The slow counter-offensive darkens the mood, with no end in sight
Kyiv, Ukraine20 Aug 2023, 21:51 5947 read 2 comments
For nearly 18 months, Ukraine held off the Russian invasion by mobilizing support for its troops from battlefield victories in the Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson regions, the New York Times reported.
Those victories took the beleaguered Ukrainians through a winter of airstrikes against civilian infrastructure, as well as the brutal and symbolic battle for Bakhmut, the eastern city that fell to Russian control in May
All the while, Ukrainian authorities and their Western partners have been hyping up an upcoming counteroffensive that, backed by new weapons and training, they hope will turn the tide of the war.
But two months after Ukraine went on the offensive, with little discernible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless tenacity has begun to fray.
The death toll – untold thousands – is increasing daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home.
In every corner of the country, the civilian population has been exhausted by the series of new Russian attacks – including strikes on a historic cathedral in Odessa, an apartment building in Kryvyi Rih and a blood transfusion center in the Kharkiv region.
In the past week, two Russian rockets struck a block in the eastern city of Pokrovsk – from where an evacuation train regularly picks up people fleeing the frontline areas around – killing civilians and emergency workers who rushed to help.
Ukrainians badly need good news, but they just aren’t getting it.
Svitlana Zhdanova rests as she walks past a restaurant in Pokrovsk destroyed by Russian missile strikes
On Tuesday evening, music teacher Svitlana Zhdanova was sitting in her living room in Pokrovsk when rockets slammed into her apartment building, shattering all the windows of the apartment and breaking her drunkard.
She didn’t know where else to go, so she cleared out the apartment she’d lived in since 1969 and decided to stay.
Raisa Rybalchenko, 78 years old, lived on the fourth floor of the building badly damaged by the double impact. She was in the kitchen when the first blast hit.
Soon after, five men knocked on her door shouting, “Is anyone alive?” She replied that she was. One of them pushed her down the stairs.
After a while, the next explosion hit. At least nine people have died so far and dozens more have been injured. On Wednesday, Rybalchenko was among the throngs of shocked people helping each other as they boarded up windows and picked up the remains of their lives.
She hopes the government will fix her apartment. “But now I don’t know,” she says. “I have no idea what’s next. I’m just in shock.”
In Smila, a small town in central Ukraine, confectioner Alla Bliznyuk, 42, says that every day she sells sweets for the funerals that parents prepare for their children killed at the front hundreds of kilometers away. Before, she says, despite the painful situation, “people were united.”
They became volunteers, prepared food for each other and brought food to the soldiers. Now, she says, there is a sense of collective “disappointment.”
Blizniuk also lives in fear that her husband or her two war-age sons will be mobilized. She has already noticed that there are far fewer men walking the streets than before. Ukraine does not disclose the number of war casualties, but everyone shares stories, she says, of new soldiers at the front surviving only two or three days at a time.
“The defenders of our country must be professionals. I’m really sorry,” she says. “We Ukrainians do not deserve this fate.”
In the Donetsk region, a Ukrainian soldier of Estonian origin, called Suzi, works at a stabilization post where they treat wounded soldiers before transporting them to hospitals in safer cities.
On one of the last days, he helps arrange the body bags that will soon be used in the makeshift morgue, which already smells of death.
Sometimes, he says, the soldiers’ bodies are so torn that we have to use two or three sacks to collect them. There are cases where soldiers come back with “only 15 percent of their bodies,” says Susie. “I’ve never seen so much blood before.”
“It’s such a high price for freedom,” he adds.
These scenes are played out a world away from Kiev, the capital, where citizens – somewhat protected by enhanced air defenses – sometimes don’t even respond to air raid sirens. But even here the painful signs of war are everywhere.
On park benches, freshly wounded soldiers being treated in the capital drink coffee and smoke cigarettes before returning to their hospital beds. They watch civilians walking with dogs and babies in their arms.
34-year-old Victor, a former waiter in a restaurant, is one of them. He came under mortar attack in a front-line trench in Zaporozhye.
His wrist was split in two and his face – now covered in scabs – was riddled with shrapnel. His knee was also hit.
Now he sees in Kiev that the bars and restaurants are full and the city is teeming with traffic. A group of children walk past him and turn their heads to look at his wounds.
Victor, who asked not to be named for security reasons, considers himself lucky because at least he can walk.
Many other men in the same park are missing limbs, and Victor’s Facebook is flooded with pictures of soldiers who never returned home.
These images haunt him so badly that he no longer wants to look at his phone. “It’s too depressing,” he says.
The last battle had been exhausting. One day it took his unit seven hours to move just 400 meters, he says. “And that was pretty quick.”
He and his wife, who also serves in the army, are due to see each other this afternoon for the first time since his injury. “I’ll probably cry,” he says. As soon as he recovers, he will return to the front.
Ruslan Proektor, 52, lost his leg over the summer after stepping on a mine while fighting in the east. Immediately afterwards, he was wounded again when the soldier helping him to safety stepped on another landmine.
Now, as he recovers in Kiev, his wife, Anna Oliynyk, 47, says she wants “the counteroffensive to be more active.”
“All these people are coming back from the front without limbs,” she says, looking at her husband in the wheelchair.
“I want the price they paid to be justified. Otherwise, what they went through is pointless.”
Given a choice, Projector would not return to the front again. “They take everybody and send them to the front line with no real training,” he says. “I don’t want to be around unmotivated people.”
Others like him are mostly angry at Russia, but are not afraid to criticize Ukraine as well. This month, President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted that a government audit of military recruitment centers had found “disgusting” practices by corrupt officials.
A soldier who goes by the nickname “Positive” and is recovering in a hospital in Kiev after concussions suffered at Kherson and Bakhmut, believes that people who take advantage of the war to make money “should be sent to the front line’.
Yulia Paltseva, 36, a receptionist in Kyiv, said she was shocked by the way Kyiv residents still celebrate and socialize.
Her friend is at the front and will soon be transferred to fight near Bakhmut, she said. “All these dancing and laughing people should remember the boys, like my friend, who are in the trenches, without rest and under daily fire,” Paltseva thinks.
As for the counteroffensive, she says: “Our expectations were higher. If anything happens at all, it happens very slowly.”
In Kryvyi Rih, Dr Valeria Maslyanik, 58, sighs as she looks up at her destroyed apartment – just a hole in the part of the building that was destroyed in last month’s strike.
There is also an empty hole in the place where her neighbors used to live. A pile of stuffed toys and flowers are piled outside in their memory.
Already thinking about the upcoming winter, she fears that her windows will not be replaced before the temperatures drop. She is tired and sees no end in sight. “I want to go to the sea,” she says sadly. “But the Russians took all the seas from us.”
Across the street, construction worker Volodymyr Pravednik, 46, stops to survey the destruction. His sister lives in the same block but escaped unharmed.
Pravednik fears the attack was “just the beginning” of more strikes on the industrial city. He lives around the corner, and every time he passes the destroyed building, he says to himself: “I feel sorry for us, peaceful Ukrainian citizens, that we have to endure so much suffering.”
O’Grady and Khudov broadcast from Kiev, Kryvyi Rih and Smila. Heidi Levine broadcasts from Pokrovsk and other places in the Donetsk region.
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2023-08-20 18:51:33
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