“February 24, 4:30 a.m. That’s where the war started, and it hasn’t stopped since. For me, it’s always winter. I don’t even feel when the sun is shining.” Yevgeniya, 48, looks down at her clothes and shows her mother bundled up under a blanket in a cold corner of the Kharkiv metro. Already three months that the two women live under this city which once housed 1.4 million inhabitants, and where only 400,000 people would have remained, according to estimates.
Yevgeniya and her mother lived a few hundred meters from the limits of Kharkiv, the area first affected by the war. They don’t know how many residents of their building still reside there, and they dare not return because of the constant alerts of artillery fire. Others, like Marija, couldn’t even come back. His village is under Russian control. “Ask Putin when this will all stop. Who have we hurt? Why did they attack us? We lived like brothers [avec les Russes]. But now they are our enemies,” she says with sadness but without anger in her voice.
“They say we have to be freed, but from whom? They came from Belgorod [ville russe de l’autre côté de la frontière] shopping, we got on well. Why all this war? Marija asks. Her husband stayed in the village, in the house he built with his own hands. He is ready to die there and will not move. “Many fled to Russia. How many of their own free will? No idea. Those who left with their cars fled to the Baltic countries. On the other hand, I don’t know anything about those they took on the bus”, recounts Maria, who refers to Ukrainian reports that people were forcibly transported to Russia.
“I should be scared now, man?”
For now, Marija and seventy other people prefer to stay safe in the metro terminus, the network’s ultimate refuge. The other stations have been returned to traffic. A train passes every quarter of an hour. Despite the threat, Kharkiv is trying to start a new life. Finally, where possible. This is not the case in the most populated borough of the city. Before the war, Saltivka housed 450,000 inhabitants. Buildings of ten to twenty-five stories gathered a third of the city. Today, the area is almost entirely deserted and largely uninhabitable. For seventy days, Saltivka was on the front line. Collapsed sixteen-story towers, charred ten-story buildings, annihilated shack alleys, charred gas stations and collapsed shopping malls line the roads.
Many buildings remained standing and residents returned to Saltivka, su