The “rocket graveyard” that has haunted the city of Kharkiv since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on December 5, 2022. GUILLAUME HERBAUT / VU ‘FOR “THE WORLD”
It’s a piece of land at the base of a smoke factory in the southern suburbs the city of Kharkiv in north-eastern Ukraine, a real industrial wasteland. The place is guarded and cannot be visited without permission. It is where the debris from the projectile rain that has fallen on the country’s second-largest city since the country’s invasion on February 24 is stored. The broadcast of videos taken by drones in this place a few days ago revealed it to the public under the name “rocket graveyard”. Just like the picture of the mountain of arms posted on Facebook on Sunday, December 4 by a couple of Ukrainian photographers who usually specialize in glamorous shots. This photo, which would have been taken somewhere else,
a warehouse, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense announced on Twitter.
Hundreds of wrecks are lined up on the site visited by Le Monde. These fragments of missiles and other munitions, dumped on sandy soil, represent “the bulk” of the remains of the nine-month strikes that have claimed this remote town, less than 40 kilometers from the Russian border. “The other deposits are of less importance,” assures Dmytro Tchoubenko, spokesman for the Kharkiv Oblast (region) prosecutor’s office, who leads the international press to this terrifying collection protected by the surrounding factory wall.
Thanks to the fierce resistance of the Saltivka district in the north of the city, Kharkiv was not occupied, but remains one of the hardest hit in the country: Faculty of Economics, Workers’ Palace (designed in 1916 by an architect from Saint Petersburg), Regional Administration… The destruction of this last building by two Kalibr cruise missile on March 1, which caused the deaths of 29 people and was filmed live by a surveillance camera, had strongly shaped international opinion. A third of the population of the 1.8 million student city has left the city.
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Remnants of cluster bombs
The collection of the remains of rockets and missiles was carried out “in a rational and logical manner” by the community’s security services. The weapons have been sorted, aligned and partially labeled from the month of May, as evidenced by the rust or the vegetation that here and there mixes with the debris. According to Dmytro Chubenko, 95 percent of the arsenal lying in the sand are “cheap rockets at $50,000 or $100,000 each” fired from multiple rocket launchers (BM-30 Smerch, Tornado-S or Ouragan). Equipment “from the 1970s to the 1990s”, that is, from the end of the Soviet Union, “not very precise, made not to destroy but to terrorize the civilian population”. We find, according to him, the remains of “cluster bombs banned in civilian areas by international conventions.”
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