Enlarge image
Cleanup at Irpin
Photo:
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Yesterday I fell asleep in my bed in Kyiv to the sound of the air raid alarm.
It howled continuously, but I quickly calmed myself with the thought that it's not as dangerous as it used to be at the beginning of the war.
As I write, the air alert sounds again.
However, the center of Kyiv no longer seems to be accessible to the Russian missiles.
A friend sent me the photos of her private home that was damaged by a blast wave yesterday.
She lives in the town of Malyn, Zhytomyr district and works as a literary translator.
The wooden window frames of her house are broken and bent outwards, and the roof is badly damaged.
Her house, which is in a residential area, had been damaged by shelling twice in the past three days.
At first only glass had broken, a window pane was broken.
The second explosion, however, was more violent.
Luckily none of her family was hurt, but the illusion of safety I had here at first is gone now.
My girlfriend now has to change all plans and postpone projects to fix the house hoping it will survive the war.
Although the front lines are to the east, in Donbass, and her home is near the Kyiv metropolitan area, the chaotic shelling continues to destroy the peacefulness and tranquility of her small town.
And not only that. It also destroys life itself, turning it into a Russian roulette, because one can become the victim of an attack at any time, pointlessly, pointlessly.
The value of life that post-Soviet Ukraine has been trying to build for so long has been completely challenged by this war.
You are punished with suffering and pain simply because you live here, in Ukraine.
It's summer weather in Kyiv, memories of the warm season overlap with the changed reality of the war.
When you take a walk, the city sometimes looks "as it used to be".
The war, when it no longer directly reaches certain districts or parts of the country for weeks, is hidden in the particularly cautious and quiet voices of pedestrians, in the news read on the way, in private conversations and reports of the steadily increasing losses of the army and civilian casualties.
Enlarge image
A friend from Malyn told me about the shelling.
My illusion of security is gone now.
Photo: Yevgenia Belorusets
I'm writing this text while waiting for a friend who can't come to my place because public transport is at a standstill during the air raid alert.
At that moment it seems like an almost imperceptible little thing, an almost everyday submission to those events that affect the rhythm of our lives.
At the same time, bombs and rockets continue to reach houses, bridges, roads, railway stations, leaving their mark, forever changing the history of Ukrainian cities and villages and forcing themselves into the history of the country.
The friend I'm waiting for told me about her husband, a social worker and psychologist, who is currently fighting on the front lines between Dnipro and Donetsk.
A week ago he had two days vacation and visited her at home.
He rarely talked about his experiences, and when he went to sleep he went to bed in his uniform.
I know this lack of words and speech.
The urgent desire to remain silent about the events of this war overwhelms me again and again.
Yesterday I took a trip to Irpin, in the Kyiv region.
At the beginning of the war, the city became known around the world for the heavy shelling and for the pictures of the residents who were being shot at by Russian soldiers while they were still fleeing.
I visited the city, which had long been contested and partially occupied by Russian troops, with friends who regularly feed pets left by their owners there.
chaos and discomfort
We went to a beautiful private home that was trashed inside.
Two of my friends lived here until March 6th, when they were able to leave town.
Clothes were scattered all over the floor, the chaos and discomfort told of the last few days in the house where the only thought was survival.
The cellar, which served as a protective bunker, could only be left for a short time during the first few weeks.
Food was cooked in the yard on a fire, you had to look for water, the house itself had lost its meaning.
It was no longer a place of life, but a possible obstacle for the attackers and a potentially dangerous construction for those seeking protection, which in the worst case would bury those who were looking for protection inside and were unable to find it.
My girlfriend doesn't want to go back to Irpin.
She can't imagine ever staying in this house again.
She is now looking for an apartment in Kyiv.
The center of Irpin looks very lively again.
Many residents of this suburb popular with Kievans have already returned.
Standing in the center on Tsentralna Street, you can even convince yourself for a few seconds that life here just goes on as normal, that it was never really interrupted.
But then, at second glance, you see rubble and the consequences of air raids.
Roofs, house walls, blocks of flats, shops, bus stops, small parks - there are injuries everywhere, holes, burns, areas blackened by fire.
Dark holes gape in high-rise buildings, sometimes huge and threatening, like patches of violence whose extent is difficult to comprehend.
My first visit to a house at 4 Shevchenko Street was a happy one.
During several rocket attacks on March 24 at 3 a.m., three floors were badly damaged and many apartments were hit.
Three are completely burned out.
Miraculously, no one died.
However, there was no water in the house and the fire brigade could not reach the house during the shelling, which lasted all night.
Therefore, the neighbors who stayed in the city and in the house put out the fire themselves.
They fetched the water from a well and carried it to the sixth floor in five-liter bottles.
One of the neighbors said that it was necessary to look for the source of the fire, he risked his life by crawling under the smoke together with his father, smothered the flames and thereby managed to save the house.
By chance, the burned-out apartments were empty that night.
The residents had either already left Irpin or had worked in the town as volunteers to help those in danger themselves.
The skyscraper that suffered a strong attack lives on now.
People are living in almost all apartments that survived the attack.
I was invited and felt the warmth that one feels in beloved, well-kept rooms.
After the explosions and fires there was soot everywhere in the house, it was wiped out, removed, but you keep coming across it in the corners of the apartments, and the air in the stairwell also tastes of cold smoke here and there.
I heard another story from an acquaintance who wishes to remain anonymous.
She is studying musicology and lived with her father and two siblings in a residential area on the outskirts of Irpin.
Her father was an Orthodox priest and did not want to leave the city on the first evacuation buses, the family stayed in the city with him.
The priest supported the neighbors, many of the believers hid in the church at the beginning of the attacks.
In the early days of the war, they saw fire and heard rockets hitting them, but their street was not attacked.
In such a dangerous situation, city life is reduced to your own street, you can hardly move through your own district.
My friend only left her house to cook food and to help the immediate neighbors.
She lived with her family in Irpin without electricity, running water or heating until March 24th.
In the fifth week of the war, almost all of the neighbors had left the area.
A couple from a neighboring house went to get some water from the well and were hit by rocket splinters.
Both died.
For days no one was able to take the bodies off the street and bury them because the shelling went on without a break.
more on the subject
FDP politician Christ defends the Chancellor: "Some shrill criticism of Scholz is inaccurate and unfair" A guest commentary by Harald Christ
Olaf Scholz and his style of politics: defiance and sadness A column by Nikolaus Blome
Only then did the family, along with volunteers who kept pushing for an evacuation, decide to leave town.
Before leaving, the father wanted to walk down his street to see if anyone wanted a ride or needed help.
He never came back.
He had stepped on a mine.
His family was evacuated and is now living in grief in Kyiv.
My friend's daughter still finds it difficult to talk about these events.
She asked me not to take photos in her neighborhood.
Irpin currently appears to be protected.
But the injuries and wounds of war still bleed.
From other acquaintances in Donbass I hear how they are in constant danger of their lives without water and almost without electricity.
The images from Irpin are before my eyes.
People in Severodonetsk or Lisichansk are dying every day under constant attacks and attacks.
A short-sighted idea
This war has been going on for three months now, for three months Ukraine has been asking the world for support against the overpowering forces from Putin's Russia, for protection for heaven.
Germany, however, continues to discuss the question of whether Ukraine could not sacrifice itself even better.
Politicians, who often describe themselves as left-wing or social-democratic, are addressing the public with such thoughts, and these ideas were also expressed in an open letter by intellectuals who spoke out against the delivery of heavy weapons.
The idea of such sacrifice is not only dehumanizing, it is incredibly short-sighted.
The territorial gains of the Russian army do not appease the aggressor, but strengthen him and make the nightmare of an even bigger, even longer war more likely.
Germany has promised to help Ukraine.
A timely delivery of arms would limit this war, the men, women and children of Donbass might survive the attacks.
Russia, despite the sanctions, managed to gather new fighters, new weapons, new tanks and launch a new offensive.
But in Germany there are always obstacles that need to be cleared, and new justifications are constantly being put forward that allegedly make it complicated to support Ukraine.
I wonder what these delays mean.
What common future do these two countries even have if Germany is too lazy to stand by Ukraine with determination at a time of greatest need?