Garbage collectors in Kharkiv are now wearing flak jackets. Several of their trucks are riddled with shrapnel holes from shells that landed during their rounds. The trash cans they empty are crammed with the shattered, twisted remains of houses destroyed by explosions.
Still, they go out every morning to keep Kharkiv clean. Ukraine’s second largest city is perhaps the country’s most heavily shelled target after the siege of Mariupol. Every day brings a hail of Grad missiles, cluster bombs, grenades and rockets.
Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. The morgues cannot handle the daily toll that Russia is taking. At a downtown facility, dozens of bodies, wrapped only in plastic bags or blankets, are stacked in a courtyard. But the people of Kharkiv are determined that their city will survive, that life in the ruins must go on, even if it is only a frightening semi-existence in the shadow of sudden death for the time being. And that means keeping the city clean.
“They can bomb us as long as they want: we will withstand it,” said Ihor Aponchuk, a driver whose collection tour now includes spooky neighborhoods with empty playgrounds and a shelled school just short of the front line.
Hours after Aponchuk emptied the first rubbish bins near the Heroes of Labor metro station in eastern Kharkiv, a rocket hit people queuing for help about 500 meters away, killing six and leaving a blood-smeared sidewalk. The next day, Barabashovo’s main market was set on fire and four people died when a shell fell in front of a clinic.
Cheerful defiance prevails in Ukrainian cities less directly affected by war – or less horribly devastated. Death in Kharkiv is too close and too frequent for that.
Men and women who draw on extraordinary courage to face life openly admit that the situation is frightening.
Workers try to protect the statue of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko with sandbags in Kharkiv. Photo Credit: Seth Sidney Berry/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/ShutterstockStill, they and hundreds of thousands of others have chosen to remain in their “hero city” – a title first awarded to Kharkiv for its resistance to Nazi forces in World War II and which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded again this month for his bravery leading up to the invasion of Russia.
“We are afraid, but we have to show people that the situation is under control and that we are getting closer to victory every day,” said Governor Oleh Synyehubov, speaking to the Observer as he walked through a city center park under light police guard .
Aponchuk, who has had several near misses with Russian missiles, said: “I understand the fear.” But Kharkiv has a reputation as a “clean city,” and he believes this is vital for morale and public hygiene.
So every day he and over 250 others set out and risk their lives with a matter-of-fact abandon similar to that shown by Londoners who kept milk deliveries going during the Blitz.
“The other day a driver was shot at heavily, so he drove back here, had a cup of tea and then drove a different route,” said Oleksii Artikulenko, a city employee who was seconded a month ago to keep garbage collection going after the war .
Russian artillery strikes have emptied the streets of Kharkiv. Photo: Sergey Kozlov/EPALess than 40 miles from the Russian border, Kharkiv has traditionally been a Russian-speaking city, and Moscow apparently expected its troops to be welcomed there. Instead, they met fierce resistance.
Pinned to the north and east of the city, they began targeting civilians and the center, damaging everything from the zoo to the cathedral to a Holocaust memorial. A rocket has hollowed out the city hall of Kharkiv. Rockets punched holes in apartment blocks and destroyed smaller houses. “When it was clear that they would not take it, they launched a campaign of terror,” Synyehubov said.
“Kharkiv will be even more beautiful, with better buildings and infrastructure, I have no doubt about that. What upsets me are deaths. It’s easy to restore things, but not to restore families.”
Officials estimate that well over half of the city’s 1.4 million residents have left the city. Trains alone carried almost half of them, 600,000 people, west, and many more left by car. But that still leaves a city of hundreds of thousands, mostly indoors or underground, who have refused to leave.
They want to keep the spirit of the city alive for themselves, support the soldiers at the front lines nearby, start rebuilding, or at least clear the debris from the last strikes so Kharkiv doesn’t feel abandoned.
Serhiy, a firefighter, spent his 29th birthday last Thursday clearing the shattered remains of the imposing Soviet-era City Hall: 30 bodies were pulled from the rubble.
By evening, he said, he’ll be back on duty putting out fires: “I’ll celebrate my birthday with a cup of tea. We haven’t had a day off in a month. They offered us a break, but we don’t want to take it.”
Nearby, teams sent a 10-meter statue of poet and Ukrainian hero Taras Shevchenko. “For me, the city was wonderful,” said Yevhen Yurgens, 56, as he helped fill the sandbags. “See how the Russians destroyed it. We want to protect it as best we can.”
Map of Kharkiv
The city feels like the end of the flagpole for the war in Ukraine. The highway from the industrial center of Dnipro, passing through rich farmland, is now practically empty. You can drive for miles without seeing a car or truck.
Reports of Russian ambush groups and shelling, even on the relatively safe southern approach to the city, are making the journey tense, and people organizing aid say they are having trouble recruiting drivers for the escape.
Although the city is not officially under siege, it is running out of food and medicine. International organizations such as the UN and the Red Cross are usually notable for their absence.
“We’re essentially left to our own devices here,” says Synyehubov. “We receive 100 tons of humanitarian aid every day, but 40 tons of that is clothes that we don’t need.” They need five times as much food and medicine as they get.
For now, the city’s vulnerable residents are being kept alive largely by informal networks of volunteers like Tetiana Medveyeva, 33, and Stanislav Manilov, 28. The couple went to the train station on the first day of the war to go west, but ended up staying.
“We saw so many people trying to get on the train with their pets and families,” Manilov said. “We looked into each other’s eyes and agreed that others had more to leave behind than we did. And at that point we decided not to go and be useful here.”
They joined forces with some activists they knew before the war and began preparing food packages for the elderly and disabled who might have trouble leaving home or affording groceries funded by private donations made online were collected.
“We’ve been doing this since February 26, and it feels like it’s going to go on forever.” They spend their mornings buying and packing food bags and their afternoons handing them out. With most jobs gone overnight and old people unable to get their pensions from closed post offices, the scale of the hardship is staggering.
When your van pulls up, people will come running to secure a bag of pasta and a few cans of fish and meat. “In other areas, people are more desperate,” Medveyeva said. “They attack the van and yell at us if they don’t get food.”
A month ago she was an administrative clerk and he worked in an architecture firm. Now they live on dwindling savings and increasingly on the food packages they prepare for other vulnerable locals. They’re so used to driving around under fire that they don’t even flinch when shells land nearby.
“We no longer have a normal reaction,” Medveyeva said.