First modification:
In Kharkiv, now the bombs fall nearby, but its inhabitants are reluctant to fall prey to the unbreathable climate imposed by the war.
They were leaving a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Kharkiv and thinking of two elderly women without electricity or food or medicine, trapped there in a bombed-out and unreliable-looking building, when traveling at the same speed, the two vehicles became parallel. In one was a group of soldiers with their uniforms and weapons; in the other, a journalist with helmets on his head and a vest on. For a moment, someone even had the fleeting thought of saying something. Nobody did, there was only an exchange of glances and almost imperceptible grimaces, when the cars finally stopped in front of a supermarket.
Kharkiv is today a war front. They are two children petrified to see their mother lying on the ground after being hit in broad daylight by the fragments of a missile. It’s the metallic shriek of a tracked main battle tank as it whizzes down an urban highway. It is the phone of a computer scientist to whom his younger brother, in his twenties, tells him that he is in the middle of a bombing.
They are the sirens that nobody pays attention to anymore, the columns of smoke that stain the sky, and an attacked fire station. And it is also that supermarket in which soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs wait in order for their turn in line to be served after some journalists, while some aid workers pass by and an employee smiles at a situation she does not want to get used to.
Scenes like these, all real, all everyday, are seen these days in the militarized Kharkiv, a proud city whose residents are reluctant to fall prey to the unbreathable climate imposed by the war. The bombs here fall very close, with the invaluable support of the artillery, which has left the most vulnerable population in entire neighborhoods with no support other than that offered by the networks of the Ukrainian civil resistance, that is, basically, civilians who help other civilians even more defenseless.
But Kharkiv is not a police state. The devastation of war has not dehumanized people. Neither the soldiers, dirty and tired from a conflict that does not rest, have stopped saying ‘good morning’, nor the inhabitants of the city distrust foreigners as if they were unreliable people, or have they stopped speaking Russian as the main language of intimacy and everyday life. Even at the barricades, a certain order is still maintained, and the one who is in the greatest hurry is allowed to pass. The focus is on keeping your loved ones safe, and anyone in distress, and letting the world know what’s going on here.
Achieving Kharkiv would be too great a victory for Russia, and eastern Ukraine knows it, even more so after the fall of Kherson and Mariupol, the strategic port city that has been in the hands of Russian troops for several weeks and has offered scenes Dantesque evacuations of civilians.
The spontaneity and absence of Kharkiv’s nervous breakdown is, in all probability, related to his story. Because it is not the first time that this city, born on a Cossack settlement, has been the scene of fierce battles. It was born as a city in 1656, to protect the southern border of the then Russian empire (Alejo I of Russia was the tsar at the time), and during World War II it was a disputed center (during the so-called four battles of Kharkiv) by Soviets and German Nazis, the first being the ones who would finally take it in 1943.
Although the intellectual soul of Kharkiv is also visible, a city that is not only the second most important in Ukraine, but was already an important industrial center in the 19th century and was even the capital of the Soviet republic between the 1920s and 1930s. the last century. Kharkiv also still shines as an important Ukrainian cultural and scientific center, although essentially the spirit of this city is still that of a bridge between East and West.
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