It was well past midnight in Mukachevo, a city of cobblestone streets tucked into Ukraine’s western tip, and a group of students lingered by the river, debating what to grab from a nearby 24/7 supermarket. A van pulled up, and out spilled a rowdier crowd of young men — loud, tipsy and visibly thirsty for more.

It looked like a classic Sunday night, before the workweek begins. But in wartime Ukraine — where curfews and Russian air assaults have turned the nights into something between tense silence and sudden explosions — it was an exceptional scene.

“Here, we do not hear the sound of explosions, we do not have rockets, we do not have frequent air alarms,” said Oleksandr Pop, 20, one of the students. “We don’t have the same experience of war.”

Ukraine’s capital region of Kyiv has reeled from several recent nights of record-breaking Russian drone attacks, with air raid alerts wailing for nearly 130 hours over the past month. By comparison, Mukachevo and the surrounding region of Transcarpathia have endured only one-tenth as much time under alert.

In more than three years of war, only a few drones and missiles have struck the remote, mountainous region of Transcarpathia. It is the only Ukrainian region without a nighttime curfew, making it a rare pocket of relative calm.

Partly, it could be protected by geography. The region borders four NATO countries — Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia — raising the risk that any off-course Russian strike could spill into a broader war. There are also few military sites in this region, which is so far west that it is closer to Venice than to the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a hot spot of the fighting.

The region’s relative safety has made it a magnet for civilians fleeing attacks in the east. More than 145,000 people have resettled in Transcarpathia, most of them in Mukachevo and the nearby city of Uzhhorod, which sits on the border with Slovakia.

For them, moving to Transcarpathia has meant adjusting to a jarring new reality. They fled places reduced to rubble, only to arrive in cities dotted with high-rises built for newcomers. From Transcarpathia, one can watch commercial planes streak across the skies of neighboring European countries, a long-forgotten sight in the rest of Ukraine, where the only aircraft visible are the rare, ominous silhouettes of fighter jets.

War usually reveals itself only indirectly — in the quiet procession of a soldier’s funeral, in memorials to the fallen that have sprung up on plazas or in conscription officers roaming the streets.

News from the front also filters back from Transcarpathia’s 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, one of Ukraine’s oldest units, which experienced heavy losses during the country’s 2023 counteroffensive. But the first thing every newcomer to the region notices is the calm.

“It was a bit of a shock,” Tetiana Bezsonova, who fled Pokrovsk a year ago, said about her arrival in Mukachevo. She paused and corrected herself: “It was not a shock, but a relief. That somewhere, people live calmly. Somewhere, people live normally.”

“For me, personally, it’s like an oasis in Ukraine,” Ms. Bezsonova, 30, said.

Transcarpathia stood apart from the rest of Ukraine long before the war began.

The region became part of Soviet Ukraine around the second half of the 20th century, after decades under Austro-Hungarian and then Czechoslovak rule. That history shaped a distinct identity — visible in pastel-colored facades and cobblestone streets that echo Vienna and Budapest. Absent are the hulking Soviet-era high-rises that loom over many Ukrainian cities. In Uzhhorod, Hungarian-language plaques still mark buildings, a reminder of the city’s layered past.

The first known attack on the region came more than two months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when a missile hit a railway facility. Since then, strikes have been so rare that locals struggle to recall the last one.

Only in Transcarpathia can revelers still dance in nightclubs into the early morning. That’s a scene now unthinkable in Kyiv, where the city’s famed electro clubs open early and shut by 11 p.m., an hour before curfew kicks in.

“Life goes on,” smiled Daria Podde, 19, a waitress at a nightclub in Mukachevo who also works part time as a bartender. On a recent evening, she leaned over the counter to show a video she had taken the month before at the nightclub. It showed revelers jumping to the beat, lights flashing. The time stamp on her phone read 5:40 a.m.

That sense of normalcy stunned Daria Markovuch, 33, when she arrived in Mukachevo in March 2022, after fleeing the besieged city of Mariupol, which is now under Russian occupation.

“You live through hell, and then you come to a city where it doesn’t exist, where people drink coffee, girls have lipstick and styled hair,” she recalled. “I just wanted to grab everyone and say: ‘Run away from here. Just run away. Because hell does exist and it’s not far from here.’”

Over time, Ms. Markovuch said she came to appreciate the calm of Transcarpathia. She now runs a local group that helps displaced people settle in Mukachevo, noting that new arrivals continue to show up every month.

The split-screen reality with the rest of Ukraine can ruffle feathers. The region also has a reputation as a gateway for draft dodgers trying to escape Ukraine by crossing into neighboring European countries, sometimes braving a risky swim across a river into Romania.

Dmytro Vorobiov, 45, a soldier who lost his right foot in combat last August, and is now recovering in a hospital in Uzhhorod, northwest of Mukachevo, said he had been annoyed when hearing a young local casually saying he was “tired of the war.”

“I’m like, ‘Are you insane? Maybe you need to move closer to the front?’” Mr. Vorobiov recalled. Still, like many soldiers convalescing in the region, he said part of the reason he fights is so that others can live in peace.

Sitting in a tavern-like cafe in Uzhhorod, oil lamps swaying overhead and the war feeling a world away, Andriy Lyubka, a well-known Ukrainian poet and resident, acknowledged “some kind of tension in the air,” as locals quietly wonder what others are doing for the war effort.

Like many other men of military age in Ukraine, Mr. Lyubka, 37, can be drafted into the army. But he said he had yet to receive a conscription notice.

“When you walk here with your daughter, for example, a lot of the people — actually women whose husbands are in the army — they look at you with some critical glance,” he said. “They have questions in their eyes.”

Mr. Lyubka’s answer is that he raise money to buy vehicles for the army. So far, he has bought more than 360 cars and delivered them with friends to the front — 58 trips in total. Each journey, he says, serves as a useful reminder that the peacefulness of Uzhhorod is “false, an illusion.”

“It’s very nice here, but it doesn’t mean everything will be OK,” he said. “The peace we feel here depends entirely on what’s happening at the eastern front.”