There’s a veneer of normality to life in Ukraine’s major cities if you ignore the air raid sirens, the booming sounds of anti-aircraft fire, the threatening buzz of drones passing overhead, and the darkened streets of neighbourhoods taking their turn as part of rolling power cuts affecting all of Ukraine.

As I say, if you ignore all of the above it’s fine, and many people do.

Kyiv appears particularly normal. Shops and restaurants are open, I’m told theatre performances are sometimes sold out, and at times you can still see families taking photos in front of the capital’s exquisite churches and cathedrals.

Late at night though, the city starts to change.

In the past few days, mostly throughout the night, air raid apps have been lighting up with warnings to “seek shelter”, while the sound of the sirens pierces the still and freezing air of the city.

From different directions I watched the anti-aircraft batteries tracking and following Russian drones swarming over Kyiv in unprecedented numbers – the tracers from their machine guns shooting into the night skies and ominous orange glows in the distance from possible missile strikes.

The capital is being targeted as never before, so much so that the military has assigned special anti-air units particularly for the defence of Kyiv.

Attacking this city is partly a Russian tactic to wear its population down and create fear and uncertainty.

But many of its drones and missiles are targeting the country’s energy infrastructure. Russia wants to switch the lights out here and, if possible, literally freeze this people’s resistance.

A necessity, rolling blackouts are the norm now while engineers repair power stations and supply lines. Power producing capacity is already limited after years of targeting, and as the temperature drops the authorities must save wherever they can.

For families the threat of attack from the skies never goes away

I drove through the streets of Kyiv’s left-bank suburbs, darkened apartment blocks silhouetted against the city’s skyline.

The dimly lit lights inside apartments are provided by generators or car batteries hooked up to makeshift electrical circuits tacked on to walls and ceilings.

Alona emerged from the doors of her apartment building into a pitch-black car park, her torch glinting off the remains of the first snows of winter, now turned into ice.

I followed her up three flights of stairs into her apartment and was introduced to her husband, Yevhen, and their two-year-old, Oles.

For families in particular, the threat of attack from the skies never goes away. In many ways it is psychological warfare, and Alona said it’s taking its toll on her and her little boy Oles.

“The hardest part, by far, is at night when you’re putting your child to sleep in the bathroom or when you have to rush to the shelter in the middle of the night. It’s really tough because it disrupts the child’s routine,” she explained.

“He doesn’t get proper sleep, everything is upside down for him, he’s terrified and he had started to become scared of the alarms.”

‘It’s still deeply frightening to be in the open’

Alona talked me through how her family tries to work out the risk of a strike in their area when the air raid sirens go off, and then they make a decision whether or not to seek shelter accordingly.

This family is typical of thousands here – scared to stay at home and scared to go out.

“I saw a missile being shot down and let me tell you, it was terrifying,” Alona said.

“It’s a haunting experience, even though I’m standing here now, telling you about how we ‘measure’ the scale of the danger, it’s still deeply frightening to be in the open.”

The soldiers who do their best to track Russian drones

After travelling to see the family, I went to meet an air defence mobile group belonging to the National Guard. I followed them on to a frozen field where they set up to man their position in the dark of night and sub-zero temperatures.

They are just a handful of hundreds, even thousands, of soldiers across the country doing the same.

These men, led by their commander Serhii, do their best to track the incoming drones with radar and use large spotlights to search the skies when they believe a Russian drone is nearby.

‘The enemy is changing tactics’

Russian tactics have changed though. As many as half are harmless decoys designed to waste time and bullets. The other half are deadly.

“The enemy is changing tactics, trying out different manoeuvres,” Serhii told me.

“They are attempting to approach in groups at low altitudes to avoid detection by radar, some targets fly high and are visible on radar, while another group flies low and slips past air defence systems.”

He showed me a Ukrainian-developed program on a tablet that tracks and monitors the movement of drones and missiles.

“Here it shows the movement of aerial targets in real-time within our zone of engagement,” he explained, pointing at a swarm of drones on his screen flying over Ukrainian territory.

People try to carry on as normal as attacks increase

Whether Russia’s main tactic is to target energy infrastructure or to sow fear, or both, nobody really knows. What they do know is that the attacks have increased.

“I cannot say the specific [reason for] that, whether it’s just the terror to make people feel unsafe and create [an] unstable situation or it’s some kind of facilities they’re trying to target, but they are operating, it’s like regular,” Pavlo Yurov of the National Guard’s “Hurricane” brigade told me.

Beneath the National Guards’ rudimentary dome of protection, people try to carry on with life as staff in restaurants and shops dress Christmas trees and hang fairy lights, but this war is grindingly depressing for everyone.

Young men fear being drafted, many hide out of sight. The news from the eastern front lines is never good, the Russians are taking more land.

Another Christmas is coming and like the last two it will likely pass without any sign of peace.

Qualified divers have told Sky News how “corner-cutting” caused significant safety hazards on a tourist boat with the same owners as the vessel which sank in the Red Sea.

The 44-metre-long Sea Story went down on Monday, south of the Egyptian coastal town of Marsa Alam.

Sea Story, which is owned by Dive Pro Liveaboard in Hurghada, Egypt, was a four-deck, wooden-hulled motor yacht which was on a multi-day diving trip.

An experienced diver has said he had travelled on another vessel, the Sea Pearl, owned by the same firm, just days before the incident.

Timothy, who only wanted to give his first name, said there were concerns among divers about “boat safety standards” on the Sea Pearl boat and the lack of a life jacket drill – and revealed there was no centralised system or adequate communication to raise the alarm in the event of an emergency.

“The Egyptian government has robust safety standards, but there’s very little enforcement,” he told Sky News.

“We weren’t told how to deploy the life rafts or anything like that. That’s not specific to Dive Pro – this would be common across the industry here.

“They didn’t say, ‘familiarise yourself with your life jackets in your room’.”

Timothy said another couple in the group revealed how they only had one life jacket between them in their cabin.

“When [they] went to the crew and asked for another one, they said ‘it’s fine, we have plenty of them in the crew quarters’,” he said.

“That’s an example of the kind of corner-cutting that I was referring to.

“I found that the staff were smoking cigarettes on the dive deck where we have compressed oxygen cylinders – you know, risk of a massive explosion.”

He added there was no safety plan or drill put in place so people were aware of what to do in an emergency.

“Absolutely not. There was no plan of escape,” he said.

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Timothy said there was an emergency escape hatch on the Sea Pearl “but it wasn’t pointed out to us how to open it”.

He added: “We found it ourselves. It’s only approximately a metre square – so it would be only one person at a time.

“And imagine if the boat was inverted in the dark. Some of the divers were relatively elderly.

“There was no emergency drill at all. They just said there are life jackets in all the cabins, but it turns out that wasn’t the case.”

Another qualified diver, who only wants to be known as James, told Sky News he had been “unhappy” about his experience on Sea Pearl.

He added: “Safety didn’t feel paramount. It didn’t feel like it was the most important thing to Dive Pro, operating the Sea Pearl.

“We arrived at the boats and on the Saturday, nobody kind of said, ‘hi, I’m such and such’. They basically just guided us towards a man with a credit card machine.

“They wanted their port fees paying before we did anything else and any other extras that we needed.”

Dive Pro Liveaboard has been contacted by Sky News for comment, but the firm has not responded.

A man who went missing for five weeks in a remote park in the Rocky Mountains has been found alive – after enduring temperatures as low as -20C (-4F).

Sam Benastick was reported missing on 19 October after failing to return from a 10-day trip to Redfern-Keily Park in Canada’s British Columbia province.

Search efforts, led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), were called off in late October with temperatures dropping well below freezing at times.

But on Tuesday, two men on their way to work at Redfern Lake saw a man walking towards them and recognised him as Mr Benastick.

They took him to a hospital, where police officially identified him as the missing 20-year-old.

Corporal Madonna Saunderson, of the British Columbia RCMP communications team, said: “Finding Sam alive is the absolute best outcome.

“After all the time he was missing, it was feared that this would not be the outcome.”

Mr Benastick told police he stayed in his car for a couple of days and then walked to a creek where he camped out for between 10 and 15 days.

He said he then moved down the valley, and built a camp and shelter in a dried-out creek bed, before making his way to the area where he was found.

According to CBC News, Mr Benastick’s parents had stayed for 20 days at the Buffalo Inn near Pink Mountain while taking part in the search.

The inn’s general manager, Mike Reid, who said he had spoken to the people who found Mr Benastick, told the Canadian broadcaster: “You know, the guy says he’s in rough shape. But man, for 50 days out in that cold, he’s going to live.”

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More than 120 volunteers from across British Columbia were reportedly involved in the search effort, alongside the RCMP and Canadian Rangers, as well as Fort Nelson and North Peace search and rescue teams.

Redfern-Keily Park, where Mr Benastick went missing, is a remote beauty spot in the north-eastern region of British Columbia and is part of the Northern Rocky Mountains.

Those visiting the park are warned it is an “isolated area and weather can change rapidly” – and to be wary of possible encounters with grizzly and black bears.