Air Raids and Acorns: The Peculiar Priorities of Wartime Kyiv

There is a particular brand of bloody-minded stubbornness that you only really encounter in Ukraine. You’d think, given the near-constant threat of Russian missiles attempting to violently redecorate the country’s power grid, that the locals might give a municipal utility project a free pass. You would, of course, be entirely wrong.

Right now, in the middle of a brutal, grinding war, a ferocious battle has broken out in the Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. The combatants? On one side, the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) and a phalanx of utility workers. On the other, local residents, teenagers, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The prize they are fighting over isn’t a strategic military bridge or a weapons depot.

It’s a patch of 80-year-old oak trees.

The Bureaucratic Offence

To be entirely fair to the city officials, their logic isn’t inherently flawed. The KCSA wants to build a new, backup heating network for the Teremki-1 and Teremki-2 residential areas. They argue, quite rightly, that if the local combined heat and power plant (CHP-5) takes a direct hit from a Shahed drone this winter, more than 280 buildings will instantly turn into concrete freezers.

They claim that routing this new pipeline through an 80-year-old forest strip in the local park is the only viable option. Any alternative route, they insist, would be too expensive or take too long. And in a country where “too long” could mean “freezing to death by December,” you can see why they fired up the bulldozers.

They’ve also promised to replant it all later. They’ll even use “large-sized trees from municipal nurseries,” which is council-speak for “please stop shouting at us, we’ll buy you a nice shrub.”

The Civic Defence

But the locals are having absolutely none of it. In a city that has spent the last two and a half years dodging ballistic missiles, it takes a special kind of civic courage—or perhaps just severe bureaucratic exhaustion—to look a police officer in the eye while an air raid siren wails and demand to see their environmental impact assessment.

According to the activists, around 660 trees are slated for the chop, many of them majestic oaks that have quietly watched Kyiv expand from muddy fields into a sprawling metropolis.

When the chainsaws arrived, so did the residents. People have been literally throwing themselves in front of lifting machines. Activist Kateryna Chepura ended up with a lovely collection of bruises after being physically dragged out of the park by men in black uniforms. In a scene that perfectly encapsulates the sheer absurdity of local government, the police allegedly detained teenagers for “throwing eggs” and “preventing movement,” only to release them a few hours later because—shockingly—they had absolutely no evidence.

As soon as the journalists showed up with cameras, the chainsaws mysteriously stopped. It seems even municipal logging operations are a bit camera-shy.

Enter the Nobel Laureate

Just when the council probably thought they only had a few angry locals to deal with, Oleksandra Matviychuk stepped into the fray. When you’re a local government official trying to quietly chop down a park, the absolute last thing you want is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate asking you questions on Facebook.

She didn’t miss, either. Matviychuk pointed out that this heating main project was drawn up in 2023. So, naturally, the authorities waited until the height of summer in 2026—when everything is on fire anyway—to suddenly declare it an absolute emergency that requires flattening a historic green space. She correctly identified the city’s defensive PR strategy for what it was: pure manipulation. How dare you care about trees when there’s a war on?

The Absurdity of Resilience

The police, for their part, have issued statements essentially saying, “We are just here to make sure nobody gets violently assaulted with a branch; the utility guys have the paperwork.”

It’s easy to look at this from the outside and think it’s madness. Why are people protesting about oak trees when there’s a war for national survival going on?

But that’s exactly the point. The war is exactly why they are protesting. When you have lost so much control over your life, when the sky routinely rains fire and your electricity schedule is dictated by an autocratic neighbour, you fiercely protect what is yours. Those trees belong to Teremki. They are a slice of normalcy, a patch of shade, a piece of home.

You have to admire the bloody-mindedness of it. In any other country, a wartime government could dig a trench through your nan’s garden and you’d have to just nod and make them a cup of tea. In Ukraine, the locals will fight a brutal war of attrition on the eastern front, and then come home on leave to physically block a bulldozer to save an oak tree.

The KCSA might eventually get their heating main. But they are learning the hard way that you cannot spend years telling a population to be brave, unyielding, and defiant, and then expect them to politely step aside when you come for their park.