In the besieged city of Sumy, 23-year-old Yulia barely sleeps a wink. She looks tired and pale through the video link she uses to call. The fact that she can’t fall asleep is not because of the sound of rockets hitting the city almost every day, but because she looks tensely at her phone late into the night. ‘Via Telegram, citizens and authorities warn against the missiles. I watch them almost every twenty to thirty minutes. I’m terrified that I’m just missing that warning that’s meant for us.’
The air raid siren goes off almost every night. Then Yulia flees to the hideout in the middle of the apartment building. This week it happened again on Monday and Tuesday evenings. ‘On Monday we heard afterwards that people had died in an attack in the area. It’s terrible.’ At least 21 people were killed in an airstrike on Monday evening, according to unverified reports from local authorities.
It is not only the rocket impacts in and around the city that make life difficult in Sumy, but the stocks are now running out. ‘We are being attacked from several sides, making it very difficult for trucks to deliver food or medicines,’ says Yulia. ‘The shops are almost empty, there are long lines. It takes me hours every day to run errands. It’s difficult, because I want to be home before 2 p.m., after that it’s no longer safe on the street.’
It is hardly possible to flee on your own, says Yulia. ‘It should have been in the first days, but me, my husband and our mothers decided to stay. Now it is too late to leave safely. The train station is closed, in the car you run the risk of being hit by a missile.’
Mental burden
Sumy, like the other besieged cities, is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. There is hardly any contact with civilians in Mariupol, a large city on the Sea of Azov. Both physically and digitally, that city has not been accessible since the siege. De Volkskrant approached several people in the city but got in touch with no one.
Kharkiv, another city that has been under a Russian siege for days, is currently only attacked by the Russians in the north and east. There are therefore still some access roads to the rest of Ukraine available in the south and west. A few times a day an overcrowded evacuation train heads west.
Refugees use these opportunities en masse to leave the city. This includes Denis Tkachov (39), who left the city three days ago with his pregnant wife, son and parents-in-law. ‘We went by car. It took ten hours alone to get to the neighboring town, which normally takes two hours,” he says over the phone. “Everyone is leaving, it’s no longer safe, some neighborhoods now look like ruins.”
Tkachov’s voice sounds emotional, it is hard for him that he was forced to leave his own parents behind. ‘They are old and no longer mobile. Fortunately I am still in contact with them.’ When he received word that the promoter of the university where he is doing his PhD had been killed in a rocket attack, he decided to pack his things. “He lived about fifteen minutes’ walk from us. That is such an unimaginable thing. The mental burden became enormous: you don’t know where and when the next rocket will land. Staying there was simply impossible.’
Desolate area
In the south of Kharkiv, a few kilometers from the front, Oleksiy Skoryk (29) is hiding with his heavily pregnant wife and son. ‘We have a car and therefore the opportunity to leave. But due to road congestion, the journey west can take days. I don’t want my wife to have to give birth in the car.’
For now, Skoryk mostly relies on the interior walls of his flat. According to him, these should be enough to keep him safe in the event of a missile attack. “As long as we don’t hide by the window, we should be fine.” In the meantime, as a straggler, he sees how Kharkiv, with 1.4 million inhabitants, the second largest city in Ukraine, is slowly becoming a desolate area. “Half the people are probably gone. At night there is only darkness because we can’t turn on any lights so we don’t help the Russian planes.’
Skoryk spends most of his time online. “The Telegram channels are a godsend to follow everything and keep in touch with friends who have already left the city,” he says. In the Telegram channels, both citizens and authorities share information, photos and videos of the war. ‘The number of members of some channels increased from 150 to 600 thousand in a few days. It’s our way of keeping in touch with each other.’
But constantly following war news can have a huge mental impact, especially if you are in the besieged area yourself, notes Yulia in Soemy. “My mind is on the news all the time. It closes off to the rest of the world. I can’t think about anything else. To be honest, I don’t even remember exactly when the first missiles fell,” she says. “It’s crazy what this situation is doing to me. I have no control over it anymore. Preferably I don’t want to see it, but I have to.’
Yulia’s last name is known to the editors.