“Close the window, the smoke is coming in!” shouts a policeman. Vyacheslav lives with his mother on the ninth floor of a building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the east of the country. The neighboring apartment is on fire, hit by a Russian rocket.
The city does not live under massive bombardments, but it is daily targeted by punctual, random, spaced out strikes, at any time of day or night, sometimes deadly.
And mainly in the eastern and northeastern districts of the city, where 86-year-old Tamara Pavlovna and her son Vyacheslav live: Heroes of Labor Street.
Twenty bars of 11-storey buildings line the road, embellished with tree-lined gardens, with swings and slides for children.
Three rockets fell in the space of a few seconds on Friday, shortly after 4:00 p.m.
One destroyed a sex shop across the street, the second hit the building, the last blew a big hole next to the sidewalk. No one was hurt.
– “The door saved us” –
Invited to leave her apartment by the police, the old lady barely has time to take a few things from a small backpack.
The elevator is out of order. Mrs. Pavlovna walks down the nine flights of stairs.
White scarf on her head, she waits, stressed, a little lost, on a bench at the foot of the back of the building.
“My son has been taking care of me for eight years. He doesn’t want to leave and I can’t decide alone,” she explains.
“For a month and a half, the Russians have been bombing here, non-stop, in this neighborhood,” she adds.
The border with Russia is about thirty kilometers as the crow flies.
At the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians wanted to take Kharkiv, in vain. The Ukrainian forces resisted and repelled the assailant a few kilometers from the city, at the cost of fierce fighting.
Since then, the Ukrainians have taken over a few small towns in the southeast. But Kharkiv remains at a distance from Russian artillery fire.
Rue des Héros du travail, firefighters mounted water hoses to the burning apartment hit by the rocket and from which large billows of black smoke escaped.
In the next apartment, Vyacheslav Pavlov has closed the balcony window and is smoking a cigarette on the landing.
“We usually hide in the hallway, between the walls. When the second shot hit the neighboring apartment, the door saved us, it blocked all the shards of glass. The cat hid,” he says. -he.
– “Scary night” –
According to him, “almost all the apartments in the building are empty now”.
Outside, the crash of new strikes echoes through the neighborhood. The inhabitants, who had come out to see the damage from the previous bombardment, ran to take shelter in a cellar.
In another district east of Kharkiv, rue de la Paix, a rocket hit a hotel-restaurant the night before. At 10:02 p.m., according to the CCTV cameras of a leather processing company, located just opposite.
On the black and white images, a white fog suddenly appears, with pieces of wood as if washed away by a hurricane. The headlights of two cars start flashing.
The restaurant was largely destroyed.
In the leather shop, Ivan came to nail boards in place of the shattered windows.
“Each window is destroyed, everything is damaged, the door is torn off, we will try to weld it today to protect the shop. The shrapnel tore the metal like paper, the whole ceiling fell. is the + Russian world +”, he says, without wanting to give his name.
In the parking lot behind the store, two representatives of a Protestant church came to bring bags of food to a family with a seven-year-old child, whom they ask to pray every day.
“My child went to bed at 8 p.m. At 10 p.m. it all started, everything was shaking,” says the mother, Yelena. The family lives in a building just behind the hotel restaurant.
“There were two strikes, later there were others, we couldn’t sleep, we spent the whole night in a corridor,” she adds.
“Last night was scary,” she says, her eyes dark and red with tears.