MYKOLAIV, Ukraine – Anna Svetlaya’s refrigerator has no door. A Russian missile blew it up the day before. The detached door saved her, protecting her chest from shrapnel as she passed out in a pool of blood.
Just before 7 a.m. in a residential area in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, 67-year-old Svetlaya felt her world explode in a hailstorm with shards of metal, glass and debris. when she prepares breakfast.
“The Russians don’t like us,” Ms. Svetlaya said. We wish we knew why! A retired nurse, she surveys her small apartment, where her two sisters have worked to restore order.
One, Larisa Kryzhanovska, said: “It was our ‘brother Russians’ who did this. “I don’t even hate them, I just pity them.”
Since the beginning of the war, Russian forces have attacked Mykolaiv, frustrated by their inability to capture it, and headed west to Odesa. But the city’s resistance had turned tough.
Almost besieged during the first weeks of fighting, it was repulsed, becoming the barricade of Ukrainian defiance on the southern front. But regularly, with rockets and artillery, Russia reminds the 230,000 people still here that they are within range of the indiscriminate carnage that characterizes Moscow’s prosecution of the war.
A Russian attack on Friday killed one person and injured 20, some of whom are still hospitalized. Mykolaiv was no longer under immediate arrest threat – a Ukrainian counterattack to the south was worrying Russian forces – but the damage of the war was clear. Once a summer tourist destination, a city with a beautiful setting at the confluence of the Nam Buh and Ingul rivers, Mykolaiv has become full of ghosts.
Weeds grow all over the sidewalk. The buildings are closed. Drinking water is in short supply. More than half of the population has left; Most of those who stayed were unemployed. About 80 percent of the people here, many of them elderly, depend on food and clothing from aid organisations. Every now and then, another explosion ignites the summer atmosphere, sending people into despair when it fails to kill them.
Better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Driving out of a nearby village, Natalia Holovenko, 59, was queuing to register for relief when she began to sob. “We don’t have any Nazis here!” She said, alluding to Russian President Putin’s false justification of the war as being necessary to “de-fascistize” Ukraine. “He just wants to kill us.”
In her imploring eyes, the madness of this Russian project seemed etched.
Without the Black Sea coast, Ukraine would become a weakened state, with lost ports, eight years after Putin took Crimea. A grain exporter, although currently facing a Russian naval blockade, will see its economy go down.
But as Russia advanced for miles by crowding miles in the Donbas region to the east, it was held back in the south. Since they captured Kherson, about 40 miles east of Mykolaiv, early in the war, Russian forces have either stalled or been pushed back. The Ukrainians, determined to be tougher, recaptured the villages in the Kherson region.
President Volodymyr Zelensky declared after his visit to Mykolaiv and Odesa last week: “We will not give the south to anyone, we will return everything that belongs to us and the waters will be Ukraine and safe. whole”. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said on Tuesday that “our troops will definitely occupy these lands”.
Certainly, Oleksandr Senkevych, the mayor of Mykolaiv, appeared confident. A frequently moving man in camouflage green cargo pants, with a Glock pistol at his hip and almost savage blue eyes, he said “the next step is to get the Russians out of Kherson and then get them out of Ukraine. ”
Before that happens, however, Ukraine needs long-range artillery, he said. Drawing on a paper carpet in a cafe, he illustrated how Russia could attack Mykolaiv, often with bombs, cluster munitionsfrom places where Ukrainian artillery could not reach.
“Right now, it’s annoying,” he said. “When we have what we need, we will be able to attack them without major losses.”
That will almost certainly take months.
The mayor’s wife and two children were gone when the war started. He works around the clock. Water is a major problem. The Russians destroyed the pipelines carrying fresh water from the Dnieper River. The water from the new boreholes is not enough and the water from the south of Buh is milky white.
“It was a big deal,” he said. “But we are radical, we know what we are fighting for, for our children and our land. They don’t know what they’re fighting for and so they lack motivation.”
He sees this as a war of cultures — in Russia, the leader says something “and the sheep follow,” he says, but in Ukraine, democracy has taken hold. In Putin’s Russia, everything is said to mean the opposite: “protection” means “invasion” and “military target” means “civilian”. In Ukraine, Mr. Senkevych said, “we are living in reality.”
That is the hard reality. Anna Zamazeeva, head of the Mykolaiv Regional Council, led me to her old office, a building with a hole in the middle where a Russian cruise missile hit on March 29, killing killed dozens of her colleagues. A last-minute delay in getting to work saved her life.
“It was a turning point for me,” she said. “Every day, the spouses and children of the dead watch the bodies and wreckage being removed, and I cannot convince them to leave. That’s when I fully realized the cruelty and inhumanity that the Russians could commit.”
This is not an easy admission. Zamazeeva’s mother is Russian. Her husband, who left Ukraine with their two children, was born in Russia. Her grandfather lived in St. These kinds of family connections, and others, are common, giving war a special quality of fracturing and severing, which can tend to be devastating, because “the other.” is not “another” and must end.
“Now I can’t talk to my grandfather because this conflict is so deep in my heart,” Zamazeeva said. “On the first day of the war, he sent a message to our family Viber group, asking how we were. I replied, ‘We were bombed, and so were your grandchildren.’ He replied, ‘Oh, that’ll be fine. You will all be liberated. ‘”
She removed him from the family’s messaging group.
Alone, she returned to her father’s house. She sleeps in the room she slept in as a child. She estimates the war will last at least another year. Her days are spent trying to get food, water, and clothing for tens of thousands of people, many of whom have had to leave their homes in nearby towns and villages.
War, for her, is ultimately simple, captured on the olive green shirt she wears. On the map of Ukraine appears a single word: “Home”.
“I am a liberal and I can’t understand it if someone doesn’t recognize the other person’s right to freedom and self-expression,” she said. “Our children grow up free and I will protect them with my own chest.”
Because it was a day of gratitude for medical workers, Ms. Zamazeeva attended a ceremony at a hospital. Vitaliy Kim, head of the regional military agency and a symbol of the city’s resistance, was also present. One of the honored women kissed his hand and said with a big smile, “Good morning. We are from Ukraine! The phrase, used by Mr. Kim in his video messages, has become a proud expression of Mykolaiv’s indomitable spirit.
At another hospital, 21-year-old Vlad Sorokin lay in bed, broken ribs, punctured lung, right hip and one knee exploding to pieces. He was another victim of the rocket attack that injured Ms Svetlaya.
“I’m not angry,” he said. “I was just asking why.” He tried to speak, closing his eyes. “The Russians have put themselves in a very bad situation. They keep quiet and listen to what they’re told from the top down and don’t think for themselves – and so they think it’s okay to attack others.”
What’s the first thing he does when he gets well?
“There was a smoke,” he said.
And after that?
“Run.”
On the second bed was another victim of the explosion, Neomila Ermakova, a dental nurse. Flying glass and shards flew into her ear, cutting off her head and concussion.
“I believe in destiny,” she said. “I had to go through this. Oddly enough, I had just finished remodeling my apartment and said to my grandson, “All of this is going to be yours one day.”
