‘It’s the children who suffer’
CITY: ‘WE GO TO BOMB SHELTERS 20, 30 ‘Russia wants to rip us off of our future’ but residents vow to not give up. 0 TIMES A DAY’ AS HOSPITAL, SCHOOL IS DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR
An air raid siren blares and tears fill Vasiliy Kravchuk’s eyes as he surveys the wreckage of the school his sixyear-old son was meant to start at next year.
“It’s hard, it’s very hard,” sobs the 37 year old, who works at the tourism organisation for Zhytomyr, a garrison town west of Kyiv where no tourists now come.
The city, with its broad, picturesque river spanned by a suspension bridge, has suffered a series of devastating Russian strikes since the start of the war.
The regional maternity hospital was badly damaged by a blast on 2 March, while School Number 25 was destroyed on 4 March.
Zhytomyr has been spared the devastation of cities like Mariupol in the south, but it remains in Russia’s sights as its troops attempt to encircle Kyiv from the west.
“Every day it’s 20, 30 times we go to the basement [to shelter]. It’s difficult because my wife is pregnant, I have a little son,” says Kravchuk.
His son had been looking forward to starting school, but now it is a pile of concrete, with a shelf full of schoolbooks hanging over a void where a wall used to be.
‘Genocide’
Russian President Vladimir Putin says the “special military operation” launched on 24 February is aimed at the “demilitarisation and deNazification” of Ukraine.
But Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said Russia is committing genocide in Mariupol and many in Zhytomyr believe the violence Moscow has unleashed across the country amounts to the same thing.
“This is indeed genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Svitlana Kovalchuk, a 50-year-old chemistry teacher at the school, says during a visit arranged by the Ukrainian government.
“Because the civilians suffer, innocent children suffer, newborn children, children from our school, children from the whole country suffer.”
At the Zhytomyr regional maternity centre on the other side of town, mothers cradle their newborn babies in tiny rooms in a sweltering basement where they hide from bombs.
The windows of the hospital were blown in by powerful strikes that hit a nearby residential area, leaving the maternity wards unusable.
“They [Russia] want to rip us off of our future,” says Nadia Skutelnyk, 29, showing off her fourday-old daughter Stephania’s tiny fingers.
The hospital has moved most of its equipment underground and has even set up its own operating theatre.
Medical director Olena Ostryiko says she “cannot understand” why “the enemy” bombed so close to the hospital.
“Why the civilians, why the children, why the kindergartens, why hospitals, why?
“I cannot understand. But we know that the enemy’s aim is the genocide of Ukrainian people,” she says.
‘Not giving up’
One reason may be that they are collateral damage in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Children and parents stroll in the sun and skateboarders rattle down the pavements until the air raid sirens ring, but Zhytomyr is partly an army town.
The maternity hospital is near a military base, while residents said that a building near the school had been used by the army many years ago.
Mayor Sergiy Sukhomlyn said Zhtyomyr was targeted despite being 80km from the front line because of its military history.
“Russia very well remembers our famous 95th brigade, which is at war since 2014 in Donbas”, the eastern Ukrainian region held by pro-Russian separatists, Sukhomlyn told a press conference.
The city was also under attack because it was on the route for aid from Europe to the worst-hit cities such as Mariupol, Kharkiv and Chernihiv, he says.
“Zhytomyr is definitely is not giving up,” he said at the sandbag-surrounded city hall. –