Sleeping with your shoes and bags ready next to your bed is one of the first things you learn in conflict areas. Next, you learn that when bombs come from the sky you have to stay in windowless places, sitting on the ground, near the walls. And so it was for us, at five o’clock yesterday morning, when in Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian Donbass, the sound of four explosions broke the air and opened the war, which was there, not at the gates. She had already entered, but through the back door, that of the diplomatic arm wrestling. Yesterday, however, she entered the front door, a large-scale operation. Putin had threatened her, and promised her. And so it was. Russian armored columns pushed into Ukraine and air strikes simultaneously hit the capital Kiev, Odessa, Kramatorsk, also heavily hit the city of Kharkiv in the north, whose airport had been previously closed a few hours earlier, hit after a few hours. strategic port city of Mariupol.
Ukraine was attacked on a very broad front, from the Belarusian border, from the one with Crimea, tanks deployed on the outskirts of Kharkiv, and armored units west of the Dnipro River.
Infrastructures, airports, military bases, television antennas, and even, unfortunately, civilian homes have been hit.
In Kramatorsk, the four explosions woke the city while it was still night outside. The phones worked in fits and starts.
The risk, when we opened our eyes, is that the last hacker attack of the night, the one on the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the Intelligence Ministry, had been followed by a blackout of the telephone networks also in the city. Signal in fits and starts for an hour, the line starts again. And a bustle of “Are you okay?” In the smaller urban centers along the contact line, however, after an hour there was already no water and no electricity and without electricity, distant friends and relatives become an obsession. But there’s no way to know if they’re okay, if they’re alive.
The war isolates, divides, silences the horizons that also rattle with artillery, missiles and bombs. Helicopters and rockets. The war falls silent because it prevents us from knowing if loved ones are safe.
The Ukrainian colleague who works with us, Serghei, is from Mariupol. It’s a five hour drive from here. He is unable to speak to his wife, nor to his mother, nor to his sister who lives and works in Kiev. Asking him to think about us, about our movements, is both necessary and inhumane. He is there, with the phone in his hand that doesn’t work or rings empty. “Can we go to the hospital and ask if we have been injured?” I would like to ask him, while his face does not leave the phone, waiting for a sign, for two words: I’m fine. I would like to ask him and I do not do it, because observing his impotence mixed with rigor, temperance mixed with emotion was – yesterday – an already completed story of this invasion.
She had fallen asleep with the echo of the square, Kramatorsk. The words of the mayor who the day before had launched an appeal to the city: take to the streets with Ukrainian flags, claim that everyone here responds to the government of Kiev, to strengthen the motivation of the soldiers at the front and of those who from today will become soldiers out of necessity .
A united square. Young. Scared. A square that perhaps he had already understood. Kramatorsk has 150 thousand inhabitants. A few hundred people responded to the mayor’s appeal. Flags in the wind and tense faces shouted Ukraine, Ukraine, with the fury of those who know they are in danger and the haste to go home, pack their bags, pack a supply of food just in case. The evening was a succession of signals, alarms, unverifiable and difficult to verify news. Until the dramatic speech of President Zelensky who, speaking in Russian, calling for peace, played his last chance. Negotiations failed, an attempt to contact Putin failed, Zelensky tried to speak to the hearts of the Russians.
“Two thousand kilometers of border join us, we are brothers,” he told the Russians. «And yet 200,000 of your troops are surrounding us, encircling us, on Putin’s orders. Many of you have relatives in Ukraine, you have studied in Ukrainian universities, you have Ukrainian friends. You know our character, our principles, what matters to us. Listen to yourselves, the voice of reason ».
The voice of reason was silent on Wednesday night. Dumbfounded by the war.
This is the image of the first two hours of Kramatorsk awakened by bombs, closing suitcases of people fleeing with phones in hand asking others: how are you? Asking others so as not to ask oneself, and then having to admit that the first answer, in war, is always: I’m afraid. At seven in the morning there are no more noises, the sky clears up, the ice that had covered roads and cars during the night melts. People leave the house, like ghosts. First of all, the elderly, tight in worn coats, in woolen socks one on top of the other that are both the habit of frost and the resistance of the bodies that at these temperatures never seem to want to get used to. They walk silently, in the direction of the shops, the bakeries. One step after another, one last, irreducible, act of resistance: to continue as if nothing had happened. As if Zelensky had not authorized a few hours before everyone to hold a weapon to defend themselves and defend the nation, as if he had not asked the conscience of the Russians of where diplomacy has failed, where weapons will surely fail. War had been in the air for weeks. But the day before last night, a few news items in quick succession were enough to make everyone here, and outside of here understand that the countdown had begun, the separatist republics that are asking for Russian military support to defend themselves from Ukraine (letter that will appear then written the day before publication), hacker attacks on government sites and, lastly, Putin’s order to launch the offensive to overthrow the government in Kiev and demilitarize the country.
So yesterday morning there was nothing left of the flower shops, open cafes, young people in the square playing songs against Putin. The activists left in a hurry, and many local journalists, the most exposed to arrests and retaliation, if the Russian tanks enter the city. Left with young children in the back seat, many of them younger than this war.
At seven in the morning the queues at the petrol stations are very long. Some fill up, others arrive with cans, they want to try to cross the country and go West, as far West as possible, to Poland if needed. But the problems as the hours go by are all practical: the banks are already running out of cash. If before the maximum withdrawal was around 60 euros, over the hours the queues thin out because there are no more money. Shut down the banks, shut down the shops. Only supermarkets and pharmacies are open. You buy what you need and what you can. Lots of potatoes. The eggs. A lot of water. That could end too. By the middle of the day, the petrol also starts running out. Two, three distributors in the city have already closed.
The phrase “I want to escape” begins to be followed by: “Yes, but where?” At night it is better not to drive, and with the fuel running out too high the risk of being trapped, in the grip of the Russians who try to enter from all four sides.
From Kiev come images that seem to come out of the short century.
The bombed center of Kiev, images of Russian troops trying to seize an airport on the outskirts of Kiev on board of helicopters, and they succeed, perimeter the streets around. Hundreds of people hiding on the subway. A Zelensky presidential adviser asks civilians to leave the presidential administration building in central Kiev. The fear is that Russian forces will enter the area to occupy the palace.
The sun goes down, the streets empty. Everyone here begins to feel trapped. Because it is another of the things that war teaches, the fear of the night.
Fear, which is different for everyone who experiences it.
The fear of civilians, especially non-protagonists, while on the stage the lights are turned on on Peskov who, before evening, announces that the Kremlin is willing to negotiate.
The string is at its point of maximum tension. Putin has shown the world how the nostalgics of the Empire play war, it is up to the West now to accept the conditions of him – to give him the Ukraine as a trophy – or to go on the counterattack.
When evening falls on Kramatorsk, Serghei, faced with his overrun nation, apologizes for not being able to concentrate on his work, but cannot speak to his mother, who is elderly and lonely, and perhaps has to go back. He has a folded face. We should take to the streets, she whispers, rebel.
But there is no one on the street anymore.
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