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Ukraine these days seems like a strange country, where life is fleeting, volatile. Multitudes of dissimilar worlds coexist at that time, in the private conversations of people and according to geography.
Yuryi lit a cigarette and said it naturally, hardly blinking an eye. He had been talking about his four-year-old daughter and his old job, as a clerk in a tour company. Everyday things. When he heard the sound of air raid sirens coming from the cell phone App, it was already late. Those images had already gotten into his head, he couldn’t get rid of them. He had smiled up until now. Not now. It was then that she said it.
“My brother-in-law died a few days ago in the latest Russian attack on Lviv (a city in western Ukraine), he was passing by, and it happened to him. He had three daughters, one had to come back from abroad for the funeral,” he stated.
Ukraine these days tastes like a strange country, in which life is fleeting, volatile. Multitudes of dissimilar worlds coexist at that time, in the private conversations of people and according to geography. In the west of the country, there is a partial normality, the attacks are now sporadic, and on the borders with Europe long lines of vehicles queue to return to a country whose name arouses fear in anyone who has not lived through a war.
Also in kyiv, and in the nearby towns that for so many weeks shielded the Russian advance towards the Ukrainian capital, life has begun to regenerate. Several stores have reopened, there are traffic jams, and analyzes continue on the bodies of those killed found in the areas occupied for weeks by Russian forces, where, as even the UN has recognized, there are indications that there were summary executions.
Meanwhile, terror and blood are piling up in the east and south of the country. The reality is impressive because the situation is even more serious than what the media managed to broadcast. Hundreds of desperate people continue to flee; they travel dirty and malnourished from Donbass and the martyred Mariúpol, a city, for a few days, practically under Russian control after a resistance that has lasted two months. They arrive in large cities such as Zaporizhia, in the south, or Dnipro, in the center of the country, but also in the small villages of the plains in the area, often guided by a local population that cares for them and helps them, as they can, to escape.
It is in these places that ordinary people – with no more training than the will to leave no one behind – have become another army: one that has even organized helplines for those in danger of life. They attend to them at any time, guiding them through the routes that are believed to be less dangerous, giving them information about possible windows for their departures, organizing the dispatch of buses to rescue them, and then hiding them in makeshift shelters whose exact location is known only to those who are part of these anonymous help networks
It is the Ukrainian government itself that has told civilians that they must flee from the eastern and southern towns that have become the front line of combat. There is barely enough power to stop the looting, destruction and death that may come in the coming days and weeks, when it is believed that the fighting between the two armies, their volunteers and their mercenaries will intensify – even more – here.
The forecasts are not good. According to the idea of some Moscow military, their troops should occupy not only eastern Ukraine, but also southern Ukraine up to Transnistria, which would mean leaving kyiv without access to the Black Sea and creating more tension in this region, which, since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, it has remained separate from the Republic of Moldova (although it has not been recognized by the international community). Hence, some believe that it could be another successful move for Russia, a country that already has troops in Transnistria.
Although there have not yet been significant advances by Russian forces in strategic locations such as Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, the announcement has left several targets in Ukraine. In all probability, even Volodymyr Zelensky himself, the Ukrainian president – usually very skillful and quick in his way of communicating -, who on Friday took hours to react after the information was released.
It is also on the roads of Ukraine that Ukrainian universes often mix. The truckers, like anonymous heroes, travel these routes for miles and miles, hardly being seen and in an attempt to continue fulfilling their task of bringing goods, products and food to the entire country. They move along single-lane roads, between trucks carrying tanks and soldiers who want to fight in the war, stopping at service stations where there are lines to fill up on gasoline and at Cossack food restaurants.
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