Lviv, February 24, evening
Es is like a swing. Sometimes good news, sometimes bad. As a rule, neither the one nor the other can be verified, at least not immediately. I’ve been trying to reach someone in Mariupol all afternoon. The port city on the Azov Sea with two large steel mills is just a few kilometers from the so-called dividing line between the Ukrainian-controlled area and the puppet regime. For hours there has been no information about what is going on there. In the morning there were reports of Russian landing troops, later they were denied.
Finally Oxana answers. The situation is extremely tense, the city with more than 400,000 inhabitants is constantly being shelled from the east and from the sea, civilians are dead and injured. She also says that a lot of people have signed up for the mobilization and that you don’t even think about giving up. That’s good, even if the situation must be quite dangerous.
It seems that the fighting around Hostomel airport near Kiev was particularly fierce. It is the home airport of the aircraft manufacturer Antonow, who maintains and tests its machines there. A few years ago I visited the An-225 Mrija, the largest aircraft in the world. In the evening it seems that the Russian troops have taken the airport after all. Poorly. But the runway has probably been destroyed, so that the Russian machines cannot land there. Much better.
In Lemberg we couldn’t buy any more bread that afternoon. Most shops are closed. The exchange offices too. But no queues at the ATMs. Is there still money there? You can easily pay with the card.
Hello West! Where are the really tough sanctions?
Lviv, February 24, noon
An e-mail has arrived from the parallel world. The Leipzig branch of the Polish Institute in Berlin sent a circular email announcing two events. A Polish film will be shown in Leipzig on March 1st. A black comedy. The name fits: “Panic Attack”. After three air raid warnings in Lviv today, it’s good to know that it’s a black comedy. It calms.
The second event is to take place as part of the Leipzig Europe Forum on March 19th. There is a discussion on EU security policy. One of the questions: How could the EU and the international community react to further aggression against Ukraine, for example? You probably didn’t hear any news in Leipzig today. Happy people.
Long queues are now forming in front of shops and at gas stations. Petrol and diesel are now rationed at one of the largest chains, you get a maximum of twenty liters per car. We were just able to buy drinking water. Six liters. In small bottles, there were no longer big ones. A new delivery is supposed to come tomorrow, but you can’t know for sure.
In Kiev, too, people are queuing for water
What: AP
There are reports of traffic jams and hesitation on the country roads from Kiev to Lviv. The Ukrainian armed forces urgently need trucks to transport supplies of weapons from Poland. Reports of shot down Russian planes and helicopters and destroyed Russian tanks. Battles for the city of Sumy in the north-east. It remains unclear whether the Russian army is already in the city.
It is almost impossible to get a hotel room in Lviv. There has only been a similar run on hotels once more than twenty years ago – in June 2001 when Pope John Paul II visited the city. At that time there were only a few hotels in the city.
Lviv, February 24, morning
My son woke me up at 6 a.m. today. He usually sleeps through the morning, as is usual with students. Lectures and seminars at the TU are only available online due to the corona virus. So you can log in and sleep on. He was quicker that night. Minutes after the first Russian missiles landed in Ukraine, the news spread like wildfire on social media.
“What?” I ask, half asleep. “What’s going on?” – A stupid question. I know what’s going on. We all knew what was going to happen. And yet we didn’t really believe in it. Now it happened. A crazy feeling. The monster has struck. A monster bred with Western help. Which, with money from its deals with the West, has not built roads and hospitals, but tanks and rockets.
I stagger to the computer, still half asleep, trying to get an idea of the situation. My phone is now overheating. Friends, acquaintances from all over the world. I’m also trying to reach a few friends across the country. I don’t always succeed immediately. The mobile networks seem to be overloaded, but they work.
A good friend from Kharkiv is behind the wheel of her car when she takes my call. It’s kind of calming to hear her voice. Much better than finding out about social media. She’s trying to leave town. Russian missiles have now destroyed several houses in Kharkiv. Everything is stuck in traffic, she says. And you don’t know where to go.
You don’t know which email to answer first. One is besieged by all kinds of media. Everyone wants a story, an eyewitness account. Yesterday we agreed with a German radio station to talk about the role of artists in a country threatened by war. This is waste now. Now is the time for disaster journalism.
Juri Durkot was awarded the Brücke Berlin Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his translations of the works of Serhij Zhadan – together with Sabine Stöhr.