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“Even when there’s a war on, people still want to look their best,” says Irina, co-owner of a beauty parlor in the Saltivka district of Kharkiv. She and her husband Vlad opened it a year into the war, when Saltivka was looking somewhat in need of a facelift itself. Its sprawling Soviet housing blocs had been bombed non-stop, leaving many boarded up, and only a fraction of the vast housing project’s 800,000 residents still remained.
At such a time, one might expect locals to be spending money on practical things like new windows or furnishings. But with any home improvements likely to be undone again overnight by Russian ordnance, many prefer to lash out on personal improvements instead.
Lip fillers are very popular, as is Botox for long-furrowed foreheads and treatments for stress-related hair-loss. If there’s an unexpected power cut mid-operation — which happens in a city that typically spends three to five hours a day without electricity — then Irina simply carries on with the light from her smartphone.
“We try to do operations when there’s natural daylight outside, but you can never be quite sure,” she said.
As a place for pampering, Irina and Vlad’s parlor isn’t much to look at: it sits in the bottom floor of a concrete-grey tower block, has no billboards outside, and looks more like a dentist’s waiting room inside. Right now, freshly-Botoxed clients have to come and go via an ungritted road encased in thick ice, currently impassable to vehicles. One motorist tried it last week and slid off down a gully.
For the couple, however, their workplace still offers a more relaxing environment than their home in Bol’shaya Danilovka, a few miles further north of Saltivka and even closer to the nearest Russian frontlines. Here, Russian drones fly overhead nearly every day on their way to attack targets in Kharkiv itself.
“It’s got to the point where it’s normal for us to see them flying overhead — four flew over just this morning,” said Vlad, showing a phone video of a drone cruising the skies over his back garden.
“Last July we saw a swarm of about sixty in the air at one time — we are always worried that they are going to run out of fuel and that one will crash-land on our village.”
The couple’s two children, Masha, 16, and Daniel, 14, attend one of six new underground classrooms opened around Kharkiv, where half of all schools have now been damaged or destroyed by Russian airstrikes. Combined with some Metro stations that have been commandeered for the same purpose, they allow nearly 2,500 students to be educated safely. The days of carefree play outside of school, however, are long over.
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Masha is currently in therapy after a close encounter with a Russian glide bomb, which carries up to half a ton of explosive. Dropped from a plane at height, they have GPS-guided wings that glide them for several miles onto their target, delivering a cruise missile-sized payload on the cheap.
“Masha was just three hundred metres from one when it landed,” said Irina. “She wasn’t injured but she gets constant anxiety and panic attacks”.
Their teenage daughter’s trauma isn’t the only family difficulty. An in-law was snatched off the street by a military-draft squad recently, and is now in a frontline assault unit despite being 49, diabetic, and utterly petrified.
“They’ve put him in a Storm Group (a unit that specialises in assaulting Russian trenches) down near Zaporizhzhia,” said Vlad. “We are convinced he is going to die.”
Tough as it is, such dramas are entirely typical for the average Ukrainian family these days, very few of whom have not suffered the war’s ravages directly. All the more reason, says Irina, to keep smiling — even if that smile needs some help from a Botox injection.
“You can feel sad inside, but at least you can look beautiful in the mirror,” she said. “And you can also have a few shots of vodka.”