Member-only story
Air Raid Alarms Go Off Nightly in St. Petersburg
The buzz among locals is that NATO bombers and drones are daily circling the city
Air raid shelters, abandoned since World War II, dot the city in a sporadic and unplanned manner almost like they were mushrooms in the forest. Only this forest is not the lovely birch-filled ones that surrounded the city, but the city of St. Petersburg; and, instead of offering sustenance, the shelters today are just grassy knolls from which children sled ride in the winter.
All of that, however, is changing as the Kremlin has decided to make fear the chief unifying emotion as it works tirelessly to force the Russian people to not just not protest the invasion of Ukraine but to at least passively be supportive of it.
Each night, it seems, NATO bombers and Ukrainian drones are buzzing the city, threatening Russia’s very existence with nuclear destruction. Each night, the air raid sirens go off waking the city’s residents, sending dogs wild, and dividing a night’s sleep into before the siren and after it halves — sleep as much as you can before because the rest of the night will be a restless and nervous one.
Russian authorities have quietly launched inspections, repairs, and cleanups of bomb shelters nationwide that have laid dormant since the end of…
