The last weekend lasted three days: Kyiv said goodbye to LIFT — while Closer still starts its parties at five

The Kyiv club LIFT at 43 Antonovycha Street has announced that it is closing its doors. The final weekend ran for three days — 13, 14 and 15 March — and with it an eleven-year history came, for now, to a halt.

The club announced it on its own Telegram channel.

The venue worked on the fourth floor, with no sign at the entrance and the way in through an office building. In recent years it lived as a karaoke bar: free entry on weekdays, paid on Friday and Saturday, with a programme carried by its own roster of performers, whom the club itself called its travesti family. On the last Saturday MANILA BOSS took the stage, DJ VLAD was behind the decks, and the doors opened at 17:00.

"LIFT was always more than karaoke. It was a place of freedom, of voice, and of people who were not afraid to be themselves," the venue said in its statement.

Why a Kyiv party ends at half past ten

LIFT's timetable was not a whim of its owners but the arithmetic of a city at war. Kyiv is under a curfew from midnight to five in the morning. Everything that used to begin at midnight now has to end before it: guests must get home in time.

So Kyiv clubs moved their parties to the early evening, and some simply to daytime. Before 2022 the city was known for sets that ran for many hours on end; now a typical event starts closer to evening and goes dark by eleven.

"It's what helps to keep us sane. We say it's like a war-life balance," Valeriia Shablii, 32, a guest at a Kyiv party, told CNN.

Closer: eight months of silence, then dancing in broad daylight

The main venue of this scene is Closer at 31 Nyzhnoiurkivska Street. The club opened in 2013 in the workshops of a former ribbon factory in Podil and was conceived from the start as more than a dancefloor: an art centre with lectures, exhibitions, later its own DJ school, record shop and label. Capacity is around three hundred.

A few weeks before the invasion the club's team was answering the question of whether it was appropriate to throw parties while everyone was talking about war.

"Is it OK to make parties during this period? Parties are needed now more than ever! For a few reasons: to distract from the news, to feel and show that our spirit did not falter, to celebrate the freedom, to stay together, to dance as it is the best thing that could possibly be done at this moment," Closer said in February 2022.

Three weeks later the club stopped. In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion its team welded anti-tank hedgehogs out of the beams of festival stages, and the venue's kitchen cooked meals for Kyiv hospitals.

Dancing returned only eight months later, in October 2022, with three parties for the club's ninth anniversary. They ran during the day, because the curfew then began at eleven at night. That autumn, as russia struck the power grid, the club ran on its own generators: Saturday from two in the afternoon until nine in the evening, Sunday from seven in the morning.

The scene has not recovered its pre-war scale. By the estimate of co-founder Serhiy Yatsenko, events are now around three times smaller than they were; there was a night when three hundred people bought tickets and did not come.

Vertuha: the residents who ban filming

One of the parties holding this scene together is Vertuha. In its own description the team calls itself residents at Closer; it has its own label, VERTUHA Records, and its co-founder and DJ is Seba Korecky, otherwise Vsevolod Koretsky.

Vertuha's nights are built around the same curfew timetable: from five in the afternoon until half past ten, ages 21 and up. The December 2025 edition was called "FETISH DECADENCE", the February 2026 one "LIGHT IN LOVE".

Two things set it apart from an ordinary club night. The first is a strict ban on photo and video: filming is not allowed at all, which is why almost no footage from the room exists. The second is a dress code the team describes as a manifesto of self-expression rather than a clothing requirement.

"Vertuha is not just a party. It is a space of trust, of beauty and of the freedom to be yourself. To preserve that vibe, we have our rules," the organisers write.

Asked who it is all for, Koretsky told the Canadian magazine Xtra briefly: "It's a place dedicated to open-minded people".

What remains

Notably, LIFT never described itself in the language of labels — neither in its own announcements nor in its farewell statement. It spoke of freedom, of voice and of the right to be oneself, and called its roster a family. Vertuha puts it the same way: a space of trust and of the freedom to be yourself.

The club called the closure temporary and ended its statement carefully.

"Maybe this is only a pause. Maybe a new chapter is still ahead," LIFT wrote.

As ONE//FM reported earlier, club culture long ago stopped being only about music — Honey Dijon turned it into an evening inside Tate Modern.