Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities experienced another powerful Russian missile attack. Because of this strike, 34 people died in the capital, of which 5 were children. This tragedy has brought to the fore the issue of shelters, a problem that the authorities have been unable to cope with throughout the entire period of the full-scale war.
“Heaven saved us,” is how Kiev resident Olga Didok describes the events of July 8.
According to her, she and her child were on the street in the Svyatoshinsky district of the capital when the rocket attack began. The woman tried to find cover to wait out the air attack, but the doors of the nearest house, which has a basement and underground parking, were closed.
“We survived the entire epicenter, standing under the gates of the place that was supposed to save us,” noted the Kiev resident.
Journalists called the telephone number of the authorized person, which is indicated on the parking gate.
They reported that according to the documents, this underground parking is not a shelter and is not included in the civil protection fund. Only residents of the house who know the special code have access to it.
This is not the only case where protective structures in Ukrainian cities, which are supposed to save citizens, are inaccessible or in poor condition, or are completely absent.
It would seem that the problem should have been finally resolved a year ago, when two women and a child died due to a closed shelter in a hospital in the Desnyansky district.
Then the issue of accessibility of civil protection facilities was raised to the level of the President and the National Security and Defense Council.
Attempts by the Ukrainian Air Force to find out why the problem still exists have led to a paradoxical conclusion. The state bureaucracy was to blame for the defenselessness of Ukrainians.
Closed shelters
At the end of April this year, the human rights organization “Center for Civil Liberties” presented a report on the results of monitoring the condition of shelters in different cities of Ukraine.
The results of this study are quite disappointing.
For example, in the capital, only 53% of the 120 shelters checked were open or there was a commandant with a key on site. Only 18% of shelters had water supplies and access to a toilet, and 33% had ventilation.
Almost a third of the shelters could not be found at all at the addresses where they should have been located. The situation was no better in Lviv, where only 25% of shelters were open, only 6% had water supplies, and 11% had ventilation. Activists recorded the worst situation in Nikolaev, where only 7% of shelters were open.
In the shelters that human rights activists managed to check, they found significant problems with the availability of water, toilets, seating, and even light. However, the most important thing is that only a small part of the shelters were accessible to people with limited mobility, for example, pensioners or people with disabilities.
This is due to the fact that many shelters are in fact basements of old houses, especially in Kyiv and Lviv. There is simply no constructive opportunity to install a ramp or gentle descent for persons with disabilities.
Only half
Since June 2023, the Minister for Strategic Industries, Alexander Kamyshin, has been responsible for the situation with civil protection facilities. Prior to this, responsibility for the condition of shelters was “scattered” between the State Emergency Service (SSES) and local administrations.
True, even now only local authorities, at their own discretion, decide where, how and for what money to build shelters, Timur Tkachenko, the profile deputy head of the Ministry of Strategic Industry, notes to the Ukrainian Air Force.
“Our role is to coordinate and control the issue of bringing civil defense structures into proper condition,” he explains.
The official notes that until 2022, the issue of shelters was not on the agenda at all. At that time, the stock of protective structures amounted to about 20 thousand objects throughout the country. This included both basements of residential buildings and anti-radiation bomb shelters.
Since the beginning of the great war, this fund has tripled and now there are almost 62 thousand shelters in Ukraine. But this is not enough.
“This allows today to protect, if we talk about the entire population, a little more than 50%,” says Tkachenko.
Over this and last years, the authorities brought almost 7.3 thousand protective structures into proper condition, including repairs and construction, spending a total of about 9 billion UAH on this.
The priority was the development of shelters at educational institutions and medical institutions.
You can track the progress of work on the special website of the Ministry of Strategic Industry “Iron Shelter”. It indicates what work is being done at what address and how much it costs.
There is also a special chatbot on Telegram so that people can leave complaints about a closed shelter or its improper arrangement.
But in order to provide shelters for the entire population of Ukraine, it is necessary to build or equip another 60 thousand such facilities.
“This cannot be done only at the expense of the Ukrainian budget. There is no such money even approximately,” says the deputy minister.
He estimates the cost of such work at $50 billion. This is more than the size of the Ukrainian budget deficit for this year.
Who is the balance holder?
However, before talking about money, we need to understand the simplest question - why are shelters closed during alarms?
The head of the Kyiv municipal security department, Roman Tkachuk, explains that this is due to the imperfection of Ukrainian legislation. In particular, with the fact that it is almost impossible to force private building owners to include their parking lots or basements in the fund of protective structures, and secondly, to force them to put them in order and then allow people into these shelters.
“Today we have heads of companies who are not even owners of buildings, but simply tenants, deciding who to let in or not. During an air raid, it is not so important what condition the shelter is in. We would really like everything to be renovated so that it would be inclusive, but, unfortunately, this is not the case yet. The main thing is that it is open,” said a city official.
This can only be enforced at those facilities where the balance holder is the state or local authorities.
Now in the fund of protective structures in Kyiv there are about four thousand shelters. The only mechanism for influencing unscrupulous balance holders, according to Tkachuk, is complaints to law enforcement agencies. But this process is lengthy and not always effective.
In addition, the bill introducing criminal liability for “closed shelters” has not yet been adopted by the Verkhovna Rada. It was introduced into parliament in June last year after the tragedy in the Desnyansky district, but was voted on in the first reading only in May 2024.
The draft law provides for fines for closed shelter and improper maintenance in the amount of 3.4 thousand to 8.5 thousand hryvnia. If these violations lead to the death of people, then the culprit faces from 3 to 8 years behind bars.
Shelter-stops
In such a situation, when basements and parking lots in houses are closed and dirty, perhaps we should move on to creating small modular shelters in crowded places?
Moreover, such “shelter stops” have already been built and are successfully operating in cities such as Kherson, Kharkov, Chernigov and Dnepr.
In practice, this looks like small rooms, most often made of reinforced concrete, which are installed in crowded places in the middle of the city and where people can calmly wait out a missile attack that caught them on the way.
Such modular shelters installed in large cities near the front line differ from each other. Some look simpler, some have an unusual shape and are decorated with ornaments. In Zaporozhye they even installed a “shelter-kiosk” with a special window where they sell coffee and sweets.
Such facilities are built fairly quickly, are inclusive, convenient, and protect people from missile and drone debris.
The Ukrainian Air Force knows several cases when it was “stop-and-cover” that saved people during powerful missile strikes. In particular, this happened in Dnieper and Kharkov.
But such facilities are installed only in some cities and are an initiative exclusively of local authorities.
Why, for example, are shelter stops not built in Kyiv and other large populated areas?
The answer to this question is strange, to say the least. It turns out that the effective protection of citizens is hampered by outdated documentation and Ukrainian bureaucracy.
The fact is that state construction standards (GSN) in this area do not correspond to today’s challenges, Sergei Svyatoshenko, design engineer of civil protection facilities, explains to the Ukrainian Air Force.
The specialist explains that the first GOS, which concerned shelters, was created in Ukraine in 1997 and was actually rewritten from Soviet building codes.
Already during the war, a new GOS was developed (title V.2.2-5:2023 “Protective structures for civil protection”), which came into force in November 2023, but it also turned out to be “morally outdated.” For example, there is no such thing as “modular shelters” or “shelter stops” in it.
“This seeker is designed for the times of the Cold War,” says Svyatoshenko.
Roman Tkachuk also points out precisely the problem with state building standards, explaining why modular shelters were not built on the streets in Kyiv during the war.
According to him, city authorities cannot spend budget funds on facilities, the creation of which is not regulated by state building codes.
“To install such a structure near each stop is not specified by the GSN standards today. And the city of Kyiv does not do this only because the State Tax Service does not say how to do this correctly using budget funds.”
Moreover, Tkachuk assures that cities that did install modular shelters to protect people are now under close scrutiny from auditors and law enforcement.
“In other regions – Kharkov, Kherson – where such prefabricated structures were built, the State Audit has already started criminal cases in this regard because of their construction,” Tkachuk assures.
What is the problem with the GOS
What's wrong with these building codes? Firstly, they do not contain any mention of the possibility of constructing modular protective shelters.
The GOS provides for the creation of only “dual-use structures”, “shelters” and “anti-radiation shelters”.
Secondly, the document directly states that there are no calculations in the event of a direct hit from ammunition or an explosion in close proximity to the walls of protective structures. Accordingly, the question arises of how protected people will be inside shelters built according to this GOS.
The standards also talk about facilities designed for large groups of people (from 500 to 2 thousand) and for long periods of stay (up to 48 hours), but this does not make sense in the conditions of modern warfare.
“The main experience of this war is the need for dispersal. This principle applies both at the front and in the rear... As soon as a concentration of civilians or military appears and the enemy has the possibility of defeat, he does so,” explains the head of a construction company that was also involved in the construction of military facilities, Sergei Rasputny.
Also, building codes do not take into account the time of destruction of objects in different cities. Obviously, it is significantly different, for example, in Lviv and Kharkov. If in the first, even an hour can pass from the announcement of the alarm to the actual arrival of the missile, then in the second it sometimes takes seconds or 2-3 minutes.
“With a missile threat, shelters that are located beyond a three-minute reach are a useless structure. These are absolutely senseless wasted funds,” the expert believes.
Accordingly, the State Tax Service would have to take this differentiation into account and introduce a certain “zoning” for the placement of protective structures.
According to experts, it is necessary to make changes to the current GSN and, at the same time, develop new state construction standards. Where, in particular, the possibility of constructing modular shelters will be spelled out.
In Dnipro, local authorities began installing modular prefabricated shelters in parks and at bus stops at the end of 2022 - beginning of 2023
It should be noted that now local administrations and private developers who install “shelter stops” act at their own peril and risk, since they are guided not by DBN, but by DSTU (state standard of Ukraine).
Indeed, since the first of March last year, DSTU 9195:2022 (“Prefabricated protective structures of modular type civil protection”) has been in force. It sets requirements for the design and construction of such “shelter stops” with a capacity of up to 50 people.
“GSN has a higher power than DSTU, and theoretically all these actions could become the subject of investigation by law enforcement,” admits Sergei Svyatoshenko.
At the same time, Deputy Minister of Strategic Industries Timur Tkachenko does not see a problem in this.
“If we talk about modular shelters, then these are regulated by DSTU, plus there are now new standards in development, which are called “Primary shelters,” he said.
Roman Tkachuk believes that a nationwide program should be developed to install modular shelters of the same standard and according to the same standards in order to avoid problems for local authorities and protect people.
Without builders and money
Even if the authorities adopt such a national program, this will not solve a number of other problems. In particular, with the financing of modular shelters.
One of the manufacturers of such structures told the Ukrainian Air Force that their price ranges from 2.7 to 4.2 million hryvnia.
It is clear that they need at least several dozen, if not hundreds, per city, depending on the number of residents.
But besides finances, there is also a problem with personnel. Thus, several heads of construction companies told the BBC about the problem with the mobilization of male employees.
“There really is a staff shortage. Before the start of the war, for example, I had 16 employees, but now there are only two left. Someone left, someone was mobilized,” noted one of them.
Deputy head of the Ministry of Strategic Industry Timur Tkachenko says that he is aware of this problem and he already sees a way to solve it. We are talking about booking workers at enterprises that are building shelters. A similar scheme is already in effect for those who create fortifications for the front.
“There must be a systemic solution. In my opinion, shelters should be equated to fortifications. I cannot make such a decision, but I can initiate it. And I’m working on it now,” he told the BBC.
All these seemingly minor problems overlap each other and generally slow down the strategically important process of constructing protective shelters, according to officials.
True, there is hope that in Kyiv it will get off the ground in the near future. The BBC learned from its sources that in early July, the capital’s authorities met with manufacturers of modular shelters and “expressed interest in these structures.”
However, a source in the Ukrainian government points to another barrier that is not related to finances or legislation. It is connected with the psychology of officials.
“Some leaders of the local government of one of the cities openly told me: why build shelters if people don’t go there anyway,” the interlocutor points out. “Ironically, it was in this city that a rocket recently flew and there were casualties.”
