Lyudmila, 66, removes pits from cherries while sitting near the entrance to the basement used as an air raid shelter in Seversk, eastern Ukraine.
Lyudmila sits next to a fivestory building and removes seeds from cherries. She says she can no longer bear to live in the basement where she has been staying for three months in Seversk, some 20 km from Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine.
“Three months ago her [os russos] bombed here, now it’s here,” he tells AFP, showing the small road that runs past the building and leads to Lysychansk, the last major city that Russian troops plan to capture in the Luhansk region.
“Bombs are falling day and night,” shouts a woman who refuses to give her name, sitting on a bench under a tree at the foot of the building.
Then she gets up, takes her wheelbarrow with two large empty containers and goes to fetch water from a spring a little further away.
“We have no electricity or gas, and we haven’t had it for three months,” says Liudmila, while bombs can be heard in the distance. Plumes of white smoke can be seen not far away, over the city of Lysychansk.
Two women are baking potato pies at the bottom of the basement stairs, in a pot set on two bricks and heated over a fire.
One of them shows the AFP journalist his “room” in one of the flashlightlit parts of the basement: “Look, the mattresses are there, in a corner, and they’re spread out on the floor at night.”
In the next partition, a 90yearold woman is leaning against a walking frame in the shade. She needs medicine, but one cannot find it here, says a family member.
Pharmacies are no longer open in the small town, and almost all of the shops have been closed for two weeks.
‘Service in the basement’
“You have to go a long way to buy something and no one can pick you up,” laments a young man walking past the building. “Wouldn’t you have left toilet paper lying around?” he asks the AFP journalist.
Another resident, Viacheslav Kompaniets, remains in his firstfloor apartment where all the windows were shattered by an explosion in March when Russian forces attempted to approach Seversk before being repulsed by the Ukrainian army.
Next door, a small fire station was destroyed by a missile, leaving only rubble.
At the end of May, Vyacheslav suffered a stroke in his apartment: “I was treated in the basement,” confirms the 61yearold, given the proximity of the bombings.
Living in a place open to all four winds is possible in summer, but when fall comes, “you have to close everything,” he says, not knowing what tools he will use to do it.
By the fall, residents polled by AFP hope the Russian offensive will be over, but for now they live each day without knowing what will happen next.