Dnipro, Ukraine — A city of 1.1 million, Dnipro sits on the banks of the Dnieper River in Eastern Ukraine. It’s 650 miles from the Polish border at Chelm. On the northwest approaches to this city, which is the country’s fourth largest and a six-hour drive from the capital, Kyiv, a car can speed down a road which in many ways is more pleasant than I-95 between Washington and New York. From this modern, divided highway, huge fields of plowed black earth alternate with even more massive fields of wheat alongside tidy farmhouses. Until you reach the little town of Tsybulivka in Poltava Oblast, it all looks remarkably like the flat steppes of eastern Kansas.

At that point, however, you turn right and south off the main road and into a landscape every bit as agriculturally rich but more visibly post-Soviet. The road becomes potholed and rough (though perhaps not as rough as some of the country roads back home in Oklahoma), and the developed highway and periodic truck stops that could pass for a Wawa give way to little towns and villages of houses built of painted cinderblock and tin roofs and workshops made of corrugated iron. Driving through at the slower speed of real life, you see parents walking their kids to school in the mist and drizzle of a November morning. You see old women in their gardens. And you see the war memorials. You see the town cemeteries with fresh graves and the little blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.

The city of Dnipro itself is grim. I won’t lie to you about that. From the far side of the river, you see rows and rows of massive grey apartment blocks. You see industrial buildings and decay. You see gaudy signs advertising karaoke and hookah and prepaid cellphone cards. The people are bundled up to keep out the cold. It’s grey and gritty the way Detroit looks in mid-November.

And in Dnipro — this city of a million souls — you can see whole blocks with shattered windows and burnt-out buildings.

The night before we arrived, Dnipro had a bad night. Last night, the city was burning. The Russians launched ballistic missiles and Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drones at the city. Across the street from the Makarov National Youth Aerospace Education Center, the local public television station took a direct hit. The TV news truck is a burned-out wreck. Shattered glass crinkles underfoot. There’s a smell of ash and burning rubber.

“Did the Russians intentionally aim for the TV station?” I ask Alex, a local journalist who can’t be more than 25. “I do not know,” he answers. “The Russians all the time hit us. They hit us every night.”

“We have a five-minute warning — and then, Boom.”

Here’s how it works. Everyone in Ukraine has the Повітряна Тривога — Povitryana Tryvoha — Ajax Systems air-raid alert app downloaded on his smartphone. You input your current location, or allow it to geotrack you the way your Uber app works, and the system sounds the alarm when Ukrainian radar or intelligence gets word of an impending strike on your region. Mark Hamill, the man who played Luke Skywalker, narrates the alert. “Take cover!” Hamill tells you. Complacency can get you killed.

But people are tired. They are tired of getting hit and hit . . . and hit. Sometimes getting to a shelter means quickly dressing at 3 a.m. and hustling your kids out the door, into the cold, and down the block to the nearest bomb shelter. Sometimes you do this and nothing happens, and then you are tired and broken at work the next day. Sometimes you decide to take the risk — just this once — and stay in bed, and the result is what happened to Artem, who fled Donetsk in 2022 ahead of the full-scale Russian invasion and ended up with his wife and young daughter here, in Dnipro.

He lost his car and his house when the Russians stormed into the east. Now he has lost this new apartment as well. When the missile hit his building and blasted a hole four stories up, Artem and his family were trapped in their flat by an avalanche of rubble, which blocked the exits. He lived, thanks be to God. But the Russians are still advancing, and Artem is worried.

He is a construction engineer. His wife is a nurse. His daughter just began first grade here, and even though they could certainly find work elsewhere in this ravaged country, they’d rather not pick up and move yet again. But he may have to — away from Dnipro, to the far west of Ukraine, away from the Russians who continue to insist on trying to take everything from him. “I think Americans don’t know what is happening here,” Artem tells me, holding a cardboard box of food and a few other possessions. “I am worried about the Russians. They keep coming.”

“They just keep coming.”

Indeed, and now the Russians are just 120 kilometers — 70 miles — away, pushing inexorably westward, albeit at great cost, toward the Dnieper. If they can get within artillery range, the Russians will be able to pound this great eastern city into submission with indiscriminate shelling. No one here doubts that they will not hesitate to do so.

“We need three things to stop them,” the deputy mayor, visibly frustrated, tells me. “Weapons, money, and men.”

“You Americans can help us with the first two. We, Ukrainians, will provide the third.”

They are so grateful for the American people’s help, a Greek Catholic priest tells me in English. “I would like to thank the American people,” he says, looking directly into my eyes. “But tell the American people that, when you do good, you must not fatigue of doing good.”

“A free people do and should help a free people.”

As darkness falls around 5 p.m., Ukrainian Telegram channels light up with predictions of an air attack on Dnipro. The Russians have been trying to knock out the city’s electrical grid and power stations. Lately, the citizens of the city have been able to count on about three hours of electricity per day. Our Ukrainian guide begins to get nervous. Dnipro is getting hit again. We should leave the city, he tells us. And as quickly as possible.

Our phones begin to sound with the air-raid alert. There’s going to be incoming. Mark Hamill tells us to take cover. The maps on our phones and translated Ukrainian Telegram channels warn of impending ballistic missiles strikes.

But it’s rush hour. The city’s streets are choked with traffic. I hear blasts in the distance, the thud of impacts. The traffic creaks forward in the darkness. The GPS no longer works. It’s being jammed. The city groans with trouble. We finally work our way to the big bridge over the river, and then across to the relative safety of the countryside and the road to Kyiv.

Dnipro and its people remain behind in the rain and darkness. And the Russians are advancing.

The author is on a trip sponsored by the humanitarian aid group Razom for Ukraine.