whose previous positions are gone.

Terehovs is bluntly honest about Kharkiv’s future: “We are on the frontline and will be as long as we have this deranged neighbor. The threat will always be there.” That’s why all of Kharkiv’s schools—eventually for 9,000 children—will be underground. Thus far, four “bunker schools” are operational, and another six will be by year’s end. Two groups of pupils currently meet in the subway system for class.

Presumably, Russia’s relentless targeting of Ukrainian’s civilian populations is intended to wear them down, deprive them of sleep, frazzle and depress them. The point is to send them fleeing abroad or cause them to turn on their leaders, their army, and one another. (Of course, Russia’s relentless attacks are also meant to convince Western allies that Ukraine is going to lose the war anyway thus making their support futile.) Although Ukrainians admit they are at the end of their tether (“Everyone is broken inside, everyone,” my friend Nadiia told me), they have until now stood as one behind President Zelensky and Ukraine’s defense: whatever it takes. While the street protests on July 22, the first since the full invasion, that opposed government crackdowns on two anti-corruption agencies will not lessen the latter in the short run—the alternative is too grim to entertain: Russia overrunning the country—Zelensky must know that he risks the until-now overwhelming trust of the population if his administration tampers with the democracy that Ukraine has thus far painstakingly sustained in wartime. After all, democracy is what they’re fighting for.

The underground schools, the air alarms, and the regular casualties—the strike I experienced killed two and injured 11—constitute just the most visible aberrations of normalcy that life on the eastern front entails. None of Kharkiv’s 16 institutions of higher education hold regular classes, which means remote learning for 300,000 students. There are no public nursery schools. There is no nightlife, no public assemblies, no outdoor concerts or sporting events, no air travel, and no place to hide. Actually, there is one place in the country that Russian firepower can’t (or simply hasn’t yet) hit: Transcarpathia, an oblast located in the Carpathian Mountains in westernmost Ukraine. I saw the Kharkiv and Kyiv train stations full of families heading there for a respite.