However, every morning they go out to keep Kharkiv clean. Ukraine’s second city is probably the most targeted target in the country after the besieged Mariupol. Every day brings a hail of Grad missiles, cluster bombs, shells and missiles. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. Mortuaries can not cope with the daily tolls imposed by Russia. In a downtown facility, dozens of corpses, wrapped only in plastic bags or blankets, are stacked in a courtyard. However, the people of Kharkiv are determined that their city will stand, that life must continue among the ruins, even if at the moment it is a scary half-existence in the shadow of sudden death. And that means keeping the city clean. “They can bomb us for as long as they want: we can handle it,” said Ihor Aponchuk, a driver whose collection tour now occupies neighborhoods of imaginary empty playgrounds and a bombed-out school just near the front line. Hours after Aponchuk emptied the first bins near the Heroes of Labor metro station in eastern Kharkiv, a rocket hit people queuing for help about 500 meters away, killing six and leaving the sidewalk stained with blood. The next day the city’s main Barabashovo market was set on fire and four people died when a shell fell outside a clinic. In Ukrainian cities that have been less directly affected – or less severely damaged – by the war, there is a cheerful contempt. In Kharkov, death is very close and very common for such a thing. Men and women who draw unusual reserves of courage to go on with their lives openly admit that the situation is frightening. Workers try to protect the statue of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in Kharkov with sandbags. Photo: Seth Sidney Berry / ZUMA Press Wire / REX / Shutterstock However, they and hundreds of thousands more chose to stay in their “city of heroes” – a title first awarded to Kharkov for its resistance to Nazi troops in World War II and awarded again by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy this month for his courage. until the invasion of Russia. “We are scared, but we have to show people that the situation is under control and we are getting closer to victory every day,” said Governor Oleh Synyehubov, who spoke to the Observer while walking in a downtown park under light police guard. . “I understand the fear,” said Aponchuk, who had nearly two accidents with Russian missiles. But Kharkiv has a reputation for being a “clean city” and believes that maintaining it is vital to morale as well as public health. So he and more than 250 others go out every day, risking their lives with a devotion to reality similar to that shown by Londoners who maintained milk traditions during the Blitz of World War II. “A driver was heavily bombed the other day, so he went back to base here, drank a cup of tea and then went on another route,” said Oleksii Artikulenko, a city employee who was deported a month ago to continue garbage collection. the war. Russian artillery attacks have emptied the streets of Kharkov. Photo: Sergey Kozlov / EPA Less than 40 miles from the Russian border, Kharkiv is traditionally a Russian-speaking city, and Moscow has apparently been waiting for its forces to be welcomed there. On the contrary, they encountered heavy resistance. Stuck in the north and east of the city, they began targeting civilians and the center, causing damage to everything from the zoo to the cathedral and a Holocaust memorial. A rocket hit the Kharkiv town hall. Rockets pounded apartment buildings and destroyed smaller homes. “When it was clear they could not get it, they launched a terror campaign,” Synyehubov said. “Kharkiv will be even more beautiful, with better buildings and infrastructure, I have no doubt. What bothers me are the deaths. “It’s simple to restore things, but not to restore families.” Officials estimate that more than half of the city’s 1.4 million population has left. Trains alone carried almost half of them, 600,000 people, to the west, and many more left by car. But that still leaves a city of hundreds of thousands, mostly living in or underground, refusing to go. They want to keep the spirit of the city alive for themselves and support soldiers on the front line nearby, and they want to start rebuilding, or at least clearing the rubble of recent strikes, so that Kharkiv does not feel abandoned. Serhiy, a firefighter, spent his 29th birthday last Thursday clearing the wreckage of the imposing Soviet-era town hall: 30 bodies were pulled from the rubble. By nightfall, he said, he would return to duty by putting out fires: “I will celebrate my birthday with a cup of tea. We have not had a break for a month. We have been offered a break, but we do not want to do it. “ Nearby, groups sanded a 10-meter-high statue of Ukrainian poet and hero Taras Shevchenko. “For me, the city was wonderful,” said Yevhen Yurgens, 56, as he helped fill the sacks with sand. “Look at how the Russians destroyed it. We want to protect it as much as we can. “ The city looks like the end of the line for the Ukraine war. The highway from the Dnipro industrial junction, which crosses rich agricultural land, is now almost empty. You can drive for miles without seeing a car or truck. Reports of Russian ambushes and bombings, even in the relatively safe southern part of the city, make the journey tense and aid workers say they find it difficult to recruit drivers to run. So while the city is not officially under siege, it is running out of food and medicine. International organizations such as the UN and the Red Cross seem obvious mainly due to their absence. “We are essentially left here alone,” says Synyehubov. “We receive 100 tonnes of humanitarian aid every day, but 40 tonnes of it is clothes we do not need.” They need five times more food and medicine than they take. Currently, the city’s most vulnerable residents are largely kept alive by informal networks of volunteers such as Tetiana Medveyeva, 33, and Stanislav Manilov, 28. The couple went to the station on the first day of the war, planning to head west, but ended up staying. “We saw so many people trying to get on the train with their pets and their families,” Manilov said. “We looked each other in the eye and agreed that others should leave more than us. And at that point we decided not to go and be useful here. “ They connected with some activists they knew before the war and began preparing food packages for the elderly and disabled who may have difficulty leaving home or buying food, paid for by private donations collected on the Internet. “We have been doing this since February 26 and we feel it goes on forever.” They spend their mornings buying and packing bags of food and in the afternoons sharing them. As most jobs disappear overnight and seniors can not receive their pensions by closed mail, the scale of need is frightening. When their truck is ready, people will come running to secure a bag containing pasta and a few cans of fish and meat. “In other areas, people are more desperate,” Medvedev said. “They attack the van and shout at us if they do not get food.” A month ago she was a manager and he worked for an architectural design company. They now live on declining savings and, increasingly, on food packages they prepare for other vulnerable locals. They are so common to move under bombardment that they do not shrink even when the shells land nearby. “We no longer have a normal reaction,” Medvedev said.
