Viktor Lazar shares his balcony on the war side with a pair of binoculars and a small orange snake, his only company in an apartment that seems to be on the edge of the world, Ukraine today.
Binoculars, rather a joke, are hardly necessary: the front is visible the same, without them. The rumble of Russian and Ukrainian bombardment is audible even now, though Lazar says he doesn’t notice it. under your balcony there is a crater, one of some. On the nearby street, a Grad rocket launcher passes by.
Lazar calculates that the Russians are only 10 kilometers away.
Viktor Lazar, 37, 10 km from the front. Photo: AP
As the war enters its fifth month along the deadly fault lines of eastern and southern Ukraine, Lazar and his few neighbors in the sprawling, shattered neighborhood of Saltivka, en Járkov, represent a life without solution in which many are trapped. The new communities are told to flee. Not everyone does.
As cities and towns around the capital kyiv have begun to rebuild following the Russian withdrawal months ago and world powers discuss long-term recovery, others in eastern Ukraine still can’t sleep peacefully.
The Soviet-era apartment buildings in Saltivka once housed half a million people one of the largest neighborhoods in Europe. Now maybe just dozens left. Some of the buildings are blackened, while others are crumbling tile by tile.
“This is my home,” says Lazar, 37, who is shirtless in the summer heat, revealing a machine gun tattoo on his right arm. He proclaims that he is prepared to fight the Russians, but his only weapons are kitchen knives.
Ruins in Saltivka. Photo: AP
A broken guitar hangs on the wall of his apartment. Lazar, what is a musician, dreams of giving a defiant concert in the streets of Saltivka, full of echoes and cats. In better times, she played to crowds in the squares of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is showing signs of recovering from the war, even though it’s a short drive from the Russian border.
Saltivka, in comparison, she’s almost dead. Past one last subway station dedicated to heroes, all activity dies down. Stores are closed and apartment buildings have broken windows. In one of them, a table-sized piece of concrete slowly twists on a reinforcing beam, waiting to fall
Overgrown grass takes over abandoned playgrounds, dotted with fallen, ripe cherries. The soldiers’ trenches are bare. In some departments now torn apart, the clothes still hang on the line.
A building destroyed by the Russians in Kharkov. Photo: AP F
Every once in a while, a car crunches through the rubble. It may be that you bring the movers who are trying to save some furniture or the volunteers who bring help.
Outside Lazar’s building, people have set up a modest kitchen with a bell that rings when the day’s food arrives. Near the kettle on a wood-burning stove, ammo boxes now hold bread that is slowly going stale.
Some electricity came back, but not running water. Lazar crouches in a basement where there is still water to bathe in. Two middle-aged women emerge from the darkness, looking fresh, and walk away.
Viktor Shevchenko shows what is left of his house, where he still lives. Photo: AP
But life is not so adventurous for those without options. Pavel Govoryhov, 84, is sitting in the doorway of a building now as fragile as he is. He has two canes at hand. For four months, he lived in the basement before moving into his apartment. Tenses up at sudden noises. The mere fact of talking about his difficulties makes him cry.
“My children do not help mehe says. “What do I need a life like this for?”
Over time, you know winter will return to the buildings of apartments without heating, without mercy.
The Russians could do the same. More than 600 civilians died in the Kharkov region, north of Donetsk, since the invasion, some in Saltiva. Ukrainian authorities have alleged that the Russians used banned cluster bombs.
Pavel Govoryhov, 84, is sitting in the doorway of a building now as fragile as he is. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Communities around Kharkiv remain in shaky hands, apparently as part of Moscow’s strategy to keep Ukrainian troops so distracted that cannot be shipped to places like Donetskwhere the Russians are devouring entire cities.
“This is not wished on anyone,” says Bogdan Netsov, 14, who lives with his family in an apartment with the curtains drawn.
In another building in Saltivka, a sign scrawled on the stairwell warns potential occupants that “if you enter, they will kill you…”.
This is the place where Viktor Shevchenko keep calling home, even if you need the light of your mobile phone to see through the gloom in the daylight hours.
“It is I who speak for the whole world,” he says, unshaven and invigorated by the tea. “We’re going to push Russia away. because we are patriots and we live in our land.
Dishes are smashed in her destroyed kitchen. A religious symbol of his Orthodox faith is singed. The wall clock, like the one in the surrounding neighborhood, stopped working.
Shevchenko takes the watch and winds it.
“It works,” he says, with a touch of pride. “Works”.
On unsteady legs, he returns to the silence of Saltivka, watch in hand.
Por Cara Anna y Vasilisa Stepanenko, Associated Press
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