Kharkiv’s mayor calls for support to prevent city being a ‘second Aleppo’
Kharkiv’s mayor has called on US politicians to vote through a fresh package of military aid to prevent the city suffering from Syrian civil war levels of destruction because it does not have the air defences to prevent long-range Russian attacks.
Ihor Terekhov said that Russia had switched tactics to try and destroy the city’s power supply and terrorise its 1.3 million citizens by firing into residential areas, with locals hit with power cuts lasting hours at a time.
The mayor of Ukraine’s second city described the $60bn (£48bn) US military aid package, currently stalled in Congress, as of “critical importance for us” and urged the west to refocus on the war, which has lasted more than two years.
“We need that support to prevent Kharkiv [becoming] a second Aleppo,” Terekhov said, referring to the Syrian city heavily bombed by Russian and Syrian government forces at the height of the country’s civil war a decade ago.
On 22 March Russian attacks destroyed a power station on the eastern edge of the city as well all its substations; a week later officials acknowledged a second plant 30 miles to the south east of the city had been eliminated in the same attack.
Power in the city, less than 15 miles from the Russian border, was interrupted after another bombing raid this week, with the Metro briefly halted. Local residents said that there was typically a few hours of supply a day in the city centre – although in the outskirts the situation was said to be better.
Children are educated either online or in underground schools for their own safety. The water supply remains on, but Terekhov said there were worries that the Russian military may switch to targeting gas distribution, following an attack on storage facilities in the west of the country last week.
Ukrainian leaders have begun asking western nations to donate Patriot air defence systems, requests for help thrown into sharper relief by the US and UK military support for Israel over the weekend as it neutralised an air attack from Iran.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised the allies’ defensive action, which he said “demonstrated how truly effective unity in defending against terror can be when it is based on sufficient political will” – before making a comparison with Ukraine.
Iranian-designed Shahed drones “sound identical to those over the Middle East. The impact of ballistic missiles, if they are not intercepted, is the same everywhere.”
The Ukrainian leader concluded that “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles.”
Seven people were killed in Kharkiv when two rockets struck near an unused shopping mall on the ring road north of the city shortly after midnight on 6 April, leaving craters and military debris near a residential area.
Nina Mykhailivna, 72, who lives nearby, said the shock from the strike “lifted her bed in the air” and was followed by about an hour and a half of secondary explosions, the most serious she had experienced during the war.
Few residents have left the city since Russia stepped up its bombing campaign around the turn of the year, and Kharkiv remains a lively metropolis with busy restaurants and cafes, and some businesses thriving despite the threat.
Oleksii Yevsiukov, 39, and Viktoriia Varenikova, 30, run the Avex clothing factory in a residential district and have installed solar panels on the roof at a cost of $20,000 since the start of the full-scale conflict, providing enough electricity to power the sewing machines for the 10 employees working below as part of a total refurbishment of a Soviet-era building.
“We anticipated there might be power cuts from energy infrastructure attacks this winter,” Yevsiukov said. “We looked at solutions and decided a diesel generator was not suitable, expensive and not very eco-friendly, so we ordered the solar panels last year.”
A newly installed power bank stores enough electricity for two days’ use if the panels are unable to generate electricity, and a geothermal pump keeps the building warm, avoiding the need for gas. This selfsufficiency could become necessary, with the owners anticipating at least two more years of war.
Yevsiukov and Varenikova’s company makes women’s swim and fitness wear for branded companies in Ukraine, and the couple say sales have grown even though the goods might be considered luxuries during a war. With the factory refurbishment almost complete, Yevsiukov said they plan to roughly double the workforce.
Soon after the start of the war, Varenikova found out she was pregnant. Their son Max is now one, and Varenikova expresses the hope that the war might be over by the time he is ready to start school. “I want him to go to a normal school, not an underground school, not a school in the Metro, not an online school,” she said.
However, they acknowledge not everybody is so optimistic. One of the company’s employees, Liubov, a mother of two girls, said she was planning to leave her home in Kharkiv and move to the centre of Ukraine for at least a month, to provide a calmer
‘European skies could have received the same protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar support [to Israel]’ Volodymyr Zelenskiy President of Ukraine
environment for her children who can continue to take classes remotely.
Russian bombing had become “much more frequent, much more often”, Liubov said. The comprehensive attack on 22 March was “very, very scary and loud”, she added, and “attacks could come at daytime or night time, in any part of the city”.
Liubov did not want to be photographed or give her surname, reflecting perhaps a concern about not wanting to be identified as leaving the city. “We’ve had to get used to everything, I wish we didn’t have to. We have power banks, we have storage of food, but want this to be over soon. We simply want to live.”