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The inhabitants of the most devastated neighborhood in Kharkiv live in fear of continuous bombing, with hardly any humanitarian aid.
The Saltivka neighborhood in Kharkiv is being reduced to rubble, day by day, by the heavy weapons that fall here. The charred Barabashova market. A Russian Orthodox Church. The hospital next door. Even the Saltovsky Ice, a youth center where young people used to play hockey. And then apartments, warehouses, bars, cell phone and computer stores. All of this has been hit by bombs.
A gray Soviet-era building was left like melted Emmental cheese, accompanied by a conspicuous black and blurred stain, courtesy of the flames that devoured it after the impact. Just beyond, a man wanders with no one around him. And then two young men, who hold hands and walk quickly, while a guard passes the broom, also quickly, to collect the glass from a recent bombing. They don’t want to talk to foreigners. Nobody wants.
Saltivka is covered in fear and despair. The further north you go, the more this macabre thermometer of horror rises, as the certainty grows that what is at risk is life; the shells are no longer a noise, they can be seen. A professional army, the Russian, harasses this humble neighborhood-dormitory in which around half a million people used to live, while another army, the Ukrainian, also shoots at a short distance, with a population that supports it, despite the birds that They flee in a terrified group at each launch.
Some interpreters have divided the area into three sectors. Each one corresponds to a ‘checkpoint’, the last one being the worst, where the soldiers and militiamen are more nervous and the controls tend to be more punctilious. In others, especially shortly before the shots are fired, those in charge of the checkpoints are more benevolent. But even here Saltivka smells like a mixture of gunpowder, gasoline and burning tires, sometimes merging with a strange smell of coffee and vodka.
“It has besieged us, people live in poverty”
Anatoly is in his seventies, with graying hair and a disenchanted look. Before the war, he owned a kiosk that he now only uses to meet with his friend Lina, who is younger but like him, got stuck in this neighborhood. She standing, he sitting, they take the opportunity to get some fresh air when, during the day, they find time to poke their noses out, always near the Heroev Truda metro, have a cup of coffee in the street, and breathe in the fresh air.
Anatoly is angry with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. He asks how it is possible that he has cornered them in this way, that they live as destitute. “Everything that happens is very scary. It is unbelievable what he is doing to the Ukrainian people, he has besieged us, people live in poverty, I think the looting will start soon, people are hungry, cold, they have no clothes, ”says the old man.
Lina, who smiles warmly when she speaks and says that she only survives thanks to the help of some local volunteers, says that she was living in a building nearby, but now she has moved away. “The reason is that I don’t feel safe there, and I don’t have water or electricity. Everything is destroyed here. My children left a month ago, I have stayed for an elderly relative who cannot move, ”she explains, when suddenly the interview is interrupted by the sound of a shell. Lina freaks out and runs to the subway.
This is not the case for Anatoly, who immediately says “calm down, calm down”, and keeps the cup of coffee in his hand while the rest rejoin and some soldiers of the Ukrainian army pass by. From the streets, meanwhile, the few that were seen have disappeared, here in this great neighborhood, which were once campaign towns on the outskirts of Kharkiv. And so the silence returns, and you can hear the murmur of the leaves in the parks as they are caressed by the wind.
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