Last night I cooked borscht for some friends. It was tasty. My guests – several journalists and the Brazilian ambassador – scraped their bowls. I joked about it being “the last borscht in Kyiv”. At five o’clock this morning, that stopped being a joke.

The explosions woke me up. My wife and I counted three of them. I knew immediately that this was the beginning of the war. They were remote, but I remembered hearing that sound in 2015 in Donbas (the eastern region of Ukraine where the government has been fighting Russian-backed forces for the past few years). I’d thought this war would come – but at the same time, I hadn’t really believed it. Now I know how the Soviets felt in 1941, being woken by explosions when Hitler attacked.

We had breakfast. I made wheat porridge with truffle oil

I looked out of the window as I made tea. Our apartment is in the middle of the old city, and I saw two women walking their dogs on the street and road sweepers clearing the pavement outside our building. But there were almost no cars, even though it was rush hour.

My wife and I talked about what to do. We have a house in the countryside which we’ve kept heated throughout the winter in case we had to flee there, but we were worried about getting stuck in traffic. So we had breakfast. I made wheat porridge with truffle oil.

While we were eating we heard more explosions, louder this time. (We later found out they were Russian missiles falling on another part of Kyiv, as well as the suburbs.) We opened the door of our apartment to find our neighbours on the stairs. “There will be a bombing!” they called to us. “Go down to the bomb shelter!” Kyiv is full of bomb shelters, most of them built during the 1950s and 1960s when people were worried that NATO might attack.

We took bread, cheese and a bottle of water from our apartment and went out looking for the nearest shelter. As we walked, my wife asked nervously: “How do they know that we will be bombed?” She still didn’t want to believe it could happen.

On the street we ran into a friend who suggested we all go to the Radisson Hotel: “They won’t shoot there, there are foreign journalists,” she said. We sat on chairs in the hotel lobby and caught our breath. There were indeed many journalists in the foyer and several groups with television cameras. We spent half an hour there before deciding to leave again. I called a friend whose office is close to our house, and he invited us to pop in: he had a shelter in the basement of the building, he said.

Our excursion to the bomb shelter, which hadn’t been repaired for 50 years, wasn’t very pleasant. On the plus side there was a toilet and a washbasin. But it was also close to a Ukrainian military headquarters, so there was a good chance that the next Russian missile would land there.

Eventually we went home again. Our friend brought tape and began to stick it diagonally on the windows to stop the glass shattering if there was a big shock. I checked through the latest official statements from the government and the mayor of Kyiv. It was clear by then that the attack was being waged on several fronts, and a group of tanks had crossed into the Kyiv region from Belarus. I don’t know how far they’ve got and whether anyone can stop them. I really hope so.

It is still quiet outside my apartment, you just see the occasional person carrying a suitcase down the street. Supermarkets are open, but most pharmacies are closed. I’ve heard there are queues outside pet-food shops. Various friends have called and asked what they should do, but I don’t have anything to recommend. I don’t even know what to do myself. I’m just waiting for this to end. I guess I’m waiting for a miracle. Maybe in the evening I’ll have more idea. Or tomorrow.

Our friend began to stick tape on the windows to stop the glass shattering if there was a shock

Some people are deciding meet-up points so they can stay in touch with their family if the phone lines and internet go down. My one source of relief is that yesterday our grown-up children finally left for Lviv in western Ukraine. They’ve talked about going for months. Although Lviv was also shelled today, Russian troops are unlikely to go there.

Now we are making plans for them to get out of the country. The idea is for them to leave via Poland and go to Warsaw, then fly to London. They are British citizens. I am a citizen of Ukraine. So for now I’m staying here. ■

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist. His novels include “Death and the Penguin”

PHOTOGRAPHS: RON HAVIV