UNBC student’s hometown pounded by Russian attacks
With the not-too-distant sound of bombs exploding in the city of Kharkiv, where Russian military forces are massing in preparation for what is believed to be a major ground offensive in Eastern Ukraine, Vova Pluzhnikov’s father and 84-year-old grandfather plant a vegetable garden to grow food for them and their neighbours on land that surrounds their rural cabin.
In western Ukraine, Pluzhnikov’s mother and sister-inlaw grow increasingly worried with news that four cruise missiles have been shot down over the city of Lviv, an area that has so far been spared the ravages of the sevenweek-old war.
While in another part of the besieged country, Anton Pluzhnikov, Vova’s 33-year-old brother, conscripted into the Ukraine army, awaits his next assignment, hoping he won’t become another victim of a conflict that has so far killed 3,000 Ukrainian troops.
Half a world away in Prince George, 26-year-old Vova Pluzhnikov, a UNBC commerce student who came to Canada six years ago to play university basketball for the Timberwolves, prays for an end to the senseless annihilation of his people and the crushing of their culture in the Russian invasion.
He holds faith for the restoration of peace in his homeland and a long-term solution that will guarantee Ukraine’s future as a sovereign nation.
Pluzhnikov was among about 100 walkers who gathered Saturday afternoon at Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park’s new pavilion near Exploration Place to join the Prince George Solidarity Walk For Ukraine. The two-anda-half-hour event gave an audience to people who wanted to express their thoughts about the war in Ukraine, its effect on their families and friends and how it threatens world peace. The walkers followed a route along the Fraser River pathway to Yalenka Ukrainian Hall and then returned to the park.
“The atrocities and images we’ve been seeing from there have gotten out of line, no one expected Russia to be that cruel towards the civilians,” Pluzhnikov said. “It’s important to be brave and be willing to see the truth right
now and not turn away from those brutal images.”
Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, is a city caught in the crosshairs of relentless air attacks that have since the start of the war Feb. 24, hit nearly 1,700 residential buildings, including 75 schools, 56 kindergartens and 19 hospitals, resulting in more than 400 deaths and thousands more injuries in the city of 1.4 million. Pluzhnikov has seen images of the city’s central square after it was blown up and the university basketball gym where he used to play reduced to ruins after it was shelled.