Surrounded by Russian forces and under constant bombardment, the northern city known for its eclectic monasteries has no electricity, heating or running water. Lists of drugstores that are no longer available are growing day by day. “In the underground at night, everyone is talking about one thing: Chernihiv is becoming the next Mariupol,” said Kazmerczak, 38, referring to the southern port, 845 kilometers away, which has suffered some of the worst horrors since Russia invaded. in Ukraine. . Fear is not misplaced. Russian bombs exploded on the Chernihiv Central Bridge over the Dessna River on the road to Kyiv on Wednesday. On Friday, artillery shells made the remaining footbridge impassable, cutting off the last possible route for people to leave or food and medical supplies to enter. Just a month after the invasion, Russia’s offensive has slowed in a horrific war of attrition as its military tries to pound cities like Chernihiv to subdue. Bombings of hospitals and other civilian facilities, such as the Mariupol theater, where Ukrainian officials say a Russian airstrike is believed to have killed about 300 people last week, have sparked allegations of war crimes. Questions about the direction of Russia’s attack came on Friday, when a senior military official said the main goal of the first phase of the operation – reducing Ukraine’s combat capability – had been “generally achieved”. Colonel Sergei Rudsoi, Russia’s deputy chief of staff, said Russian forces could now focus on “the main goal, the liberation of Donbass.” Donbass is the largely Russian-speaking eastern region where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014 and where many residents want closer ties to Moscow. Mariupol is there, although outside the two territories controlled by the separatists. U.S. officials say Russian troops appear to have stopped attacking the capital, Kiev, and are focusing more on gaining control of the southeastern Donbas region. However, British defense officials said on Saturday that the Russian military continued to besiege a number of other major Ukrainian cities, including Chernihiv, 146 kilometers (91 miles) from Kyiv. “It is possible that Russia will continue to use its heavy firepower in urban areas as it seeks to limit its own already significant losses, at the cost of further civilian casualties,” the Pentagon said in a recent briefing on war information. . Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, appearing on video at the Doha Forum in Qatar, on Saturday compared the destruction of Mariupol with the destruction of Syria and Russia in the city of Aleppo. “They are destroying our ports,” Zelensky said. “The absence of exports from Ukraine will hit countries around the world.” He called on countries to increase their energy exports to give European nations an alternative to Russian oil and gas. “Europe’s future depends on your efforts,” he said. In Kyiv, the ashes of the dead are piled up in the central crematorium because so many relatives have left, leaving the containers unclaimed. For the citizens who decided to stay or could not leave under constant bombardment, the misery becomes more and more intense. In Yasnohorodka, a village about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Kiev that Russian troops occupied earlier in the week appeared to have been repulsed as part of a counterattack by Ukrainian forces. The houses at the main crossroads were in ruins. The tower of the village church was damaged. “You can see for yourself what happened here. People were killed here. “Our soldiers were killed here,” said Yasnohorodka resident Valeriy Puzakov. In Chernihiv, hospitals are no longer operating and residents are cooking over fireplaces in the streets because the power has been cut off. Chernihiv Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko said more than half of the city’s 280,000 residents had fled amid the relentless attack. Russian forces, he said on Ukrainian television, “are deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure – schools, kindergartens, churches, apartment buildings, and even the local soccer field.” It was impossible to count the dead, but Atroshenko estimated the number was “in the hundreds”. Located about 70 kilometers (45 miles) from the border with Belarus on the road to Kyiv, Chernihiv was attacked in the early days of the war and was surrounded by Russian troops this month, but its defenders have so far prevented the occupation. “Chernihiv has become a symbol of the Russian army’s failed blitzkrieg, in which the plan was to occupy the city in one day and move on to Kyiv,” said Mykola Sunhurovskyi, a military analyst at the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center think tank. Kazmerzak began spending the night in a bomb shelter after a Russian bomb struck a Stalin-era cinema next to the 12-story apartment building where he lived. A Russian rocket also destroyed the hotel near his home. “The walls were shaking so much that I thought my house would collapse every minute and I would be left under the rubble,” Kazmerchak said. The few supplies led to long queues from the few grocery stores that still had food. The bombings killed 10 civilians on March 16 as they waited outside to buy bread. Residents remained in their homes, but as the siege continued, some gave up trying to stay safe, Kazmerczak said. “The destroyed houses, the fires, the corpses in the streets, the huge aircraft bombs that did not explode in the yards no longer surprise anyone,” he said. “People are just tired of being scared and they don’t always go underground.”
Andrea Rosa in Kharkov, Ukraine, Nebi Qena in Kyiv, Ukraine, Robert Burns in Washington, DC, Lujain Jo in Doha, Qatar, and Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.
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