Culture · Kyiv, Ukraine
How do people party in Ukraine?
A weekend at Brave! Factory festival, which took place in Kyiv on 22–23 August 2026.
I went to Kyiv to see how Ukrainians party, mostly for professional reasons. A fellow drug checking organisation, Drugstore, was scheduled to work at one of the biggest local festivals, Brave! Factory. Drugstore is part of the non-profit Alliance for Public Health, which funds services ranging from mobile support near the front lines to basic harm reduction supplies such as drug education materials, safer sniffing kits and reagent test kits. Coincidentally, my friends said that Brave! is the best festival in Ukraine, I had to go.
With Drugstore’s Galya Sergenko we arranged for her team to show me how they work at a party and to do a small tour of their space. After a relatively easy overnight coach from Warsaw we met up on a Friday afternoon in the office. Drugstore has their own versions of the famous TripSit drug interaction chart, reagent tests and many more materials they showed me. Next we went on to continue talking over a drink and some of the best deruny (potato fritters) I ever had.
There is no choice
“Kyiv lives its own life no matter what, the people are already used to it. Because there is no choice.”
Galya, Drugstore
Asked if they had seen any weird drugs, and who uses them, Drugstore’s Olga tells me “It’s the new generation”. According to Drugstore, the purity of more classic drugs has gone down since the start of the full-scale invasion. Ukraine’s legal-highs landscape has included synthetic cannabinoids and kratom. Recently more new psychoactive compounds got banned and the drugs are no longer so much in the open — if that can be considered an improvement.
On the wall of Spaska 13, the local grassroots community centre where we talked, there is a sign saying, “The occupiers’ language is not spoken here.” I asked Olga how come Russian is not allowed here, but I could hear people using some Russian words, like “больше” (“bolshe,” meaning “more”) or “хорошо” (“khorosho,” meaning “good/well”). That is called surzhyk, a kind of mixture of Ukrainian and Russian. Banning Russian language is not easy either.
Sitting in a café in Ukraine, casually discussing drugs, felt off. I repeated to Olga how everyone I knew had said this trip was a bad idea.
“Yeah, so what? It’s a bad idea to live here and we still do it.”
Olga, Drugstore
The next day, right before the Brave! Factory festival gates opened at the old Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv, I met Kolya. He must be around 18, with long hair, a KISS band T-shirt and a guitar around his neck. When I asked him about it and if he came for the festival too, he said that he was only there waiting for a girl.
“I can play, do you want me to play?” Kolya asked shyly. I encouraged him and he played a few chords from Smoke on the Water before adding:
“I can also sing, but I sing better in Russian.”
Kolya
The festival starts at noon, because everyone needs to get home by midnight in time for curfew. Day parties are the new norm, and that means a completely different party from a few years back, as I learned from veteran raver Serhii at the Depo stage, where Lisovskyi was opening.
“If you could only see how it used to be, back at Brave in Metrobud. Three or four thousand people at one stage.”
Serhii
Serhii used to work in Poland, but returned to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022. He must had worked and lived in more cities in Poland, than I have even visited despite being a native. While we talked, a dog came around with a lady. She noticed Serhii’s injured legs and said something to him quietly in Ukrainian. He replied that he had only done what he could.
I would die if I didn’t live
Now out of military service, he keeps busy. His passions for football and music drive him to make both more accessible in his hometown of Ternopil. He showed me photos of a football field he had built and commented on how he had seen buildings just as big completely annihilated by Russian bombs.
“I would die if I didn’t live. Every day something happens. Every night can be the last night. People in Ukraine want to live, not die. I want for everyone to live and have fun, not be at war.”
Serhii
How can you survive this shit without it?
At Drugstore’s info stand I met Anastasia, a local DJ who came to the festival with two of her friends. “How can you survive this shit without it?” she says about raving while at war. Anastasia takes lessons from the legendary Closer club collective, and the names Igor Glushko, Roman K. and Sasha Shults quickly landed among the favourites in my timetable. “She is our guide, too,” her friends said proudly.
One of the hottest names this year was Mezerg, a French artist who plays a custom instrument comprising a theremin, keyboard and percussion piece. Although a successful studio artist as well, he considers himself primarily a live performer. Right before he started, someone in the audience shouted the classic:
“Putin dickhead! Welcome to Ukraine!”
Ukraine is my home
Sweely, a French DJ, played at the Dvir stage, where I bumped into Tatyana.
“I used to work in international development, in Iraq, Afghanistan. I live in Mexico but now I came here, as Ukraine is my home.”
Tatyana
She asked what brought me there, and we chatted about harm reduction and drug checking test kits for a bit. Personally, she does not use any drugs, but is a big fan of red and black tea. We were in luck: here, of course, we could find a tea booth. It was right on the way to the techno at the Topka stage.
Tatyana helps her mother run an animal shelter near Kyiv. They help animals from all around, and she was not sure if she could come for the afterparty at Closer, scheduled for the next weekend.
“But if you are interested, in September there is another festival, Dirty Dog, that you are welcome to come for. ”
Tatyana
Most party goes probably do use some psychoactive compounds, although certainly much less at any day party than during a typical night out clubbing. At Brave I have not seen almost any person clearly under the influence of anything psychoactive, really, but with multiple chill zones, medics on the spot and Drugstore too, there is no doubt safety is paramount to the organizers.
Later that day I said my goodbyes — “do pobachennia” — to Drugstore’s crew and got going for the bus back to Poland. Just as I finished listening to Eric Cloutier’s closing DJ set, I got an air raid alert notification on the phone. Because of course there is an app for that.
I asked a girl standing next to me where the shelter was. Were we heading to the subway? She looked at me, surprised, and just smiled and loughed.
Not to be dramatic, but I was going to take the subway anyway, so I headed for the shelter. I asked a teenage girl I met on the way if she knew anything more about what was going on. She showed me a Telegram group chat that tracks “arrivals”. This way, you can know if your district is targeted or not, which can be more precise than the city-wide alarms.
From what the chat said, we should be fine. But as we passed under a busy street, it became less clear whether what we were hearing was car exhausts or Shahed drones.
We started to walk faster. We had places to be. Time to go home.
Support Ukraine now by joining the war relief efforts and donating at u24.gov.ua.
