KHARKIV, Ukraine—Spring flowers have begun to bloom at the center of Shevchenko City Gardens in Kharkiv, but there’s no one around to see them. Instead, the streets are empty and a dead silence falls over a once-crowded city of 1.5 million, broken only by the regular sound of artillery fire. On my first night in the city, I was woken up by shells at 6am. I could hear explosions at least every minute for the next hour and a half. Some were close enough to vibrate the windows of our apartment. Later in the day we could see men clearing debris a few blocks from where we slept.
“Why should we go outside when every step is a lottery with our lives!” Nastya, a 23-year-old subway station attendant, told The Daily Beast. (Due to the tight security situation, many residents were uncomfortable giving last names.) Like most Charkivitans, she rarely ventures outside. “Originally we divided the city into dangerous areas like the center and east of the city near the Russian lines and the other areas that we thought were safer.” But last week, she says, she was visiting her family drove to a formerly untouched area of Kharkiv. “As soon as I got there, they started shooting at it!” she said. “Now nowhere in the city is safe.”
Destroyed buildings in Kharkiv.
Tom Mutch
A Ukrainian soldier who fought on the front lines told The Daily Beast that when the war started, “they came to the gates expecting people to just walk around in despair as soon as they entered the city. But they didn’t. Instead, they fought back.” The unprepared and ill-equipped Russian force was quickly driven out of the city proper. So the Russians gave up trying to capture Kharkiv. Instead, they have sat back from dug-in positions up to 10 miles from the city and subjected it to one of the most ruthless bombings of a European city since World War II. If they can’t have the city, they want to make life here so unbearable that it’s uninhabitable. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed and many of the city’s residents lack basic necessities. As one resident put it, “It’s Mariupol in slow motion.”
The irony is that Kharkiv is an almost exclusively Russian-speaking city, which witnessed significant pro-Russian protests eight years ago in response to the Maidan uprising. No one knows this better than Father Vasili, the 50-year-old priest at the Church of the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women in central Kharkiv. Dressed in a black robe and with an ornate silver crucifix around his neck, he gestured at a large chunk of shrapnel that had smashed into his church from a missile that had landed across the street. He had just finished an Easter Sunday service attended mostly by older parishioners who couldn’t or didn’t want to leave their hometown.
“150 meters from this church is the Pushkin Russian Drama Theater. About 600 meters from here is the Kharkiv National University with a department of Russian language and literature. There are three to four streets nearby named after the prominent Russian poets and writers: Pushkinskaya, Lermontovskaya, Dostoyevskovo… they came to “denazify” what? Your people and your language!” he thundered to The Daily Beast.
Despite the close cultural and personal ties between Russia and eastern Ukraine, Russians have inflicted terrible suffering on the people of that part of the country. “I spent the early years of my ministry in a church in Borovskii District. Now there are Russian troops there. Life there didn’t just freeze – it rolled back several decades. There is robbery, looting and rape. I say it with great pain,” said Father Vasili. The sadness in his voice turns to anger as he begins to describe the actions of the Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow, who recently gave his holy blessing to Putin’s war: “We are ashamed of the Russian Orthodox Church. We used to be a part of it. And now we’re ashamed of it. We are ashamed of the patriarch who is silent. They preach war.”
A Ukrainian child stands next to debris from Russian shelling.
Alexander Chan
This senseless torment can be found throughout the city. The Daily Beast visited several sites that had recently been bombed, including a market in the heavily damaged Saltivka district that had been hit just two days earlier. We could not find any sign of troop movement or the debris that would be expected from military activity in these locations. Instead, there were the charred remains of clothing, shoes, and books that the various shops were selling.
Alexander Vasil, a 37-year-old who runs a peacetime cryptocurrency exchange, was awakened by the blast at 3:30 a.m. He showed The Daily Beast a photo he took with a sign that read “I Love Kharkiv” as the buildings behind it burned down. He said that while no one was at the market at the time, several people nearby were injured by the blast and he was told at least one elderly resident had died from a heart attack caused by shock. Vasil said he decided to stay in the district to help those around him and to help the people living underground in the subway station.
“We haven’t had hot water or electricity since the start of the war,” he said, “but we’ve gotten used to it. We just wash with cold water instead.” His windows have long since been blown out, but like most people in the city, he said the endless explosions and shelling have merged into one and people are no longer shocked. Trade in the city essentially ceased. A single cafe called Protagonist opens for a few hours in the afternoon, serving mostly soldiers and journalists.
But life in the city goes on and the remaining residents refuse to back down. “This is my home, why should we ever be forced to leave?” said Anna Subotina, a tattoo artist who has defiantly kept her studio open despite the destruction of her surroundings. Their usual clientele was replaced by soldiers who had their unit’s insignia or various military symbols inked before going to the front lines. “Nothing is open and they have nothing to spend their money on, so they spend it here instead.” By far the most popular tattoo these days has been that of a rifle or AK-47.
For Father Vasili, hope lies in Kharkiv’s youth. “What I enjoy most is the young people, the volunteers,” he said. “A lot of them have cars and money and everything they could leave, but they chose to stay.”