War appears and disappears on the edges of Poland.
It is not perceived in the flow of daily life in Rzesow, the last city before the border with Ukraine, but it breaks into its old bus station.
In this bare place, a group of young women and their children wait for the vehicle that will take them back to the homes they left two months ago: some return to Lviv, in the near west, but the vast majority to kyiv, the resistant capital.
Son refugees who bid to stop being refugees. They come from living in reception centers in Warsaw or in family houses in the Baltic republics. But they don’t want any more: they feel that, with the spring rains, the time has come to return.
Russian missiles continue to fall on their besieged nation, but they are confident that they will be able to resume the life they suspended last February 24, when the first alarm sounded, when they ran to the subway shelters and the first bombs fell.
Their partners are not. “Many are still inside,” Natalia will say to Clarion. Graphic designer, worldly English. “Many men are still fighting in different parts of the country. They moved east.
Flowers at a memorial to war victims on a street in Lviv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. Photo: AP
The situation has not changed much. There was a moment when it seemed that Russia was withdrawing, but the war continued”, she explains, hesitating, searching for words: “Perhaps things are not as good as they think”, she sentences.
besieged cities
Indeed, the reports coming from the east and south of Ukraine are not encouraging. Kharkov is besieged. Mariupol hardly exists. It was reduced to a steel mill. Odessa gets used to smoke and fire. Dnipro is no longer safe. Zapohiriyia counts dead and displaced. Beyond the border, Moldova is the new red dot.
When the escalation of belligerence began, Natalia, her husband and their children left for Krakow, where they have family. Until then, they lived in Lviv, a city that practically did not suffer from the Russian attacks but that got used to the curfews and the missiles on specific targets from time to time: the airport, a military base, ammunition depots, a refinery.
Lviv is a kind of “alternative capital” of Ukraine, the first stopover of Clarionin its second stage of coverage, heading to the new war front.
Natalia returns to Lviv. She wants to see how her house is. Mara, Ella’s little daughter Sofia, and Ella’s red-haired Barbie doll instead return to kyiv. She has a long journey ahead of them. They left Ukraine at the end of February. They spent this last time in Warsaw. They lived in a mall. They will take the train to the capital at night despite the fact that their mayor, the former boxer Vitali Klitcoh, continues to ask people not to return if possible.
The position of Russian troops in Ukraine, this Tuesday. /AFP
The man is a full time patriot and he is convinced that the threat remains. “Dear neighbors, at this moment we are 2,120,000 people in kyiv and we are making great efforts so that everything returns to normal: we open more metro stations, electricity and water services are restored, there is more and more life in our city. But I still ask that if you can stay out, do so. The enemy has not withdrawn and the war continues,” he said.
Klitcoh does not want to proclaim himself the winner. He is torn between the idea of relaunching his vigorous city and the fear of a sudden Russian air attack.
constant alarms
In sixty days of fighting, the anti-aircraft alarms never stopped sounding in the great capital. On Sunday the missiles went over him. Russia attacked five stations of the train that connects kyiv with Lviv. They managed to instill fear once again, but not that the transport service, a great connector of lives and hopes during the war, would stop working.
The episode reads like a response from the Kremlin to the untimely visit made by US government officials to President Volodymyr Zelensky to guarantee him various aid, weapons above all.
Libon also returns to kyiv with his French friend, a Frenchman who can’t stop laughing. She doesn’t want to say what she does. Her friend carries her. Libon remembers that she left 40 days ago. That she was lucky enough to be able to take refuge in Paris and that she tried to return several times but the security conditions were not given.
Smoke and flames rise from a train substation near Krasne station, Ukraine, following an attack by Russia on Monday. Photo: REUTERS
Now her central apartment awaits her again, in the historic heart of the city, in the area of the great avenues, still dotted with military checkpoints.
re-enter
Meanwhile the bus makes its way, first through fields and later through forests. At the Kracowiza border crossing, the migration mechanism works perfectly. Polish agents ask for passports from all passengers: 8 men and 42 women. It can’t be lowered. Short waiting time. The driver is friendly and gives out cards: his bus connects Lviv with Krakow every day there and back.
For two weeks, every time he re-enters the Ukraine, he does so with a full vehicle. It is his contribution to an incessant tide: it is believed that every day some 50,000 people are returning to live with the war on top.
Once the process has been completed in Poland, the sequence must be repeated in the Ukraine. A soldier gets on the bus to ask for passports. “Who are the Argentines?”, she asks her. She checks that they are journalists. Natural mistrust. They are still times of war.
The trip ends at the Lviv railway terminal. The square outside is again crowded with refugees. They are the ones who escape from the east, who left their homes in a hurry because missiles do not stop falling these days.
They are poor people, mostly, with the appearance of peasants. They do not come from cities, but from villages. Humanitarian organizations receive them, they feed them. They insert them into a new dynamic, of time without destiny.
Inside, the trains are advertised with no apparent problem. There are no delays. At 23.50 the last service to kyiv is announced. The one that the envoys of Clarion.
Lviv, Ukraine, special envoy
CB