KHARKIV, Ukraine—The spring flowers have begun to bloom in the center of this city’s Shevchenko City Gardens, but there is no one around to see them. Instead, the streets are empty and a deathly silence hangs over what was once a crowded city of 1.5 million people, punctuated only by the regular sounds of artillery fire.

On my first night in the city, I was jolted awake at 6 a.m. by the sound of shelling. I could hear explosions at least every minute for the next hour and a half. Several were close enough to make the windows of our flat vibrate. Later in the day, we could see men cleaning up rubble a few blocks down from where we had slept.

“Why would we want to go outside when every step is a lottery with our lives!” Nastya, a 23-year-old metro station attendant, told The Daily Beast. (Due to the tense security situation, many residents were uncomfortable giving last names.) Like most Kharkivites, she rarely ventures outside. “We originally divided the city into dangerous areas like the center and the east of the city near the Russian lines and the other areas we considered safer.” But last week, she says, she went to visit her family in a formerly untouched area of Kharkiv. “As soon as I got there, they started shelling it!” she said. “Now nowhere in the city is safe.”