South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
City fears being the ‘next Mariupol’
Chernihiv in north faces deadly ongoing Russian onslaught
LVIV, Ukraine — Nights are spent huddling underground from Russian strikes pounding their encircled city into rubble. Daylight hours are devoted to hunting down drinkable water and braving the risk of standing in line for the little food available as shells and bombs rain down.
In the second month of Russia’s invasion, this is what now passes for life in Chernihiv, a besieged city in northern Ukraine where death is everywhere.
It isn’t — yet — quite as synonymous with atrocious human suffering as the pulverized southern city of Mariupol. But similarly blockaded and pounded from afar by Russian troops, Chernihiv’s remaining residents are terrified that each blast, bomb and body that lies uncollected on the streets ensnares them in the same macabre trap of unescapable killings and destruction.
“In basements at night, everyone is talking about one thing: Chernihiv becoming (the) next Mariupol,” said 38-year-old resident Ihar Kazmerchak, a linguistics scholar.
He spoke to The Associated Press by cellphone, amid incessant beeps signaling that his battery was dying. The city is without power, running water and heating.
Kazmerchak starts his day in long lines for drinking water, rationed to 2 gallons per person. People come with empty bottles and buckets for filling when water-delivery trucks make their rounds.
“Food is running out, and shelling and bombing doesn’t stop,” he said.
Nestled between the Desna and Dnieper rivers, Chernihiv straddles one of
the main roads that Russian troops invading from Belarus used Feb. 24 for what the Kremlin hoped would be a lightning strike onward to the capital, Kyiv, just 91 miles away.
More than half of the city’s 280,000 inhabitants fled, according to the mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko. He estimates Chernihiv’s death toll from the war to be in the hundreds.
Russian forces have bombed residential areas from low altitude in “absolutely clear weather” and “are deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure: schools, kindergartens, churches, residential buildings and even the local football stadium,” Atroshenko told Ukrainian television.
Refugees from Chernihiv
who reached Poland this week spoke of broad and terrible destruction, with bombs flattening at least two schools in the city center.
They said that with utilities knocked out, people are taking water from the Desna to drink and that strikes are killing people while they wait in line for food. Volodymyr Fedorovych, 77, said he narrowly escaped a bomb that fell on a bread line he had been standing in just moments earlier. He said the blast killed 16 people and injured dozens, blowing off arms and legs.
So intense is the siege that some of those trapped cannot even muster the strength to be afraid anymore, Kazmerchak said.
“Ravaged houses, fires, corpses in the street, huge
aircraft bombs that didn’t explode in courtyards are not surprising anyone anymore,” he said. “People are simply tired of being scared and don’t even always go down to the basements.”
With the invasion in its second month, Russian forces have seemingly stalled on many fronts and are even losing previously taken ground to Ukrainian counterattacks, including around Kyiv. The Russians have bombed the capital from the air but not taken or surrounded the city. U.S. and French defense officials say Russian troops appear to have adopted defensive positions outside Kyiv.
With Russia continuing to strike and encircle urban populations, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol in the south, Ukrainian authorities on Saturday dismissed statements from the Russian military suggesting that it planned to concentrate its remaining strength on wresting the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region from Ukrainian control. The region has been partially controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014.
“We cannot believe the statements from Moscow because there’s still a lot of untruth and lies from that side,” Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian defense minister, told the BBC. “That’s why we understand the goal of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin still is the whole of Ukraine.”
That skepticism was underscored hours later when explosions rocked Lviv, a city about 45 miles from the Polish border where an estimated 200,000 displaced Ukrainians have taken refuge.
Among them is Olana Ukrainets, a 34-year-old IT worker from Kharkiv.
“When I came to Lviv, I was sure that all these alarms wouldn’t have any results,” Ukrainets told the AP from a bomb shelter after the blasts. “Sometimes when I heard them at night, I just stayed in bed. Today, I changed my mind and I should hide every time. … None of the Ukrainian cities are safe now.”
The strike happened as U.S. President Joe Biden was visiting Poland, which has taken in far more Ukrainian refugees than any other country.