A shed built from several pallets is the new playground for a group of children in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, commanded by nine-year-old Ostap. Fact and fiction go hand in hand in this country at war when one of them draws a wooden gun and points it at his friends. They are surrounded by logs and planks, which the elders cut with axes and saws at their leisure. Any place is good to keep them away from the indulgence. This firewood is the fuel the neighbors want to feed the boilers to get through the winter in the same dugout that protected them from the Russian bombings the month Irpin was occupied.
Children prefer this improvised sawmill in the open air to the traditional park with swings, which is just a few meters away on a sandpit. There the colored irons are spattered and perforated by shrapnel. It is a living memory of those weeks when this town on the outskirts of Kyiv was the scene of fierce fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian armies. Now that the invading forces have been withdrawn since early April, the biggest near-term fear for Mayor Oleksandr Markushin and neighbors is the impact of systematic Russian attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure in a city that has been partially destroyed. In an interview with EL PAÍS, Markushin warns that despite government aid, they don’t have enough money to get through the toughest months of the year. “The most urgent thing now is to repair the roofs and windows,” he says, not forgetting the generators.
More information
The scene of the children’s game in the forest takes place next to a residential building whose main facade is littered with artillery shells. Some even went inland and ransacked some of the homes in this hundred-apartment block, which was home to about 300 people before the Russian invasion that began on February 24. Several workers are busy these days with the help of a crane to seal the holes in the projectiles with new stones. Temperatures are steadily dropping, and the more advanced the damage repair is, the less impact the cold has.
For weeks, Kremlin troops have been conscientiously beating across the country to leave the Ukrainians without electricity, water and gas. Kiev authorities estimate that up to 40% of the energy infrastructure is damaged and savings are the order of the day. According to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, this weekend started with 450,000 households without electricity in the capital alone. Across the country, that number was multiplied by 10, according to President Volodimir Zelenski, who reported that 4.5 million homes were left in darkness.
Valentina Bratkevich, a neighbor and community manager who is winterizing a basement in Irpin. Louis of Vega
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe to
Valentina Bratkevich, a neighbor and manager of this community in Irpin, still has hours in the day to face all the tasks that lie ahead of her. The latest purchase was a boiler which they have already installed in one of the rooms in the basement common areas, the easiest place to heat. The chimney exits through a window onto the street, which they didn’t want to remove the sandbags from “in case they decide to go back to the Russians,” says this 45-year-old woman, mother of four and wife of a soldier in the reserve. It is a room where birthdays and other celebrations used to be celebrated and which served as a shelter from the attacks when war broke out and is now being renovated to protect it from the harsh winter. They even equipped it with some furniture that was saved from the flames of the houses in the building that was the target of the attacks. For example, a washing machine or the table in the living room of 60-year-old Andrii Saharov, from whose floor only black walls are left.
Throughout the Russian occupation, barely a dozen of the 300 neighbors remained in the block’s basements. Most were evacuated from Irpin, like Valentina Bratkevich, who went first to western Ukraine and then to Portugal for three weeks. As soon as he could, he returned. On April 30, a month after the liberation, he was back in Irpin. A Belarusian family is among those left behind. Grandmother Claudia was killed in an attack on March 4th. Bratkevich escaped the next day. She says it took three or four days for the old woman’s body to be recovered from the house and she was buried in the garden until the end of the occupation allowed her to be exhumed and taken to the cemetery as it was at dozens of civilians happened Irpin and other towns from the surrounding area.
Artillery damage to the facade of the Irpin building Luis de Vega
According to the city administration, the windows and doors of 320 buildings and around 1,000 houses in Irpin urgently need to be replaced. In some cases, repairs to roofs, facades and floors also have to be carried out. Authorities are urgently requiring generators to deal with power outages and utility disruptions in places like hospitals, schools and temporary shelters in modules for the displaced or homeless. Also for boiler rooms or systems for pumping water. “We have already inaugurated a modular city and will open another one so that people can winter there,” explains the mayor. The occupation and fighting left only 5% of Irpin’s 100,000 residents unevacuated, but according to Oleksandr Markushin, 82% of the population has now returned.
In front of the portals of the block, which began to rise in 2006, rubble removal works continue. Several operators, intermediaries of a recycling company, load a truck and a van with all the scrap metal. There are heaters, bed frames, windows, roof sheets, pipes, appliances and even the skeleton of an ironing board. Jana Ischenko, 50, is the municipality’s accountant and follows the process closely as she takes notes in front of the scales. She takes care of selling all this junk, for which they get two hryvnia per kilo, which is about five cents.
Employees weigh the scrap that was removed from the building after the damage caused by the Russian attacks to buy from neighbors Luis de Vega
A 30-year-old witnessing the scene, checking out the neighborhood organization, proudly remarks that these are people who have left behind the Soviet and centralist mentality, who care more about moving forward than protesting, and that they do this in do in difficult times like these Try not to rely solely on government tutelage. “This good organization dates back to before the war,” Valentina Bratkevich clarifies. But despite everything, the neighbors regret that there is no public help.
The mayor is confident that within two weeks these neighbors will receive help from the fundraising platform United24, an initiative for which President Zelenski, a former actor, has enlisted famous colleagues such as Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn or Ben Stiller. The administrator of the municipality says that so far 70% of the owners of the 93 apartments have already paid the equivalent of around 600 euros out of their own pockets into a joint fund for the renovation of the building. In all, he estimates they need about 1,000 each to complete the repairs that will allow them to brave the winter. At the same time, however, it is emphasized that there is solidarity and that no one asks for money if they are unable to pay.
Given the bleak prospects, Oleksandr Markushin never tires of calling for help inside and outside of Ukraine. In any case, he is aware that the reconstruction will not be complete before those months of the year when the thermometer drops below zero. That’s why he insists his message goes beyond his country’s borders: “We are fighting not only for our territory, but also for the democratic values of the whole world.”
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
read limitless