Tchaikovsky composed one of his first symphonies there, the Russian troops will leave a much more painful memory there: Trostyanets, in the north-east of Ukraine, came out this beginning of the week as if dazed, and partly destroyed by a months of Russian occupation.
After three days of heavy shelling, Ukrainian forces last weekend drove Russian soldiers out of this town of nearly 20,000 inhabitants, known for a summer stay of the famous Russian composer in 1864, and today for its chocolate factory, the largest in the country.
“It was bombarding from all sides. On the night of 25 to 26 (March), they just decamped”: Pavlo spent almost a month cloistered in his house, near Smorodino station, where the bulk of the contingent was stationed from Moscow. Russians, Chechens, and Ukrainians from the separatist Donbass, “the most cruel, who expelled people to settle in their homes”.
In a month of occupation, a refugee in his cellar, Pavlo says he saw everything, or rather heard everything: the entry of the Russians into Trostyanets, their actions in the streets, “the bombs and the (rockets) Grad flying. . “
– “Any news from Kyiv?” –
Three days after the attack, the forecourt of the station is a battlefield, still dominated on its stele by an antediluvian tank T-34, in homage to the “Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis.
A dozen tanks, tank trucks and other armored vehicles, gutted or charred, lie everywhere around the devastated square. An MSTA, a monstrous 152 mm howitzer on tracks, is abandoned there, door open. Abandoned rangers, pieces of steel and ammunition litter the overturned ground.
The nearby bus station, the shops that housed the Russian soldiers and their armaments are in ruins, gone up in smoke, wooden ammunition boxes stacked or overturned on all sides.
“Our soldiers were right on target, with drones or whatever. It’s beautiful all this burnt scrap metal, we’re going to make lots of ammunition for our army”, rejoices Pavlo, who came with his bike to see the damage.
“It was very dangerous to walk around here (…). They were arresting people, stealing phones to call home.” He only went out very rarely to see his daughter’s house, always “by roundabout ways” to avoid the Russian soldiery.
“There was nothing left to eat in the city, no more water, no more electricity. Me, I’m fine, I had my well in the garden and my provisions in the cellar”, confides, with a smirk, the fifty-year-old, who has kept his plumpness despite everything.
For Olga Kolchelienko and her husband, cloistered in their third floor apartment, without water or electricity, this month under the Russian yoke was visibly harsher. The pale complexion, the couple of sexagenarians go out in the city center for the first time in a month.
“We are still in shock…”, tries to remember this English teacher. “I saw the Russians from afar, we didn’t even dare to look out the window, for fear that they would shoot us.”
“When the electricity went out, we just had time to call our son, before the batteries went flat. We went for weeks without a phone, without a connection, without any information… You have news of the war? kyiv is still holding out?” she asks worriedly.
The city is buzzing with rumors of civilians killed, women raped or men “taken hostage” and detained at the central station, where the Russians had their headquarters. Olga learned that a 13-year-old student of hers had been shot and “buried near his home”. But in fact “no one really knows, as long as the (telephone) network does not work”.
– Scrap dealers –
100 km northwest of Kharkiv, the country’s second city, Trostyanets is also about thirty kilometers from the Russian border, from where the tanks of the 4th Armored Division “Kantemirov” emerged in the early hours of the invasion on February 24, according to the Ukrainians.
“Russian troops arrived in town on the second day of the war,” Pavlo recalls. A column then pushed for tens of kilometers further to the southwest, where it then encountered furious Ukrainian resistance, as evidenced by the skeletons of charred tanks all along this secondary road.
In Trostyanets itself, most of the destruction is concentrated around the station and in the south of the city, near the hospital, the only place apparently where ground fighting took place during the recapture of the city.
There was no Russian resistance, they left without fighting or almost, according to multiple testimonies. Their station headquarters is littered with discarded uniforms, rations stamped with the Russian star, and rotting, smelly food.
In the middle of this dump-like battlefield, demining services are busy neutralizing unexploded ordnance and sorting out those that are still usable.
For the Ukrainian military, it’s a salvage fair. Many have their noses in the engines or under the chassis of abandoned Kamaz trucks. A deminer dismantles a rear light on a broken down semi-trailer.
“With two rotten trucks, we can tinker with one that works,” sums up a local police chief, who came with his escort to also rummage through the wreckage.
No Russian corpses were visible in town. The armored column left behind mines and IEDs in the surrounding woods and fields, which killed one person on Monday, according to a rescue worker.
– “People are hungry”
The chocolate factory of American food giant Mondelez, which employed many locals, appears to be only slightly damaged. The Russians parked vehicles there and looted the place, according to a guard.
For the inhabitants, almost all of whom we see with bags full of provisions, the emergency is to supply. No businesses have reopened yet.
Dozens of elderly people, serious faces and caps on their heads, line up in front of the Tchaikovsky music school, next to the museum of the same name, to collect some food.
“People are hungry,” said Katerina, 18, who came with her mother to a food distribution organized in a Baptist church.
“We went from the apartment to the cellar, from the cellar to the apartment. It was horrible”, says this young girl with freckles. “I had to help mom find something to eat, go out every day. Can you imagine, no bread for a month?”