Water and humour run low amid non-stop shelling
Ukrainians caught in the fighting for the port of Mykolaiv fear same besieged fate as Mariupol
‘Here we have shelling for breakfast, shelling for lunch and shelling for dinner,” grinned Sergei Kushnir, as bombs exploded in the distance beyond his village. Like everyone in Shevchenkove, a farming hamlet near Ukraine’s port city of Mykolaiv, he likes to joke darkly about life near the front lines. But after weeks of almost non-stop shelling, which is steadily reducing the village to rubble, the joke is wearing thin.
Outside Mr Kushnir’s house was some of the latest fare served up by the Russian artillery – a missile buried in the middle of the road, its grey tail fin still protruding from the concrete. It was one of a salvo that also ploughed a 10ft deep hole in the nearby potato field, and wrecked the home of Mr Kushnir’s neighbour Valentin, whose house has been hit twice already. With the Russians expected to mount a new push towards Mykolaiv in coming days, it is getting too much for some.
“I expected to have peace soon, but it has not happened,” sobbed another neighbour, Nadiezda Maximenko, who has spent most of the past two months in her basement shelter. “Every few hours now, I thank God I’m still alive.”
On Sunday afternoon, though, during a lull in the shelling, the villagers wiped away the tears and tucked into chicken broth, dried pork, and home-made vodka – as part of the annual Provody celebration that commemorates the dead.
Held on the first Sunday after Orthodox Easter, the idea is to feast in honour of the deceased – a ritual with particular relevance this year. Yet as Shevchenkove’s residents raised a glass to the six already killed in their village, they also spared a thought for a British man who died for their country.
Scott Sibley, a former Royal Marine from Northumberland, perished last week while fighting as a volunteer for Ukraine’s armed forces, reportedly around Mykolaiv. The exact location has not been disclosed, but he is thought to have been killed somewhere on the front lines beyond Shevchenkove, east of Mykolaiv, where Kremlin forces are advancing west from Russian-occupied Kherson.
A source in Mykolaiv said Mr Sibley, 36, had been part of an eight-man team caught in an ambush, in which five were killed. His family last night declined to comment.
So heavy has been the shelling around Shevchenkove that only 130 residents remain out of 3,000, most with nowhere else to go. With their attention on the relentless bombardments, the death of the Englishman had barely registered. But they were grateful nonetheless.
“I read online about a British man who died here,” said Sergei Benedeshuk, who runs an agribusiness. “We are grateful to anyone who comes here to help us in Ukraine, and sorry to their families for their loss.”
The battle is key not just for control of Ukraine’s southern flank, but its viability as a nation-state. Capturing Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding port, would allow Russian forces to
press west to Odesa, the main trading port. From there, they could link up with Russian troops in Transnistria, the tiny pro-kremlin breakaway state in neighbouring Moldova.
Doing so would leave Ukraine landlocked, and give Russia a land corridor to the European Union’s south-eastern flank.
Mykolaiv has given the Kremlin a bloody nose once already, repelling its forces in March in one of Ukraine’s early victories. The expectation, though, is that Russian forces have now learnt from their mistakes.
In the past fortnight, the city has faced regular shelling, hitting residential areas and water pipes. Residents fear the same fate as the port city of Mariupol, further east, where both water and electricity were cut off during a two-month siege.
In Mykolaiv last week, residents queued to fill five-litre water bottles at street taps and from tanker lorries, resigning themselves to limited washing for weeks to come. One entrepreneur was doing a brisk trade selling 200-litre liquid storage drums from a van. They had previously been used to store industrial alcohol.
“The Russians have been shelling anyone who tries to repair the water pipes, so we are stuck like this,” said Irina Vinohradova. “We heat the water first for a shower, and then use it for the toilets, so it’s not wasted. It’s hard, but not as hard as bombs.”
Next to her in the queue was Valery Ghostiev, who had commandeered his 18-month-old baby’s pushchair to transport eight five-litre bottles.
To get enough water for nappy changes and baths for his two young children, he had to make two runs a day from his house a mile away, including negotiating the three flights of stairs to his flat.
“This is a bad time to be a parent of young children,” he said, resorting to language he would probably not use in front of them as he volunteered his opinion of Vladimir Putin.
In the basement of an apartment block near Mykolaiv’s docks, pensioner Anatoli, who declined to give his last name, described how he was about to celebrate his 76th birthday two weeks ago when a Russian missile wrecked the building above. “A birthday present from Putin,” he joked.
The shell injured three people, scattering shrapnel across a playground and embedding a large chunk in the wall of history teacher Larisa Maiboroda’s flat. She and husband Valery, who are leaving the house for good, plan to keep the jagged metal shard as a souvenir for their grandchildren, evacuated to Bulgaria.
“It’s a memory of a destroyed life – we had 20 happy years here, and it’s all gone in one month,” she said.
Also gone, she said, was some of the innocence of her grandchildren, who seemed to have matured 10 years in the space of 10 weeks. “They no longer play so much, and they seem more serious, and supportive of us adults,” she said. “They even send messages of support from Bulgaria, saying things like ‘let your sadness go the same way as the Moskva [the Russian warship sunk by Ukrainian forces last month]’.”
Among the books that Ms Maiboroda was packing up last week was the family’s old Russian-language copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, bought just before the fall of the Soviet Union. What seemed – even back then – like a dystopian fantasy novel, now felt like a warning of things to come.
“When we first read it in Soviet times, it felt like an abstract fantasy, which didn’t connect to reality,” said Ms Maiboroda.
“Now we realise it shows what really happens in Russia.”