Ukraine war’s forgotten ones

CHERNIGIV: SHELL OF A CITY WITH LITTLE TO OFFER

►► ‘Why did they fight to defend me, only to leave me here to die?’

Ukrainian literature teacher Tetyana Sobistiyanska has not washed since 15 March. She remembers the date because that is when Russian mortar fire blew a hole through her apartment on a central street in the battered north Ukrainian city of Chernigiv.

But Sobistiyanska is taking out her boiling anger for her plight on both the Ukrainians and the Russians in the third month of the war.

The 51 year old still lives in one of the nine-storey tower’s hallways and sleeps on its debris-strewn floor. There is no power or water in any of her Soviet-era building’s 171 flats.

Sobistiyanska and two of her neighbours sip cold tea off a kitchen table that takes up half the corridor’s width in the dark.

She says local officials have ordered her to move out but offered no assistance other than the locations of area shelters.

“Why did they fight to defend me, only to leave me here to die?” she says, referring to Ukrainian forces who managed to keep the Russians from seizing the city of nearly 300 000.

“The grandmother on the fourth floor locked herself up when the bombs fell. When we forced the door open, she was already dead,” Sobistiyanska said.

“I think this winter, the same fate awaits me.”

The outgunned Ukrainian forces’ ability to defend Chernigiv – a riverside city 100km northeast of Kyiv famous for its brand of beer – played a huge role in stalling Russia’s assault on the capital in the first weeks of the war.

Russian troops bombed and shelled the tower blocks dotting Chernigiv for more than a month.

The Russian withdrawal in the first days of April left behind a hollow shell of a city.

The historic city and its ancient churches overlooking the Desna River began to lose its importance and shrivel when its inland port shut down after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The much more recent closure of the border with Kremlin ally Belarus 50km to the north means the main road running through the city from Kyiv now leads to a dead end.

“Most people have already left the city,” Stanivaya said. “And the ones who are returning, when they see what has happened, I don’t even know,” she sighed. “They are returning to nothing.”

But 20 people still live in the seriously damaged apartment building. –