Thousands of Russians celebrated in Moscow on Friday the annexation of four areas in the south and east of Ukraine that they had controlled for a year. But locally, many cities were devastated. In Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, many neighborhoods were completely destroyed in fierce fighting and many residents lost their homes, such as 85-year-old Valentina, whom LCI met in the following report. “Without this house, I no longer know who I am,” she says, showing crumbling rooms, a veritable field of rubble.
It was moved a few kilometers away to a new building, one of those that regularly spring up in the city. According to the new pro-Kremlin authorities, nearly 1,700 residents like her were able to benefit from a new roof. But the octogenarian cannot find peace: “My soul is broken, you can’t compare my life there and here,” she explains.
A sadness that not everyone in this city shares, whose residents are predominantly pro-Russian. “The city is coming back to life, it is being rebuilt, the buildings have never been so beautiful,” says one of them. “Russia has retaken its city, it is a Russian city, it always has been,” says another happily. A Russification of the spirits that Russia wants to spread in the other territories it supposedly controls, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk. But fighting in the area continues and Kiev launched a counteroffensive in early June.