As British cities did during the blitzthe frustrated aerial bombardment campaign launched by Hitler to try to subdue United Kingdom during the Second World War, their Ukrainian peers have also turned off the light. They did it at the beginning of the invasion and they have done it again now. When night falls, the lights don’t turn on. Street lighting. The streets are empty and you walk in the dark, between the shadows of the few cars that circulate and the flashing of the traffic lights. The confessed intention of the authorities is no longer to hinder the visibility of the russian aviationone of the great disappeared of this war, but in saving energy before the winter of stalactites that freezes its horizon. Light or no light, there is a city that will not sleep, a city where night does not bring more than death, insomnia Y destruction.
Zaporizhia is in the ukrainian mythology the homeland of the cossacksthe germ of an independence that those slavic warriors they did not get to see and that the country that made them the foundation stone of their story is now fighting to preserve. For two weeks the russian missiles and its kamikaze drones of Iranian manufacture fall daily on this city under Ukrainian control of the South of the country. A city of 720,000 inhabitants in peacetime it is like a gigantic dynamo.
It not only houses the Europe’s largest nuclear power plantbut also the largest hydroelectric of dnieper River, the fourth longest on the continent. Hence not only one valuable strategic place; is also a potential armageddon. Blowing up the reinforced concrete of the hydroelectric plant would bury the city and the lowlands that open to the south under water, while awakening the genius of the plant, as has been about to happen on more than one occasion since the beginning of the war , would do Chernobyl Y Fukushima something akin to an X-ray session gone backwards.
All this would help to understand why its inhabitants do not sleep, if it were not because their concerns are more epidermal and immediate. “I have started taking medication to sleep at night, but it is not helping me at all & rdquor ;, he says Serafina Reikova, a 26-year-old anesthesiologist. “I’ve got tachycardiasI start to sweat and, sooner or later, the panic attacks. I tell myself that it is something temporary, but my body does not react & rdquor ;. A week ago now, around two in the morning, a Russian missile blew up the apartment block where she lived. The ball of fire it slipped through the corridors and ended up collapsing nine floors of an entire wing of the building. Fifteen people died.
Military escalation after annexation
“This is a lower-middle class neighborhood. There is not infrastructures. I can’t figure out what the goal was. Either the Russians have lost their minds or they are not human & rdquor ;, says Reikova as she puts what has been saved from burning, such as the oven, the fridge or a bag of clothes, into a van. Zaporizhia is not Groznyneither Mariupol neither Aleppo. Neither is he Beirut wave Loop of the israelis. The city is largely intact after almost eight months of war, but since the end of the “referendums” at gunpoint in the occupied regions and the Kremlin will announce the annexation of Zaporizhia, Kherson and Donbas, missiles regularly rain down on different parts of the city. (Before it was more sporadic.) Since then 79 people have died Y 200 have been injuredaccording to the local emergency service.
The south front is just 30 kilometers away and, although Ukraine continues to recover territory, the Russian forces control near to 70% of the province. “Russia is trying to spread panic, but it is also trying to make the pro-Russian population of the city, which still exists, take to the streets to demand that Ukraine leave the city so that the violence ends & rdquor ;, affirms Taras Tyshchenko, doctor and member of the Zaporiya Emergency Council, a civil-military body. “From Russian logic it is the next step to annexation. They try to get the Ukrainian patriots to leave so they can completely conquer. What they have not understood is that, at this point, the people who have stayed are to fight to the end.”
Without fear of a conquest
The urban planning of Zaporizhia it is like an open book. As it happens in Odessa (southwest) or in Dnipro (center), the city no longer fears being conquered. At least in the short term. Although they remain military checkpoints on highways and some intersections, the parapetsthe metallic hedgehogs and the fortifications that awaited the invader in the first months of the war. The initiative is on the Ukrainian side. The fear derives from the arbitrariness of the bombardments that, although they are hitting some infrastructures and military points of interestmany of them are war crimes clappers against the civil population. From residential buildings to public car parks.
In other cases it seems simply that the vaunted precision missiles of the Kremlin are anything but precise. On October 6, a missile killed 17 people in an expensive apartment building in the center of Zaporizhia, a building that is situated just 200 meters from a military barracks. Something similar happened in Dnipro. Another missile devastated a market that had been closed for months, killing a security guard. That same market is less than 30 meters from one of the headquarters of the National security and one from the police.
second migratory wave
None of that matters to a population that is being severely decimated by a everyday terror which has launched a second migratory waveafter the one unleashed at the beginning of the war, according to Tyshchenko.
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Lourdes Harchenko is one of those who is packing her bags. She speaks some Spanish after spending time in Castellón years ago. She is a swimmer and studies medicine. She is only 20 years old. The attack on the downtown residential building left her deaf for half an hour. She lived very close. She hid with her mother in the bathroom and then looked out the windows as four people burned and others returned naked and completely bloodied to collect belongings from their homes.
Since then every noise she hears startles her. She can’t sleep at night. Neither anxiolytics nor sleeping pills have managed to restore the deep sleep of before. And now she drinks herself to sleep. “Here we had everything: two houses, two cars… but we only have one life and we are too afraid to continue here. Let’s go to Germany&rdquor ;, he says from a bench a few meters from the hole of lives left by the Russian missile. Night falls in Zaporizhia. Air raid sirens sound. It is also time for us to leave.