With the Russian army camped at the city's gates, the days all seem the same in Kharkiv: rockets and missiles fall regularly on Ukraine's second city, already familiar with suffering from World War II.
"Of course we're scared, they fall almost all the time here!" Nikolai says, hurrying home after going out "to buy two, three beers".
But the curfew creeps closer and Russian forces often pound the city at the end of the afternoon.
Two hours earlier, in the same Tyurinka district, a salvo of rockets mowed down six people as they queued in front of a post office to receive humanitarian aid.
Four others were killed, punctured by missile shrapnel on Friday.
In the most at-risk areas, pedestrians are rare on the streets.
People only go out for supplies or to walk their dogs in deserted parks.
"I'm from Kharkiv, I have nowhere to go. So why leave?" says a weary Anna Kolinichenko, with an old labrador pulling on its leash.
Kolinichenko, who lives in a three-room flat with her sister and brother-in-law, said they don't even bother to head down to the cellar when the sirens go off.
"If a bomb drops, we're going to die anyway," the 50-year-old said, adding that "we are getting a little used to explosions".
Fireworks every day
More than 1.5 million live in the majority Russian-speaking city, lying at the confluence of three rivers, located around 40 kilometres (24 miles) from the Russian border.
In a single day this week, the local administration reported 44 artillery, mortar and tank rounds, and 140 rockets raining down on the city, and two missiles fired from the Black Sea.
"In Kharkiv, it's fireworks every day at the moment," a police officer says, deadpan, at a checkpoint.
Kharkiv mayor Igor Terekhov says there has been "indiscriminatory bombing and several dead" every day.
"It's a war against Kharkiv, against Ukraine, against civilians," he said.
Russian for centuries under the Tsars, Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine between 1917 and 1934, preserving the imposing official monuments and modernist buildings from the communist period.
The city paid a heavy price fighting Nazi Germany, with four bloody battles, hundreds of thousands dead and a decimated population.
This time, the aggressor is Russian.
On the invasion's first day on February 24, Russian forces descended on the city, penetrating the suburbs, but were then pushed back to Kharkiv's northern and eastern outskirts.
Since then, Russian artillery has been striking day and night, especially in the north and east of the city.
In the heart of the city, Russia's long-range missiles target administrative buildings and security services.
In the vast Freedom Square, more than three weeks after a deadly shooting, rescue workers continue to remove bodies -- more than 20 to date -- from the rubble of the governorate's gutted facade.
Nearby, signs celebrating the "glory of Ukraine" and lambasting "Russian fascism" have been left behind after a protest.
On the other side of the deserted square lies an abandoned artificial ice rink.
- Ravaged homes -
Destroyed buildings, windows ripped out, rubble-strewn pavements, everywhere in Kharkiv carries the marks of a month of heavy bombardment.
Even the golden domes of an Orthodox church, close to the police headquarters, have been ravaged by shrapnel.
Russian forces have destroyed or damaged 1,143 buildings, including 998 homes or apartment blocks, the mayor's office says.
The famous Derzhprom building, the first Soviet skyscraper constructed in 1928 at the heart of the city, has been spared for the moment, with only a few shattered windows.
Kharkiv's aerial defences were demolished in the invasion's early hours, leaving it vulnerable to Russian planes dropping powerful bombs.
Local officials say the thermobaric bombs, also known as fuel-air explosives, blow up everything within tens of metres around them.
A nursery for deaf children and two apartment blocks in the northern district of Shevchenko, close to a large television antenna, were devastated by an Uragan rocket-launcher, miraculously without any victims.
The planes and aerial bombardments stopped for less than a week, allowing for the arrival of new anti-missile defences, several local officials said.
"The situation changes all the time," says Sergiy, a man living on the fifth floor of a Soviet building with the lift out of order and a ruined stairwell.
"It's rather more indiscriminate in the suburbs but more targeted in the city centre," he says.
To protect its heritage, the municipality has erected mountains of sandbags around sculptures and monuments, including the statue of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.
Palpable paranoia
Kolinichenko, the woman now less scared of air raid sirens, says there are no longer any street fights, but "there were a lot of saboteurs here".
Kharkiv -- even the mayor agrees -- is a city "where residents have brothers and friends in Russia", a closeness which Moscow uses to bring arms and fighters in.
In 2014, after the Maidan Square revolution in Kyiv, there was unrest in Kharkiv by pro-Russian separatists, but it was quickly suppressed by Ukrainian security forces.
Paranoia is palpable everywhere in the city, which is dotted with makeshift barricades and anti-tank obstacles.
Police cars patrol the city where traffic is almost non-existent, and any suspicious vehicle is immediately stopped and searched.
Snipers at night are ordered to open fire on anyone unidentified on the streets.
"The situation today is very difficult," the mayor says, only meeting the press in a secret place, deep underground.
"But we're united and we're fighting."