#Life #Ukrainians #ruins
Galyna Chorna sobs as she recounts the Russian missile impact that destroyed the apartments above her, shattering her windows, her door and every shred of security she still clung to.
The 75-year-old is the only remaining occupant of her nine-storey block in Saltivka, one of Europe’s largest housing developments, which has been under ruthless and unrelenting shelling from Russia since the invasion of Ukraine began in February.
“I’m so scared because I’m alone here – I’m really alone. I had a daughter, but she died a year ago because she drank too much,” she says, shaking despite the warm sun.
“So now I’m just sitting here on this bucket. If a missile comes in, I just fall to the ground, on my front. Maybe that’s why I’m still alive.”
Saltivka, in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, was once a thriving neighborhood built in the 1960s as a “dormitory settlement” for Soviet industrial workers and home to more than half a million people.
On February 26, a relentless barrage of Iskander and unguided rockets began, hitting apartment blocks indiscriminately.
As the war rages on, much of the neighborhood now lies in ruins.
The beginning of spring was so cold that the nails on Galyna’s hands and feet turned black from the onset of frostbite.
There was no running water in the area for the first six weeks of the war and no electricity until last month. The gas just came back this week.
– Cherries on the sidewalk –
Burnt buildings overlook every street, their shattered windows and gaping holes punched through the brickwork testament to the intensity of the bombardment.
Many of the buildings are marked by deep cracks and look like they are about to collapse.
Rusting cars with roofs littered with fallen debris and bent metal in the streets.
Several blocks of flats appear to have been spared further down the property, but due to the indiscriminate nature of the shelling, no corner is truly safe.
Many of the attacks were carried out with banned cluster bombs, human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say, allegations the Kremlin has denied.
Parts of the district have been left in their natural state again, green strips are waist-high.
With most of the children gone, the cherry trees remain unpicked, their fruit falling onto the pockmarked sidewalk.
Those residents who stayed eke out a living on less than $100 a month in government funding and ready meals delivered by police and charity workers.
A few of Chorna’s neighbors have moved into a cavernous, gloomy shelter beneath the local school, where the dim light of bare bulbs reveal stone-ribbed floors kicking up thick dust.
The beds consist of school desks, chairs and wooden pallets.
Refugees from the chaos above bend over saucepans of soup being heated in a makeshift kitchen.
Antonina Mykolaieva, 71, moved to the shelter with her husband and about 40 others when war broke out, but he died of heart failure a month later.
Her son, a soldier in the Soviet Army, was killed decades ago at the age of 21. She could not bury her husband in the same cemetery because he had been pulverized by shell fire.
“I was always scared when I heard a loud bang because I was afraid the block would fall on us,” she says.
– “70 bombs a day” –
Oleg Synegubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region, told AFP that Saltivka was “almost completely destroyed”.
The most important task for the future, he said, is to ensure heating is restored before winter sets in, when night-time temperatures average around -7 degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit).
“But the destruction, the existing damage to the buildings will not allow them to be restored to the condition they were in before,” he said.
The task of protecting residents from the elements falls partly to Volodymyr Manzhosov, a 57-year-old plumber on a city government maintenance team trying to replace bombed-out pipes.
He lives alone in Saltivka – one of five people living in a 15-storey block of flats – after sending his wife and two children to the relative safety of the western city of Lviv.
“The most difficult time was around March because it was cold and there were about 70 bombs in the area every day,” he said.
But he continues to hope for a brighter future as public transport and some shops return to his corner of the property.
“I live on the ground floor, so if my block gets hit, I’ll be fine,” he grins.
“If something happens and I find myself under the rubble, I have a bottle of water and a flashlight by the bed.”
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