If it was not because Russia is destroying Ukraine and the lives of millions of people, this war would be a gold mine for the black moodas the Spanish Civil War it was for Gila or the Francoism for Berlanga. Petropavlivska it is a village of 400 souls, now half, where goats walk in pairs along the road and the neighbors travel by bicycle with milk churns hanging from the handlebars. A village of farmers like those of before, of those who go hungry when they are badly given. It has but one school, now destroyed by bombing, and endless fields of sunflower Y cereal. That dusty hamlet of common people it was occupied last May 24 by Russian troops. The war had come to the farm, but a bunch of poor bastards in Russian uniform thought they’d taken over. Reichstag.
The occupying forces They settled in the empty houses of the town, left behind by those who headed for Europe or to other safer regions of Ukraine after the war started. There were Russian soldiers, but also many soldiers from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, a breakaway region of eastern Ukraine. And particularly the first ones, they arrived with a serious mental “empanada” in the head, according to the neighbors, product of the kremlin propaganda, but also from a deep ignorance of the place to which they were sent. “They said that they came looking for nazis and soldiers from the Azov battalion. And I told them that they had the wrong town, that only 200 people live here,” he says. Victor Davidok with a grimace of astonishment.
But what shocked him the most was when the Russians began to say that “in less than a week they would kill [Stepan] Flag“, the most controversial figure of the Ukrainian nationalism. “‘But he died more than half a century ago,’ I told them without leaving my astonishment,” says this farmer with tan skin, tracksuit and wool cap. Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in Munich in 1959. In Russia it is considered a Nazi and has become a favorite throwing weapon for their propaganda, which often refers to Ukrainians as “flags” and “ukronazis”. In the Ukraine, on the other hand, his figure has been rehabilitated, despite his far right radicalism and his antisemitism. Much of the country now sees him as a patriot who above all else fought for the independence from the country.
And in those, his compatriots continue so many decades later, now trying to defend a freedom that came in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR. “We had no electricity, but since the town was liberated I have seen what the Russians did in Bucha and other places in Ukraine,” says Mykola Davidok, Viktor’s brother. “In this village we were treated decently. They neither tortured nor mistreated us, but they were very lost. A soldier told me that they planned to reach Odessa in one day, when he is more than 400 kilometers away, “he adds in front of him.
October 6, release date
Petropavlivska and other neighboring villages in the north of Khersonon the western banks of the dnieper riverwere liberated by the Ukrainian forces from the October 6. But it is an area that has not said goodbye to the war. The artillery blasts black clouds rise a few hundred meters from the village and a Russian fighter unloads a couple of kilometers to the south, above the front line. It’s like an afternoon of thunder. The battles of the last month have destroyed much of the power lines that fed the region. For the yellow fields of wheat there are artillery shells driven in like stakes and everything is extremely dry. It is as if one biblical dust plague would have hovered over these lands.
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“Russian aircraft do not go too far into ukrainian sky, but in the front of the regions that occupy the attacks on our forces are daily. They turn around, unload and leave,” says alexander opel, one of the soldiers of the Ukrainian brigade who recovered this area. At the moment, they hold the position at the expense of an order from above to advance. Morale is high among your troops. One of them says they trust recover the entire province of Kherson before the end of the year, but they insist that they lack weapons Y armored. “Europe does not understand that if it lives under safe skies it is because we are defending them,” says Opel before pointing to the dilapidated old jeep with which they evacuate the dead and wounded. In the adjoining school several coffins, crosses Y flower crown. “They are for the next one,” says the Ukrainian military man.
Although in Petropavlivka the destruction is minimal, in Miroliubivka, about 15 kilometers to the north, there is hardly a house left with the roof still standing. It was one of the squares of the counteroffensive and the Crusader attacks were relentless. Also the attitude of the Russian forces and their separatist allies, who occupied the village for months. “It has been a horrible experience“, says Volodymyr without a hint of sparkle in his eyes, a 21-year-old peasant who buried his grandmother a few days ago, after a Russian shell fell in the dining room of his house, with the village already under Ukrainian control. ” We were not allowed to leave the house or use our well. They ransacked the store and took our preserves. We have passed hunger and we have had to resort to rainwater to drink,” adds Volodímir.