Russia’s war: the “living hell” in Ukraine’s cities
“In Kharkiv’s hospitals, the faces of war are sculpted by flying glass and burning shrapnel,” said Anthony Loyd in The Times. “Woman are adorned in stitches”, their skin is purple with bruising and green with disinfectant. “Wounded children stare up from their beds, listless with pain and trauma. Some weep in shock.” But fear follows them even here, as artillery fire and the roar of jets rattle the windows of the wards, where exhausted medics work back-to-back shifts. This week, Ukraine’s second city was under relentless attack from air strikes, surface-to-surface missiles and artillery fire, making a grim mockery of Vladimir Putin’s claim that his forces were trying to avoid civilian casualties.
A married couple, Oleg Ilchinskyi and his wife Victoria, both lawyers, told The Times that they’d been having lunch when a rocket hit their flat, blowing their furniture to smithereens and sending them smashing into their fridge in a blast of hot air and broken glass. Minutes later, as they staggered out of the building and into the arms of rescuers, Victoria’s phone rang. It was their 15-year-old daughter, in Brussels, anxious to know if they were all right. “So I took the call covered in blood in the street, our home obliterated behind us, dust and smoke everywhere, glass sticking out of my skin, took a deep breath, gathered myself and said, ‘Don’t worry darling, everything is just fine here.’”
Two weeks ago, Kharkiv – the former Soviet capital of Ukraine – was “a flourishing metropolis”, said Luke Harding in The Guardian, with fine parks, a new architect-designed zoo, an opera house, and thriving restaurants and cafés. Now, the historic city, close to the Russian border, is a “living hell”; houses have been pulverised and schools, residential blocks and grand buildings stand in blackened ruins. In the metro stations, the trains go nowhere, but are packed with some of the thousands of local residents who now lead subterranean lives. Many believe that having failed to take the symbolically important city, Putin has resolved to wipe it out. Yet Kharkiv is not uniquely hard hit: similarly brutal scenes are being played out across Ukraine.
In the besieged port city of Mariupol, 200,000 people were feared trapped this week. Days of intense shelling have reportedly killed hundreds, and also knocked out power and water supplies, leaving people freezing in dark basements, and boiling snow to drink. In Irpin, 13 miles from Kyiv, the bombardment has been so ferocious that many residents have opted to flee despite the lack of a safe escape route. They come in an endless stream on debris-strewn streets, said Orla Guerin on BBC News, some carrying children, or bent under the weight of bags, “trying to outpace the Russian shells laying waste to their hometown”. The elderly keep up as well as they can. Getting out of Irpin is not easy: the road bridge to Kyiv was blown up, to slow the Russian advance, so people must pick their way across an icy river on slippery planks. And some are not lucky, said The New York Times. Last week, two adults and two children were killed by mortar fire as they trudged towards the bridge. In distressing video footage, soldiers can be seen running, too late, through the smoke to their aid. The family’s suitcases lie around their bodies, while their dog barks frantically in its container.
Meanwhile, across the country, the resistance continues, said Catherine Philp in The Times. The roads into Kyiv have been fortified, with roadblocks and metal stingers to puncture the tyres of military vehicles. Screens that once showed adverts carry messages for the expected invaders: “Don’t become a killer, stay human!” reads one. But more commonly, you see everywhere in Ukraine the meme: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!” Armed volunteers man checkpoints to root out Russian saboteurs amid persistent rumours of a plot to assassinate President Zelensky. In Russianspeaking Odesa, the former jewel of the Russian empire, which was also braced for attack this week, the centre now resembles the set of a Second World War film, said Louise Callaghan in the same paper. Sandbags are piled high at the base of Renaissance buildings; steel girders welded into tank traps block the roads; and local forces claim the beach has been mined.
Even in the captured city of Kherson, Ukrainians are still showing their defiance: on Saturday, hundreds gathered in its main square to protest against the occupation, said CNN, raising questions about how Moscow will hold whatever territory it gains. The Russians are already using siege tactics in an effort to break the will of the people to fight, said the FT. If they succeed, the fear is that rather than embark on a costly occupation of Ukraine, they will use terror to subjugate the belligerent population.
“Screens that once showed adverts now carry messages for the expected
invaders: ‘Don’t become a killer’”