Pummeled by airstrikes, Ukrainians in Kharkiv defy Russia by getting on with daily life

This one had taken his father, also a firefighter.

The first strike, an hour after midnight in a residential area of Kharkiv, damaged a high-rise building and several lower-rise ones. Less than an hour later, as emergency responders were still combing the rubble, disconnecting gas lines and aiding the injured, two more drones hit close by, according to Ukrainian news accounts.

Three rescuers died that night, including 52-year-old Vladyslav Lohinov. His son, working nearby, had immediately feared for his father's safety when he heard the roar of a fresh explosion. Soon enough, colleagues surrounded and embraced him as they confirmed the older man's death.

A civilian was killed as well, and a dozen other people injured, local officials said.

"It was a horrible picture," said Vasylenko Yevhen, a 44-year-old emergency services spokesman who was at the scene. "It's something unbelievable when you hear that sound" — that of another drone approaching a site crowded with emergency workers.

Russia honed the illegal "double-tap" tactic years ago in Syria, rights groups say, and now it is becoming a pattern across Ukraine. In addition to the Kharkiv strike April 4, similar attacks took place this month near the Black Sea port of Odesa and the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

The strikes are under scrutiny by war-crimes investigators, adding to a backlog of thousands of alleged atrocities. Officials said some emergency response protocols were being revised in order to protect rescuers, but declined to give details for fear of aiding Russia.

"We spend a third of our lives together to fight fires," said Yevhen. "We treat each other like family. And sometimes, we are dying together. Also like family."

There was the barista who escaped an occupied city. The cashier who found refuge in Kharkiv after being displaced. Servers with relatives on the front lines, kitchen workers with family members who had been killed or injured.

"Everyone has their war story," said 29-year-old Kharkiv entrepreneur Dmytro Kabenets, who runs a chain of coffeehouses called Makers, a name he says is meant to evoke not only the creation of caffeinated beverages, but also of community.

In roughly the span of the war, Kabenets' business has grown to four branches in the city and a fifth in a nearby front-line town called Kupiansk, which was occupied by Russian troops early in the war and whose inhabitants fear it may fall again.

If not for a few boarded-over windows — shattered when an attack in January wrecked the building down the street — this downtown branch would look like a hipster coffeehouse anywhere: young people tapping away at laptops, an Alvin and the Chipmunks video projected on the wall, the espresso machine quietly hissing.

Inscribed on one of the pieces of particleboard covering a tall window is a verse by Maksym Kryvtsov, a well-known Ukrainian poet-soldier who was killed in January at the front.

"My heart stopped beating long ago / It pours out like a river," one couplet goes.

Kabenets' daughter was 2 months old when the war began. She is now a toddler, and he and his wife have resolved to stay in the city and keep expanding the cafes into surrounding Kharkiv province.

Many of those who have chosen to remain in Kharkiv, even in these difficult times, tend to voice determined optimism. But others, especially among the city's large population of displaced people, may be staying put out of a sense of paralysis and despair, according to some who work with them.

Kabenets' next project — not even a full-fledged shop yet, he said — is in Izyum, occupied earlier in the war like Kupiansk and in likely danger if Russia, as expected, presses an offensive this spring.

Under circumstances like that, he said, it might be nice for people to be able to get a really good cup of coffee.

"For me, it's not about business and commerce," Kabenets said "It's a social project, a project for getting through this war together."

Onstage, Carmen was passionately scorning her erstwhile lover. Clustered in a dank, darkened corridor offstage, members of the chorus drew themselves up, preparing to burst into song.

Upstairs, the troupe's plush prewar performance space, one of Europe's largest opera and ballet theaters, was dark and silent.

Cast members clad in jeans and puffer coats were rehearsing Bizet's work in a chilly concrete basement, where a raised stage and a makeshift orchestra pit were installed late last year.

Mass gatherings in Kharkiv are still deemed too dangerous, as they have been since the start of the war. But authorities tacitly allow what are literally underground performances, as long as they are not advertised in a manner that would make them a target. One was set in coming days in this basement.

Early in the Russian invasion, the landmark theater — a hulking, slab-like structure likened by some locals to an aircraft carrier — closed after two rockets landed on its roof, but did not explode. The troupe went into exile, basing itself in Lithuania and performing all over Europe to try to keep alive the idea of flourishing Ukrainian culture.

Many are still outside the country, but some remained, or returned for bare-bones productions such as this one.

"It gives us so much joy, you can't believe it," said Armen Koloyan, 53, the theater's opera director. "It demands imagination from us, and from the audience. But we can imagine everything. Even an end to this war."