Kyiv 5 Day Plan: For When It's Safe
Kyiv does not currently have a version of this five-day trip you can take. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022 and is still running. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against all travel to Kyiv, the US State Department holds Ukraine at its highest-tier “Do Not Travel” guidance, and the country operates under martial law with a nightly curfew. Ukraine’s airspace has been closed to commercial flights since day one of the war, so Boryspil and Zhuliany sit shut with nothing scheduled in or out. Kyiv continues to take missile and drone strikes that set off air-raid alerts telling residents to take shelter immediately, and ordinary travel insurance does not cover a trip made against official advice. Check the live FCDO Ukraine page before you plan around anything written here, since the facts move faster than this page does.
So this describes the city for a future peacetime visit, not a suggestion to travel now. It also corrects something older versions of this plan got wrong: sending a day to Chornobyl as a guided excursion. Chornobyl is not a live booking anywhere in this plan. The Exclusion Zone’s visitor passes were suspended on 11 April 2022 after Russian forces occupied and then withdrew from the zone, and no operator runs that trip today, whatever an old itinerary still claims. The five days below stay inside Kyiv itself.
The figures below are rough, pre-war order-of-magnitude estimates in hryvnia (UAH, ₴), not researched current prices. They’re useful only as a sense of scale for whenever this plan becomes real again.
| Day | Focus | Rough peacetime cost estimate (₴ per person) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | St Sophia’s Cathedral, St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, the Golden Gate, Maidan Nezalezhnosti | roughly ₴500-1,000 in entry fees and transit |
| 2 | Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, the Mother Ukraine monument | roughly ₴700-1,300 in entry fees, transit, and a meal |
| 3 | Andriyivskyi Descent, Podil | roughly ₴400-900 in entry fees, transit, and a meal |
| 4 | The National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine at Pyrohiv | roughly ₴300-700 in entry fees and transit |
| 5 | Mariinskyi Palace and the Pechersk government quarter | roughly ₴200-500 in transit and a meal, since the palace grounds cost nothing to walk |
Day 1: The upper town’s oldest churches and its newest history
Start at St Sophia’s Cathedral , raised 1017-1024 under Yaroslav the Wise and inscribed by UNESCO in 1990 as one property together with the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The war pushed that listing onto UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger in September 2023, so a future visit here is also a visit to a monument the war has directly endangered, not just an old church with good frescoes.
From there, St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, founded 1108-1113 under the Kyivan Rus’ ruler Sviatopolk II. Soviet authorities tore it down between 1935 and 1937 to clear ground for a government complex that was never built, a deliberate act of historical erasure worth knowing before admiring the rebuild, which dates from after Ukrainian independence and reopened in 1999. The Golden Gate nearby carries a similar honesty problem: the original, also raised in 1017-1024, fell into ruin after the 1240 Mongol invasion, and what stands today is a 1982 Soviet reconstruction built for Kyiv’s 1500th-anniversary celebrations, with no surviving image of the original to confirm how close the copy really is.
Finish day one at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square. It isn’t a photo stop; it’s where the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests played out, and where more than 100 people, the “Heavenly Hundred,” were killed. Since 2022 the square has carried a wartime memorial role too, with rows of flags marking the fallen.
Day 2: The Lavra, and the monument that changed its name
Give the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the “Monastery of the Caves,” the morning. Founded in 1051, it shares the 1990 UNESCO inscription and the September 2023 in-danger listing with St Sophia’s. Its underground galleries hold the preserved remains of venerated monks, and above ground the Great Lavra Belltower, built 1731-1745, rises 96.5 metres over the Dormition Cathedral.
Spend the afternoon at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, home to the statue long known as the Motherland Monument. Built between 1979 and 1981, the 62-metre stainless-steel figure stands on a 102-metre base holding a shield and sword aloft. The memorial complex’s director announced the rename to “Mother Ukraine” on 29 July 2023, and two days later, on 1 August 2023, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle shield was removed from that raised arm and replaced with the Ukrainian trident, work that went ahead on schedule despite bad weather and Russian air raids at the time.
Day 3: The descent and Podil
Work down the Andriyivskyi Descent in the morning, a 720-metre cobblestone street lined with galleries and souvenir stalls, with the 18th-century Baroque St Andrew’s Church, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, at the top. It ends in Podil, the historic riverside merchant and craft district that has anchored Kyiv’s economy for centuries and still does today.
Give the rest of the day to Podil itself, its streets and old warehouses, without another ticket to buy. It’s a natural pause between the centre’s dense sightseeing and the trip out to the edge of the city that day four makes.
Day 4: Pyrohiv, out past the centre
Day four is where older versions of this plan sent readers to Chornobyl. It goes to the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine instead, known locally as Pyrohiv after the neighbourhood it sits in on Kyiv’s southern edge. It gathers traditional wooden houses, churches, windmills, and farm buildings moved here from across Ukraine’s regions, grouped so that a single walk covers rural building styles that would otherwise take a trip through several oblasts to see in one place.
It’s a genuine, standing site rather than a closed one, which is the point of putting it here. By this point the plan has corrected a rebuilt gate, a renamed monument, and a monastery the Soviets tore down; day four asks nothing of the reader except to look at wooden architecture gathered from a country currently defending itself, which is enough on its own.
Day 5: Pechersk and the government quarter
A fifth day earns its place by going somewhere the first four don’t: Pechersk, the hilltop district that has held the seats of power in this city for centuries, and specifically Mariinskyi Palace within it. Built 1744-1752 by the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth of Russia and rebuilt in 1870 under Alexander II, the palace today is the official ceremonial residence of the President of Ukraine. Its White Hall has hosted Hero of Ukraine award ceremonies since 2022, which makes the building a working part of the country’s wartime state rather than a preserved relic of an older one.
Walk the palace grounds and the surrounding Lypky streets, the old aristocratic quarter that grew up around the seat of government, then let the afternoon run loose. There’s no fifth attraction that needs correcting here, no renamed monument or closed excursion to flag; it’s simply a district that a four-day version of this trip has to skip and a five-day one doesn’t.
Is any of this bookable right now?
No. Nothing in this five-day plan is a live booking recommendation. The sights are real and the history is checkable, but Kyiv still sits under an active “advises against all travel” tier from the FCDO and the US State Department’s highest “Do Not Travel” rating, both driven by the ongoing war rather than a front-line technicality that spares the capital.
If a future trip runs shorter than five days, the 2-day , 3-day , and 4-day plans compress this same spine into a tighter walk; if it runs longer, the 6-day and 7-day versions build further outward from it, and the full Kyiv guide covers everything else the city holds. If you want to do something for Ukraine today instead of planning a trip you can’t take, United24 is the Ukrainian government’s own channel for that, and Visit Ukraine tracks when normal travel becomes possible again.
One more thing worth carrying into whenever this plan is real: with the airspace closed, entry runs overland, commonly a flight to Warsaw or Rzeszow followed by a train into Kyiv that typically takes somewhere in the range of 10 to 16 hours depending on the route. There is no version of this five-day trip, or any Kyiv trip, that currently starts with a flight straight into Boryspil or Zhuliany.