Generators, Ghost Towns, and Dangerous Vodka: Inside Hotel Ukraine

Hotel Ukraine, Kyiv.

Back in the day, this 4-star monolith right in the middle of the city was the kind of place bursting with tourists asking the concierge where to buy the best fridge magnets. Now? It’s a lot quieter. It’s also a lot darker. Usually literally, because when the power goes out, the lobby bar instantly devolves into a scene lit by tactical torches and phone screens, all set to the low, droning hum of a diesel generator.

When the tourists packed up and left, the void was filled by a very different crowd. The journalists came. The volunteers, the medics, the fixers, and the “I’ll just be here for a week” people who blink and suddenly realize it’s been six months.

The Right Kind of Broken

It takes a very specific kind of person to willingly travel to Ukraine right now. And I don’t mean “brave” in the glossy, movie-trailer sense of the word. I mean stubborn. I mean people who are probably a bit broken in all the right places. The sort of person who can be laughing one minute and then go dead quiet the next because their phone just buzzed with a bad message from home.

If you spend enough time in these dark lobbies, you quickly learn the ecosystem:

• Who will always share a charger.
• Who always has a secret stash of snacks.
• Who disappears for 48 hours and returns looking ten years older.
• Who can still crack a joke that makes you spit your drink out, even when the city is freezing and the Western news cycle has completely moved on.

Take a look at the photo above. That’s me and Antonio in the lobby bar during a blackout. It’s one of those small, unremarkable moments you don’t forget because it’s entirely real. No performance. No dramatic lighting. Just tired people in the dark.

We have an endless supply of “you genuinely couldn’t write this” stories. In this job, you meet amazing people, completely unhinged people, quiet heroes, loud frauds, and absolute saints with catastrophic sleep schedules. It is pure, unfiltered chaos with a press badge. And somehow, in the middle of all of that, you form actual, real friendships.

Sometimes, those friendships involve getting into random civilian cars because getting an Uber during an air raid is a fantasy. It becomes completely normal to be a Brit, an Italian, a Ukrainian, and an Israeli bouncing through the pitch-black streets of Kyiv, laughing like idiots while quietly making peace with the fact that your driver is operating purely on “Kyiv confidence” rather than anything resembling the Highway Code.

The True Enemy

And then, of course, there was the Japanese university student.

Picture this: a young guy wanders into the dark lobby looking entirely lost. He is armed with nothing but a translation app and absolutely zero English or Ukrainian. He has also never touched vodka in his life. For reasons known only to him—and whatever deranged algorithm recommended wartime Kyiv as a “vacation destination”—he decides that this is the night to start drinking.

The next morning, he shuffles into the lobby looking like a man who has seen God and immediately regretted it. He looks at us and announces, in the only English sentence he managed to string together the entire trip:

“Vodka is dangerous.”

Mate. Kyiv is currently dealing with ballistic missiles, Shahed drones, and a 1,000-kilometer front line—and somehow, vodka was the fight that finally finished you. Respect.

Even in the Dark

Ukraine is never just “war.” It’s people. It’s relationships. It’s the weird, absurd little human moments squeezed into the gaps between the horror. They are the moments you remember forever because they are the proof that you are still alive inside all of it.

So, if you’re reading this from far away, from a place where the lights stay on and Ukraine feels like it’s slipping out of the daily headlines—just know that people are still here. They are doing the work. They are telling the truth. They are keeping each other going when the adrenaline runs out.

The unhinged, stubborn people who make these memories become the friends you keep for life.

Even in the dark.