Fires still smouldered throughout Kyiv, Ukraine, after another record number of drone and missile attacks in the early hours of a recent Tuesday. But when an air-raid siren blasted out just before noon, pedestrians at a busy intersection did not scurry for cover or play chicken with traffic.
Mariam Mirakian, 25, waited patiently at the red light. So did everyone else. On the sidewalks of Ukraine’s capital, order ruled.
“Yes, there are rockets flying and all the things, but still you can get killed by a car,” Mirakian said. “You’re just trying to live normally, trying to save as many normal things as possible, even in wartime.”
Anyone new to Ukraine notices the disconnect between the front line and much of daily life farther away.
Complicated espresso drinks are still sold at gas stations; pizza and sushi are still on offer; and rave parties still rave, even if they end at 11pm, in time for the midnight curfew.
The desire for order is core to how Ukrainians cope in this fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Traffic lights seem to be the most obvious sign of how Ukrainians hold onto normalcy. Red means stop. Green means go. There is no yellow light here, no caution, no chancing it. Even during air-raid alarms.
“Even when I walk my dog in the evening and there are no cars at all, I still wait at the curb,” said Volodymyr Yeremenko, 63, a resident of Pryluky, a city of about 52,000 people about 145 km east of Kyiv, who had come to the capital for a doctor’s appointment.
Spotting a foreigner in Ukraine is easy. They cross when the light is still red, or, God forbid, jaywalk, something that is a hobby (or death wish) in cities like New York, which decriminalised jaywalking last year. Ukrainians have been known to shake their heads at scofflaws or to caution them not to cross.
Ukrainians say strictly obeying traffic signals was a peculiarity here long before the war. Maybe it’s a way to show they are more like the people in notoriously law-abiding street-crossing nations like Finland or Germany.
“In Lviv, it’s striking how people obey pedestrian traffic lights, even when there are no cars around,” wrote Johannes Majamaki, 24, a Finnish law student, on social media recently.
Majamaki, who often visits Ukraine, posted a photograph of pedestrians waiting on a carless corner. “It feels like being back home in Helsinki,” he noted.
Putting firm numbers on how widespread law-abiding behaviour at traffic lights is in Ukraine is difficult.
The Kyiv police did not respond to repeated questions for data on the number of tickets issued for crossing against a red light. The offense, a $6 fine, is lumped together with offenses by animal-drawn vehicles and errant bicycles, so it’s impossible to parse out the pedestrian violations.
But Anton Grushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology, said he thought that waiting patiently at the light was a cultural habit. He said he typically crossed the street only on a green light. He said that was his custom, even if there were no cars, in 2005 and today, in the middle of the war.
He added that he had not noticed any change in Ukrainians’ street-crossing behaviour since the Russians invaded in February 2022 because the war had been normalised for most people.