France 24's special correspondent met her in the capital and presented her as emblematic of a generation learning to live under daily bombardment. Danger, the dispatch reported, has become woven into the fabric of daily life, and Daryna has grown up before her time, far too quickly. Cold has compounded the outages. Inside homes, radiators connected to Soviet-era heating networks remained desperately cold as temperatures plunged to as low as -27°C in the capital and -30°C in some parts of the country.
The pressure on the city is not only the strikes themselves. The account described a deliberate Kremlin strategy aimed at sowing panic and, potentially, triggering a mass exodus from a capital Russian forces failed to capture in the early days of the 2022 invasion.
The war stays close to that room. She recounted how a friend's apartment, just a few streets away, was damaged in an explosion a few days earlier.
In Kyiv, power cuts are a daily occurrence. Rolling blackouts are imposed district by district according to schedules that are, at best, unreliable.
Daryna was barely 21 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now 25 and living in Kyiv, she has entered adulthood in a country at war.
Seated in an old wooden armchair, she said she eventually realised she needed more things around her"to make this place feel like home."."I wanted to make it as beautiful as possible because it's important to surround yourself with beauty and things that bring you comfort during wartime,"she said. Daryna said she barely survived, even though she wore thermal clothing all the time.