There at the Irpin bridge everything has changed. Mortar rounds land on the road.
They are deafening, the men who guard the crossroads from which the three-kilometer straight that crosses the forest to the collapsed bridge over the river begins, intimidating us not to enter. We are told that a mortar round killed civilians. He landed on the road, but this time on the side of the bridge where yesterday we had documented the exodus of women, children and the elderly, through long lines of buses. Now the mortars land there.
The situation today is serious, the Russians have taken Bucha, the population cannot leave the city and the Russian artillery hits the streets of Irpin. The battle has gotten much more violent in the past twenty-four hours.
An entire family: the father, the mother, a teenage daughter with her brother who seemed the same age. The mother with her children die instantly, a body seems to be missing, perhaps the father was transported in a hurry because he still showed signs of life.
The fact that they were civilians forces us to go immediately. We serve this: to tell the effects of war on those who suffer war.
The car ride ends early. The driver doesn’t go any further, he won’t take us to the parking lot in front of the department store like he did yesterday. He parks in the woods that runs alongside the road by slipping into a muddy road and we find ourselves surrounded by hidden Ukrainian troops guarding the area.
We get out of the car quickly, on the right a soldier camouflaged in the bushes, further on another who is operating a small drone.
We cross the street and head towards that devastated bridge. We run low as the mortar rounds alternate in groups of three. Forty seconds between one and the other.
Away from the asphalt, we think. There is nothing more dangerous. A mortar, hitting a hard surface, creates greater damage; the splinters even travel as far as three times the distance they would reach if it landed on soft ground. We were told that the bodies are just before the bridge, right where the Soviet monument is.
We run for about 700 meters, the day before yesterday we covered that distance sitting comfortably in the car. The brick walls and painted sheet metal fences that rub against our jacket bear the marks of the splinters, but this is not the time to think about it. We have to get to the monument, take pictures of the bodies of these poor people who were trying to escape from the mortar hell and return.
The image that appears before our eyes looks like a movie set: two bodies covered with pink flower sheets – they must have been taken from a house in front of them – a gray trolley standing upright, with the disintegrated handle. The hand lying on the asphalt, uncovered by the sheet, is stained with blood. That family had managed to cross the slippery passage over the river, under the bridge that collapsed due to the bombing. He was doing it to get to safety, they were dragging the trolley full of dreams towards safety, by now it was just a little while to get out of Irpin: it was enough to get to the end of that straight stretch of less than three kilometers. As they were all doing, by the thousands, with those columns of yellow buses leading to the station.
But war works like this; it doesn’t kill everyone. And maybe that’s why we keep waging wars, maybe until it’s our turn we can’t feel empathy.
Empathy for those bodies torn apart by the explosion, pierced by shrapnel, for those people who wanted to get away from that little corner of country tranquility that was Irpin.
Before the war, the inhabitants of Kiev often decided to move there because of the tranquility. What an absurd atrocity war is.
Yesterday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, shouted to the world the pain of a battered people: «Today is the Sunday of forgiveness. But we will not forgive the hundreds and hundreds of victims, the thousands and thousands of suffering. And even God will not forgive him. Neither today, nor tomorrow, nor ever ». Instead “of the day of forgiveness – he added in the message posted on Facebook – there will be the Day of Judgment”. This morning the peace talks resume, but the hopes are almost zero. The mediation of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett does not seem to take off. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called Putin and he too made it known that he had asked him to “guarantee the ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors”. Zelensky, from the bunker from which he directs the operations, changes his tone towards his Western partners: «We ask you every day for a no-fly zone, if you don’t give it to us, at least provide us with airplanes to protect us. If you don’t give us these either, there is only one solution: you too want them to kill us slowly. This will also be the responsibility of world politics, of Western leaders. Today and forever ». It is a strong reference to NATO, Europe, America, whose protagonists seem, however, powerless with respect to the Russian escalation. Poland has in fact officially closed the door to the possibility of supplying some aircraft to Ukraine, an idea sponsored by Washington, while from Moscow the Ministry of Defense was still threatening neighboring countries. Any country hosting Ukrainian military aircraft “will be involved in the conflict,” the Kremlin men say.
For the second day in a row, the humanitarian corridors in Mariupol have failed. Doctors Without Borders tells of explosions very close to civilian homes, in the streets of the city: “There are neighborhoods that are heavily bombed, tortured,” say humanitarian workers, many of them local. While the water to drink is almost no longer available: «We have seen people drinking from the sprinklers, long queues form for a little water. There are Unicef trucks being stormed ». And the bread is missing: «There is nowhere to find it. Most of the shops and supermarkets have been stormed. Someone breaks the windows to grab the last supplies ». Same condition for hospitals: “In a structure in the western part of the city, where the battle is getting closer and closer, the nightmare is the bombing, because buildings not far away are hit.” The telephone in Mariupol hardly works anymore. And there is also no electricity to recharge it.
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