stranger than seeing someone city from three million inhabitants vacant and commercial deadTo the point where you have to walk a few blocks to find a place to eat or drink coffee, this is just to confirm. there is no light in the windows. Everything is dim and dim, as if endless night had fallen on the same streets that once celebrated Bulgakov and Gogol in the March of Artists or occupied the beaches of the Dnieper, even in the dream of spring. “Half the city left in the first weeks of the war, and the other prefers to live with half the lights off for what might have been,” says Kate, 23, who lives in a cafe in Kiev. She nobody wants to talk too much about what happened in Bucha, she. Very dark, very tasteless, very difficult to digest.
You shouldn’t think this gloomy weather is a surrendered city. Rather the opposite. All the rest made for it combat until the last drop of blood. Other than armament, such as feeding the army and the sick or maintaining essential services. But they all know very well that without the price paid horoscopeIrpin or HostomelTowns on the western outskirts of Kiev, Russian troops They would enter the city. “They can’t win or advance and that’s why they’re killing civilians this way. “They act like animals,” says Irna Pustovojt, a 72-year-old woman. “Like a horror movie and russian soldiers are his zombies. “What they’re doing is absolutely abnormal and inhumane,” says her friend, 55-year-old Babiyak Raise.
civilian massacres
In any case, Ukrainians know how to overcome the most inconceivable tragedies. famine stalin According to the current academic consensus, it killed between three and five million Ukrainians. In the second world war that started with nazi occupationBetween three and five million people died, including 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews, considered a liberation that would result in fighting Soviet troops from both the Wehrmacht and Stalin. But none of this numbed them from the “pain” and “sadness” they felt as the details of the city. bucha massacre, it was also repeated on a smaller scale in other occupied towns in western kyiv.
“I play football on a Hostomel team with players from all over the region and half died or disappeared”Says Viktor, 26, who made a living as a tour guide before the war. “I’m from Odessa, I speak Russian and had no problems doing it. However, the Russian media ate their heads. They have been told hundreds of times that we are fascists and Nazis, and they believe it. I no longer have friends in Russia, they died for me”, adds Viktor. “What they’re doing is absolutely insane.”
A handball plant, this boy tried to join the army twice but was rejected both times. For weeks Ukrainian forces have just accepted soldiers with military training because there are too many people. And whether military or civilian, they all greet and say goodbye in the same way, a nationalist greeting derived a century ago: Slava Ukraini!, to which the other’s answer is ‘Heroyam Slava’. (Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes).