“The city has disappeared, there are only ruins. It is impossible to rebuild it. If the Russians had captured it too, they would have captured rubble.” In a nutshell, Anastasiya sums up the paradox of the invasion of Moscow: in its destructive charge, it no longer even serves its own interests. Anastasiya is one of thousands of people who fled the martyred city of Mariupol. Like 80% of the buildings, his house was destroyed by Russian bombs. She fled with her two children and her injured husband first to Berdyansk, then to Dnipro and finally to Odessa. A stay at the Dream Hostel, which has hosted dozens of Eastern evacuees since the beginning of the war and gave them a first consolation.
Georghe, the hostel owner, has been running a volunteer association since 2014 to help the elderly, women and the infirm during the Donbass war. With the beginning of the war he made his hostel directly available.
“We built this kitchen in a few days. We want to give a little rest to the refugees from Kherson, Mariupol, Melitopol. People who are exhausted from the journey,” he explains to ANSA. By his side is one of the newcomers, Anastasiya. A rocket hit his building not a few meters away, but still devastated his apartment by blasting the windows. “The first thing I did was cover my son in shrapnel, we were lucky,” she recalls while holding this child so small he hasn’t learned to speak yet. They are all on their way to Romania, where this young mother has a promise to work in a local company. “I don’t know how long I will stay there, one day I would like to return to Ukraine, but there is nothing left in Mariupol.”
The memory of the bombs is vivid. “Even before February 24, my husband said I should get out of there, and then everything was very quiet.” Then came hell. “In 2014 that wasn’t the case, you could hear the sounds of battle in the distance, not in the middle. There were no air strikes, explains Anastasiya. She is certainly not the only one who came to Odessa from Mariupol. Kateriyna Yerska in the City of Martyrs was a volunteer and local chronicler. “Putin will go all the way to Europe. Like all dictators, he will continue to his own end,” he said in a phone conversation with ANSA. For Kateryna, despite 2014, this war marks a point of no return between Russians and Ukrainians. “But let’s be clear, this is our country. We were here before the Russians, since the times of Kievan Rus, he emphasizes, recalling the great kingdom of the East Slavs, which peaked in expansion around the year 1000, which together occupies a very large part of what is now Ukraine.
Words, those of Kateriyna, reflected in the vigorous defense of the Southern Front, and Odessa, which its mayor Gennady Trukhanov calls his “personal front”. So far, nearly 490 tons of humanitarian aid have arrived in Odessa, and the city’s defenses have been strengthened in recent hours. The Ukrainian army has launched another round of exercises to deal with what may be the last Russian offensive from the Black Sea in the coming days, which is expected in Odessa, and meanwhile military and tanks are also moving into Mykolaiv to further secure the southern line . “From now until next week we will know the truth,” several local sources explain. Convinced that after crossing the ford, victory may be close at hand.