“I don’t want to die, please tell the world that we Ukrainians want peace, please.” Alina turns 26 in the shelter of the Dorohzhychy metro station in the center of Kiev, where she has lived for seven days like the vast majority of the (formerly) three million inhabitants of this capital besieged and emptied by a war that nobody knows. I expected.
We are more than 80 meters underground, an area that is reached by taking a very long escalator from a monumental station and it is cold. It snows outside.
You see families with babies, the elderly, young couples, all camped out on mats, cardboard or mattresses.
Ian, a Slovak journalist who is part of a press tours Organized by the Ukrainian Government so that the hundreds of journalists who have come to cover this invasion can hear the voices that come out of the bowels of Kiev, he warns that the young woman is celebrating her birthday. Alina is a psychologist. She says that she never imagined that she would spend her birthday here. “The worst thing is that today for the first time in my life I saw my dad cry,” she says, on the verge of breaking down. “We don’t want to die, we want peace,” she adds, in perfect English.
‘We feel the explosion’
The shelter of this station is 100 meters from the TV tower bombed by Russian forces two days ago. “If I’m not mistaken, it was around 17 local and even down here we felt the explosion. It was terrible. The escalators made noise and everything vibrated… We started looking at the cell phone to see what had happened and shortly after we felt a second explosion, stronger. A family of five who lives nearby died,” says Vladislav, a 27-year-old designer who is also there.
His girlfriend, Anastasia, a young woman with glasses and braids, says that they are worried about another couple who was their “neighbor” in the shelter, showing me the space with two sleeping bags next to them. “We haven’t seen them since yesterday, we don’t know what happened to them,” she says.
Outside, although the TV tower is still standing, it was not shot down –the missile evidently missed its target–, at its feet the scene is one of total devastation. Black smoke still billows from a low-rise building, no more than two stories, that used to be a gym and is now a mass of smoldering rubble. You smell that classic smell of gunpowder and death left by bombing. You have to be careful: there is glass on the floor, twisted iron, metal and a destroyed car. But not only the gym was destroyed. Next to it is another building also targeted by aerial fire, flattened. “Be careful, don’t get too close, because some part of the building could collapse,” warns a colleague.
Incredible as it may seem, there is no chaos in the subway shelter. Everything seems to be very organized. Upon entering there are armed uniformed men who ask for identification and even check their backpacks. “Argentina, Maradona, Messi,” I say to an agent dressed in black, who checks my bag, who smiles at me and replies: “Agüero!”
Vladislav and Anastasia say that in the place they have food, water and even bathrooms, although it is not perfect, it is acceptable. Volunteers come and go with boxes of blankets, cookies, and water, as well as trays of coffee, cakes, and other groceries.
Although on one platform there is a subway train stopped with some people inside, perhaps because it is less cold, on the platform that goes in the opposite direction it seems that the service is still working.
Beyond hell, attitude is perceived. Like that of an older lady who, despite the language barrier, proudly displays the potato, vegetable and meat stew that she has ready to eat on a plastic plate. She says something difficult to understand and although she is about to burst into tears, she tries to smile.
In the shelter there are also many pets that Kiev families have not abandoned in their apartments; young people who read a book or who, while waiting, unleash all their creativity. Like Sofía, a 14-year-old girl, who seems much older – the war surely makes her grow up all at once – with violet-dyed hair sticking out of her black hat, she painted some very special white bags. Bags that he proudly shows to journalists and that will one day be part of history: one says “Kyiv is the capital of freedom” and the other, in Cyrillic, “The Russian military should go to hell”, as they translate.
Caterina, a 25-year-old English teacher, is with a sister and a friend, sitting on her sleeping bag. She also lives in the neighborhood, ten minutes from the subway station, and she also went down to the shelter seven days ago.
“I am afraid because my parents are blocked in Volnovakha, in the Donbas region. That city is under attack by the Russians, who will not let them out in any humanitarian corridor. There is no internet, communications are cut off and I don’t know anything about them,” she says. “I’m not afraid for myself, because right or wrong I feel a little more protected in this shelter, where people are really very friendly, I even made friends… But I am very afraid for my parents and my brother who is with them”, he adds, with eyes full of fear. “I hope they are alive.”
ELISABETTA PIQUE
THE NATION (ARGENTINA)- GDA
@bettapique
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