The last survivors of the ruins of Irpin have only one word to describe the defeated Russian soldiers after one of the crucial battles of the war in Ukraine: “fascists”.
That’s the word Bogdan, 58, uses angrily as he walks his dog with his friend through the deserted downtown of this city on the outskirts of kyiv, which hasn’t been bombed for the first time. times for a month.
Son ami acquiesce.
“Every 20 to 30 seconds, we heard mortar fire. And so on all day. Just destruction,” said this worker to AFP journalists who accessed Irpin on Friday.
It was still in mid-February a well-served suburb in the pine forest on the northwestern outskirts of the capital, it is now a wasteland, wanted by Moscow, which thus considers it to have “denazified”.
Irpin resisted the Russian invasion with all his strength, blocking the way to the advance of Russian troops towards kyiv, some 20 kilometers away.
The city, whose once verdant parks are littered with corpses, is now back under Ukrainian control. the Russian troops, they, withdraw hastily from the surroundings of the capital.
It was a Pyrrhic victory that made the city unrecognizable. Almost all of the buildings were destroyed. The shelling blew up huge chunks of pastel-colored modern buildings.
The foggy streets are eerily empty, where only stray dogs and crows rustle. Car windshields are shattered.
“It’s the apocalypse,” says a Ukrainian soldier hitchhiking in the deserted town.
– “I like Irpin” –
Irpin had already embodied the horrors of war in the early days of the invasion by Vladimir Putin, who claimed to want to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine.
Images of a family annihilated by a shell as they tried to flee, and thousands of people sheltering under a destroyed bridge, went around the world.
For three weeks, the media no longer have access to it after the death of an American journalist, the Ukrainian authorities declaring that it was too dangerous to go there.
In the town center today, near a ‘I love Irpin’ sign surrounded by a red heart, the few townspeople who remained tell how they survived more than a month of bombardment incessant.
“We hid in the basement. They fired Grad rockets, mortars and tank shells,” said Bogdan, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “My wife and I came under mortar fire twice. But that’s okay, we’re alive and healthy.”
Wandering down a street blocked by a charred cement mixer, resident Viktor Kucheruk begs for cigarettes.
“As soon as we hear a shot, we immediately take refuge in our burrows,” said the 51-year-old man. “The lamps of the chandeliers unscrewed and fell because of the explosions. During the bombings, we sat at our house, in the corner, where the walls are thickest”.
A new housing estate with a large sign saying “Irpin, rich city” bears the marks of the bombardments, and two apartments there are completely destroyed.
Playgrounds with abandoned children’s scooters are covered in rubble.
Rescuers are still picking up the dead to place them in body bags, before taking them to the exploded bridge that connects the city to kyiv.
This bridge is covered with dozens of burned, bullet-riddled and abandoned cars, which rescuers are trying to free.
– Severed leg –
In recent days, Ukrainian forces have “liberated” a string of Russian-occupied towns and villages near the capital, after Russia said it would scale back its attacks on kyiv.
Russia’s withdrawal now seems to be accelerating, at least in this area, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has assured that Moscow is preparing to launch an assault in the east and south of the country.
AFP journalists counted at least 13 destroyed Russian armored vehicles around the village of Dmytrivka, five kilometers southwest of Irpin.
At least three charred bodies of Russian soldiers lay under the wreckage of a convoy of eight tanks and armored vehicles.
A severed leg was seen next to a vehicle.
Russian military uniforms and personal effects were strewn on the floor, including a Russian translation bound in red leather of an essay by an 18th-century Briton, Edward Gibbon: “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” .
Oksana Furman, 47, shows a huge hole, probably caused by a Russian military shell two days ago, in her kitchen. A Russian tank backed onto his garden wall, causing it to collapse.
“There was a crazy roar, the noise of vehicles, everything was shaking. And then it was shell after shell,” says Oksana Furman, who took refuge in a neighbor’s cellar.
In Irpin, where the authorities claim that at least 200 civilians were killed, residents put Ukraine’s success in this battle into perspective.
“We have reconquered Irpin, we have reconquered a lot of things, but the war is not over”, nuance Bogdan.