Beauty and the beast
REFUSE TO EVACUATE: LACK OF MONEY AND FEAR OF LOSING HOMES
A member of the Roma ‘Aresel’ NGO next to a Russian tank mock-up and a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a protest in front of the Russian embassy to Bucharest yesterday. Dozens of Roma activists protested against the biased representation of the facts during the early days of the Russian invasion, when media outlets stated that Ukrainian Romas stole a Russian tank.
Some across eastern front wait out the war under relentless Russian fire.
The giant policeman in military fatigues and combat helmet was losing patience with the tiny woman staring at his chest and flatly refusing to evacuate from the Ukrainian front.
Whistling shells had just resumed smashing into buildings across the war-shattered industrial city of Lysychansk. Angelina Abakumova stood a little closer to her two children outside a shelter where she had spent the past month living in a pitch-black bunker and did not budge.
Policeman Viktor Levchenko pointed to the sky in exasperation and tried to coax the mother into an armoured truck waiting to make a mad dash past Russian artillery positions to a slightly safer corner of Ukraine.
“What are you still doing here with the children,” the professional athlete turned regional traffic police chief demanded in a booming voice. “Do you understand that this is a war zone?”
Levchenko gave the mother a hard stare and told her that she and her children could soon die.
Then he told her that her presence was undermining the entire Ukrainian war effort by making the army focus on shielding civilians instead of fighting the Russians.
Then he gave up. “We will be back tomorrow and I expect to see you here ready with your things. These children have to be evacuated to a safe place,” he said in a huff.
“I am not changing my mind,” Abakumova whispered on her way back to her basement. “It is dangerous here now. Then it changes and it becomes dangerous over there. What is the point of going back and forth?”
Some civilians across the east Ukrainian front are making the difficult decision to wait out the war under ceaseless Russian fire. Their reasons often involve insufficient money to start a new life and fear of losing their homes.
None satisfy Levchenko. “People do not fully understand the situation,” he said. “We have to evade shelling and make our way through very difficult conditions to reach these people and feed them and try to evacuate them.
“The people who sit here just think everything will be fine,” he said of the dozens hiding in the underground corridors and intertwining basements of one of the city’s more fortified buildings.
“But, unfortunately, everything is not fine.”
Volunteers who distribute food at the shelter estimate that more than 20 000 of Lysychansk’s 100 000 residents are still trying to survive in the besieged city. It has already lost power and cellphone service. Water stopped running in late April and the general assumption is that the gas line will be cut in the coming days.
The traumatised civilians who still walk the city’s streets seem almost oblivious to the escalating rocket and artillery fire from Russian units trying to cut the coal mining centre off from the rest of Ukraine.
A pensioner, Volodymyr Dobrorez, counted more than 30 artillery strikes around a nearby bridge running to Severodonetsk, a sister city now under partial Russian control, by lunchtime.
The battles have grown in number as the Russians try to gain control of hills overlooking a road providing Lysychansk’s last link to the outside world.
Many of those who remain understand their lives will probably never return to the way they were prior to the invasion. At least one of the city’s four mines employing many of its workers has flooded because the power outage has halted the pumps.
“I won’t have my old job back when this is over,” said coalminer Vladyslav Sheremet. “But I have seen too many people leave, spend the last of their savings, and then come back with nothing.”
Abakumova balanced the fate of her children against that of her husband and his brother.
“Men of fighting age who are evacuated immediately get called up and sent off to the front,” she said. “I will not let my husband and his brother go. They would die on day one.”
Unfortunately, everything is not fine