“Close the window, the smoke will come in!” shout of a policeman. Viacheslav lives with his mother on the ninth floor of a building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, in the northeast of the country. The neighbor’s apartment is on firehit by a Russian missile.

The city is at the crosshair of the Russian army. They are not massive bombings, but every day they receive specific, random, spaced attacks, day or night, sometimes deadly.

The hardest hit were the city’s east and northeast neighborhoods, where 86-year-old Tamara Pavlovna and her son Viacheslav live on Heroes of Labor Street.

About twenty-one storey blocks line the street, inspired by tree trunks, with hammocks and slides for children.

In this seemingly indeterminate corner of Kharkiv, three rockets fell in just a few seconds on Friday, just before 4 p.m.

One broke into a sex shop across the street. The second hit his building. the last left a large hole in the sidewalk. No one was injured.

Right time to escape

Invited by the police to leave the apartment, the old woman had enough time to put some things in a small bag.

The elevator was broken and Mrs. had to walk down nine floors. Pavlovna.

With a white scarf covering her head, the woman waits stressed, somewhat lost, on a bench at the back of the building.

“My son has been taking care of me for eight years. He doesn’t want to leave and I can’t decide on my own,” she explains. “Within a month and a half, the russians bomb here, relentlesslyin this neighborhood, “he added.

The Russian border is 30 kilometers away. At the beginning of the invasion, Kremlin troops wanted to take over this city, in vain. Defensive forces resisted and drove the attacker several kilometers away, in exchange for intense fighting.

Since then, Ukrainians have recaptured several small towns in the southeast. But Kharkiv remains under Russian artillery fire.

On Heroes of Labor Street, firefighters placed their hoses in the apartment hit by the missile, where large clouds of black smoke appeared.

In a nearby apartment, Viacheslav closed the balcony window and smoked a cigarette on landing.

“We usually hid in the corridor, between the walls. When the second bang hit the nearby apartment, the door saved us, it blocked all the pieces of glass. The cat hid,” he said.

According to him, “almost all the apartments in the building are now empty.”

roar

Outside, the noise of other attacks echoes around. Residents came out to assess the damage from the previous bombing they ran for shelter again.

On Peace Street, in another neighborhood in eastern Kharkov, a rocket hit a hotel-restaurant last night. Exact time? 10:02 pm, according to video surveillance cameras of a leather processing company located just opposite.

The black and white image was suddenly obscured by white mist, with pieces of wood as if propelled by a storm. The lights of the two vehicles began to flash.

The restaurant was further destroyed. In the leather store, Ivan even put wooden planks instead of windows, which exploded.

“All the windows were destroyed, everything was broken, the door was torn. We’re going to weld it now to protect the store. The shell cracks tore the metal like paper, the whole roof was bulging. It was the Russian world. ” he said without wanting to give his last name.

In the parking lot behind the store, two representatives of a Protestant church brought bags of food to a family with a seven-year-old boy, whom they asked to pray daily.

“My son went to bed by 8:00 pm And 10:00 pm, it all started, everyone was shaking,” mother Yelena said. The family lives in a building just behind the hotel-restaurant.

“Two shots, later someone else, we couldn’t sleep, we were in the corridor all night,” he adds.

“Tonight was awful,” she sighs, eyes red with tears.

Source: AFP

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