Kyiv
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Silhouettes move through dark alleys covered with snow and ice, towards the muffled beat coming from a concrete building in central Kyiv. Inside, a dim red light blurs the faces of a dancing crowd, their sweaty bodies pressed up against one another.

The red glow evokes the low-light torches used by soldiers on the front lines with Russia, hundreds of miles to the east, as they seek to avoid detection by the enemy. But for ravers at Closer, one of Kyiv’s most renowned nightclubs, partying is a way to forget the war – even if just for one night.

“It’s what helps to keep us sane,” Valeriia Shablii, 32, who attended a Closer event held to mark Maslenytsia – a Slavic festival that celebrates the beginning of spring – told CNN. “We say it’s like a war-life balance.”

The war has disrupted much of Ukraine’s cultural life. Many music venues have closed since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and some artists have fled while others have joined the armed forces.

Yet Ukrainians are still coming together to party. Closer, which occupies a former ribbon factory, shut down when the war began but re-opened just eight months later, and has run music events almost every weekend since.

Under the constant threat of missile and drone strikes, and after a harsh winter made worse by repeated energy blackouts, dancing has become an emotional outlet for the turmoil of war, Shablii said.

“People are just really tired,” she said. “Coming here and spending some time with your friends… it’s uniting people.”

She says rave culture is alive, if changed, in Ukraine’s major cities and has emerged as a powerful form of resistance during four years of brutal war with Russia.

“It didn’t die,” she said. “We will rave on Putin’s grave.”

Raving and resistance in Ukraine

Even before the war, Ukraine’s electronic dance music scene had long been intertwined with notions of resistance.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the 1990s, a new era of independence encouraged an openness to Western cultural influences – in parallel with other now-famous European electronic music hotspots like Berlin.

Large-scale parties, squat raves and festivals sprang up across Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, becoming spaces for freedom of expression and musical experimentation.

The emergence of rave culture in Ukraine culminated in the mid-2010s, with the formation of Kyiv’s cult Cxema parties – huge raves held in urban warehouses or under bridges – which would go on to achieve international recognition.

Events were about “creating a safe and democratic space” and “building a community” for disaffected young people suffering economic insecurity in the wake of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, when protesters ousted the then-president Viktor Yanukovych for what they saw as widespread corruption and abuse of power, Cxema’s founder Slava Lepsheiev told CNN.

“Resistance was directed against the old system and Soviet inertia,” Lepsheiev said. “After the full-scale invasion, the vector of resistance changed and is now directed against the enemy. We get together and dance to stay strong,” he said.

“Given the horrors of this war, it is especially important for us to have the opportunity and the desire to continue to have fun,” Lepsheiev said, adding that parties had become a place for escapism.

But organizing raves during wartime is difficult. Due to the nighttime curfew, Lepsheiev says Cxema events are held during the day, and are smaller because of safety concerns around large gatherings.

Club event organizers elsewhere in Ukraine agree that the war has influenced rave culture. “The party has more energy,” said Anton Nazarko, co-founder of Some People, a group that runs a nightclub in Kharkiv. “(It’s) a very wild energy.”

Kharkiv is just 19 miles from the Russian border, and Nazarko told CNN that Ukrainian soldiers sometimes attend the club’s events, which usually take place every two weeks.

“In the morning, friends from our community are fighting in the trenches. And in the evening, they come to our party,” he said. “They’re dancing like it’s their last day.”

Some People’s original headquarters in Kharkiv was bombed just a few days into the war, Nazarko said, although no one was killed. He said members of his team sold belongings and borrowed money to develop their current site – the Center of New Culture – in 2023.

Nazarko said he felt that ensuring the continuation of cultural life in Kharkiv was a contribution to the war effort.

“This is very important for Ukraine, and very important for the city. Because the Russian army wants one thing – for all people to leave,” he said. “That’s why they bomb electricity (infrastructure), so that we don’t have a normal life.”

The nightclub – which occupies a Soviet-era refrigerator factory – has a generator that allows raves to continue during energy blackouts, and Nazarko says the site also acts a bomb shelter for local people.

Nazarko and his team plan to extend the center by building an exhibition hall and a cinema. “If the war didn’t start, maybe we would never have started to do this big project,” he said. “We don’t know how long we will live… we don’t have any time to dream.”

But for others, the harsh realities of war have drawn them away from Ukraine’s club scene.

Daniel Detcom is now a junior sergeant in the Ukrainian armed forces and previously served as a rifleman and drone operator. But before the war, he was a well-known DJ and techno music producer.

His Kyiv-based electronic music collective, Dots, organized popular parties that hosted DJs from around the world, Detcom told CNN, who were often surprised how much Ukrainian ravers loved to party. “These guys would say, ‘what’s the deal with your dancers? They dance like crazy!’”

But as tension between Ukraine and Russia intensified in the lead-up to the full-scale invasion, Detcom began preparing for conflict. He practised at a local shooting range and took classes in tactical medicine.

Despite his flourishing DJ career, he joined the army immediately when the war broke out. “I didn’t think about that like it was an option or choice,” Detcom told CNN. “It just felt right.”

While awaiting re-deployment to the front line, Detcom told CNN that he misses the “vibrant” rave community that existed in Ukraine before the war. “They were happy, careless days,” he said. “Life will not be the same ever again.”

Detcom has been able to continue producing music on his laptop while serving in the army and has even run several Dots parties during periods of leave from the front line – but raving is no longer so carefree.

He said that, although organizers now usually ensure there are medical teams present, he always takes two first aid kits with him when he goes to raves because of the threat of Russian strikes and he usually stays sober.

Rave culture has evolved. “It’s daytime parties now,” said Detcom. “This new generation of clubbers, ravers and DJs, they’ve actually never partied during the night.”

But in other ways, the war has provided opportunities for Ukrainian DJs and electronic music producers.

“I feel like there’s a big lift for young artists right now. I see new faces every day,” said Denys Yurchenko, an art director at Kultura Zvuku, a DJ and music production school in Kyiv.

He told CNN that fewer international artists are willing to travel to Ukraine to play in nightclubs due to the on-going conflict, meaning more space on event line-ups for Ukrainian electronic music producers, who are inspired to experiment.

Music labels have been keen to promote Ukrainian artists during the country’s war with Russia, Yurchenko added, and funds from the sale of some Ukrainian electronic music compilation albums, as well as nightclub events, have been used to support the war effort.

Detcom, Nazarko and Yurchenko have all either performed at, or organized, raves in support of the war effort. “It’s absolutely, 100% about resistance and helping our country,” Yurchenko said.

At Closer nightclub, in Kyiv, that resistance comes with hope. “We are waiting for spring,” Shablii said.

On the dancefloor, friends embrace; a young couple kisses on a sofa in a dark corner. Despite the chill in the air, groups of friends laugh together in the club’s outdoor courtyard, passing around hand-rolled cigarettes.

After a harsh winter and four years of war, Ukrainians are still raving.