«Yesterday morning we had twenty-two degrees in the house. After the rocket hits in the middle of the day, the central heating went out, the taps ran dry and the power outage didn’t allow us to turn on the emergency electric heaters. Now we have dropped to 16 degrees, if this continues, with the cold of the night, even the temperature in our bedrooms could drop to 10 degrees, then the walls will freeze and the situation will get worse in the next few days “. The remedies? We lock ourselves in the kitchenette and try to heat with gas and candle flames. The evenings become endless without light bulbs, living in semidarkness, smoking, playing cards and drinking a kind of home-made vodka that friends in the country for a few grivnias because there is now good wine in the supermarkets in the center unapproachable for families like hers who have lost 80 percent of their income in nine months They spread their sleeping bags on the bed and bury them under them all Blankets that are in the closets At home stay dressed in layers including the winter jacket “Soon we will go to the public fountain nearby and then we will have Wass him to wash dishes,” say Ala Graciova, 67, and her daughter Julia, 44. At the home of Julia, 47, also a Kiev citizen, his mother was a victim of Putin’s bombing of civilian infrastructure. Kyiv lacks water and electricity, a “medieval” strategy by the Russian army to besiege the capital of Ukraine, a city of nearly three million people, and leave it in the dark and cold.
Scenes from everyday life in Kyiv, which was paralyzed by Russian missiles the day before yesterday. To reach her home in the Dorohojekhi district, we had to navigate traffic jams amidst the chaos of switched off traffic lights and queues outside the few open supermarkets as the owners managed to snag increasingly rare generators. The place is well-known to the press: here stands the tower with television repeaters, which was attacked by Russian rockets on March 1. It was the first crackdown on civilian targets in Kyiv, and since then the astonishment has turned into acute and widespread popular anger. Light rain is falling today, which at times turns to sleet.
The Graciova family’s apartment is on the fifth floor of a Khrushchevka, the well-known prefabricated buildings that are widespread in all regions of the Soviet Empire and were commissioned by then-Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s. Julia lives there with her three children between the ages of 20 and 25, who no longer study but no one works. “The war has reduced employment opportunities,” he says. She is separated from her husband Max, who lives in the districts on the east bank of the Dnieper and is also unemployed. Occasionally he spends some money, but at the moment they can’t communicate: the phone lines are cut and to send messages you have to go to the subway or to the nearby school number 24, where one of the guys who Zelenskyy called “Resistance Centers”. Here you can charge your mobile phones, connect them and warm up.
They are simple people, generally preferring to dream about vacations and talk about love gossip or the possibility of fabulous earnings, but they do not compromise on one principle: Putin must withdraw from the territories occupied since February 24, otherwise they will not give after they are ready to endure the cold, live in the dark and tighten their belts. “I never thought that the Russians could attack and bomb us like that. Putin is a lunatic who must be stopped and punished at gunpoint. Zelenskyy may have made several mistakes, underestimating the Russian threat, but he has moved well since the beginning of the war, we are on his side and we will resist, »says Julia cautiously. It’s worth listening to him: she’s not a soldier or a politician, she works as a worker in a large construction company that is punished with power cuts. “My monthly intake is now less than a quarter of what I was taking a year ago,” he explains. But the only concession she might be willing to make to the Russians in exchange for an end to the attacks and, most importantly, “a safe and guaranteed peace” would be to start negotiations on the future of Crimea and part of the Donbass. Mother Ala and the people patiently waiting in the snow at the city water pump for their turn agree with her. They smile, they pat each other on the back. Rumor has it that in some areas of the city the water is returning and the engineering teams are working miracles. “We will resist, the Russians have to withdraw,” they repeat. Maybe even Putin should listen to them.
-Updates on the Russia-Ukraine war here
– Appeal of President Zelenskyy to the UN: “In Ukraine people without light and in the cold, it is a crime against humanity”.
November 24, 2022 – Updated November 24, 2022 7:38 pm
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED