Oleg is not a housewife. It’s not easy to sit in the small little studio cluttered with boxes and khaki clothes that this 50-year-old sergeant occupies with his dog, on the second floor of a dingy building. The crockery, however, gleams on parade on its drainer, and were it not for the gaping hole that engulfed the window, one would not imagine that a Russian cruise missile crashed two days earlier at a hundred meters from here, on the 184th training base in Starytschi.
The weariness of taking shelter
“The siren woke me up at 4 a.m., but I was tired of going down to the basement all the time, so that time I stayed in bed,” he explains without emotion. Ten minutes pass, before the explosion blows all the windows. The shock wave is so violent that it smashes the doors inside the building. In the apartments, the fridges vomit their contents on the floor. 48 hours after the impact, Oleg still finds shards of glass in the recesses of his room. “Thank God we weren’t hit directly. »
What about behind the walls of the military base? Hard to know. Access to this training center located 30 kilometers from the Polish border is forbidden to the press, and from afar only barracks with dark roofs can be seen. In a dusty square in Starytschi, where 3,400 people live, soldiers on leave prefer a drink under umbrellas to chatting about confidential information. ” Everything’s fine. » But in the streets, civilians are still in shock. “People are scared, very scared,” confides in a low voice a local entrepreneur. On his smartphone, he scrolls through photos of his business located in the camp, the explosion of which shattered the facade.
Missile deluge
“Starytschi and training base 184 have been shelled four times since March,” says Vassyl, head of the territorial defense (volunteer militia under the authority of the Ministry of Defence) of the village, pointing to a civilian hospital whose crumbling windows litter the sidewalk. A few kilometers from here, the gigantic base of Yavoriv, where Ukrainian soldiers trained under the guidance of NATO instructors until the start of the invasion, was ravaged by Russian strikes in the third week. of the war. “At home, it’s not like in Lviv, where people stay sipping their coffee on the terrace when they hear the sirens”, Vassyl scoffs. The proximity of the bases makes it necessary to take each alert seriously. “As soon as we hear the signal, we will take shelter in the cellars or hide in the forest. »
Ukraine has suffered for several days from a deluge of missiles targeting both military and civilian buildings. In addition to the projectiles which hit Starytschi, around 40 others fell on the western and northern regions of Ukraine at dawn on 25 June. On the 26th, new shots hit a residential area of kyiv. The next day, a Russian missile carrying a ton of explosives crashed into a shopping center in the city of Kremenchuk, killing or injuring dozens of people.
According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, this air barrage proves the Russian will to escalate when the G7, from June 26 to 28, and the NATO summit, from June 28 to 30, are on the agenda. of which military aid to Ukraine figures prominently. Just days after the much-anticipated arrival in the country of US Himars multiple rocket launchers, the United States announced the delivery of new air defense systems. For Moscow, preventing the deployment of these ever more sophisticated weapons is a priority, whether through brutal intimidation of civilians or strikes on infrastructure where cargo passes.
Russian espionage
We will not know if the 184th base falls into this last category. How weapons are transported and where they are stored are two of the country’s best-kept secrets. Everyone knows, however, that the Lviv region has become the hub of Western weapons. Especially not Russia. “We often see drones in the sky in Starytschi, explains Vassyl, we alert the army as soon as we see one. »
“The Russians are constantly observing the region, confirms Maksym Kozytsky, the governor of the Lviv region, who receives us in his vast office. In the past two months, we’ve shot down more than ten of their drones over the region. » If the delivery of Western weapons is primarily the business of the Ministry of Defense, it is up to the regional administration to facilitate their delivery ” Without delay “ towards the forehead.
It is therefore up to them, in conjunction with the Ministry of Infrastructure, to increase the transit capacity of road and rail routes, but also to repair them urgently after the Russian strikes. “Railways and railway electrical substations in the region have been bombed several times, certainly with the aim of preventing arms deliveries”, recognizes Maksym Kozytsky. On June 1, in the south of the region, Russian missiles damaged the Biezkydy railway tunnel. Repairs would still be in progress on this crucial axis nicknamed “the gateway to Europe”.
“15 minutes to shelter”
Five kilometers from Starytschi, in Novoiavorivsk, 32,000 inhabitants, three men are typing the cardboard in a windowless municipal room cluttered with relics of the Donbass war: barbed wire, casings, machine gun ammunition. A rusty shell keeps the door open, letting in a bit of fresh air and the bursts of voices of children bouncing on the trampoline and inflatable slide set up in the main square on this sunny Sunday. Like an air of vacation. On the wall are lined up the portraits of thirteen men from the town killed during the Maidan revolution and then in the trenches of Donbass in 2014 and the Russian invasion.
In four months of war, 18 more died: sixteen on the front, two in a strike on the neighboring base. Several families left at the start of the Russian invasion, but almost all have since returned. “It’s easy to recognize those who have just returned: they continue to hurry when they hear the sirens, grinds an employee of the town hall. Here, everyone knows that we have fifteen minutes to take shelter before the missile arrives. »
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kyiv recovers 17 prisoners in exchange with Moscow
Seventeen people, almost all Ukrainian servicemen, have been freed from Russian captivity in a new prisoner swap with Moscow. According to the main intelligence directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, there are two officers, 14 soldiers and one civilian. Five of them are injured and require emergency treatment. Ukraine released 15 Russian prisoners in this framework. The latest officially announced prisoner exchange took place in early May and involved 41 Ukrainians.