Kateryna Sabadosh gazed up at what was once a nine-storey building. Its apartments were blackened shells. An explosion had ripped out the ground floor, turning it into a macabre doll’s house, with someone’s dressing table visible. Windows were broken. Debris littered the front yard. A courgette plant grew in the deep crater where a Grad missile landed.
“It’s psychologically difficult. The area was once so beautiful,” said Sabadosh, a 63-year-old pensioner. She moved to north Saltivka, an ensemble of high-rise buildings in the city of Kharkiv, back in 1989, when Ukraine was part of the USSR. “There’s a certain nostalgia for the more equal society we had then, but not for communism,” she said.
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to return Kharkiv to Russia brought disaster to her suburb. Saltivka is located in the north-east of the city, next to a busy ringroad. Until last month, it was the closest point to territory occupied by Russian troops – and to their mighty artillery. Over six months, Saltivka became synonymous with terror, destruction and death falling from the sky.
Sabadosh said the Kremlin began bombarding north Saltivka in February, at the beginning of the invasion. Enemy armoured vehicles tried unsuccessfully to seize Kharkiv. Multiple bombs hit the district. On 23 March, her block of flats off Lesia Serdiuka street was struck. Part of it burned down. Giant concrete panels collapsed in a cascade.
Kharkiv. Saltivka. A large and peaceful residential area. It was like that until Russia came. But no missile will bring the terrorist state closer to its goal. Instead, each missile brings Russia closer to international isolation, economic degradation, and historical condemnation pic.twitter.com/65TF5qKvrb
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) September 26, 2022
North Saltivka now resembles the set of an apocalypse movie. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has tweeted photos of the damage. Saltivka was a “large and peaceful residential area … until the Russians came”, he wrote, adding: “No missile will bring the terrorist state closer to its goal.” Instead, Russia would experience “international isolation” and “historical condemnation”.
During the worst of the bombing, many people moved out. Others moved down the road to the “Hero of Labour” metro station, where for months they lived deep underground, sleeping on the platform and in railway carriages. Earlier last month, Ukraine’s armed forces pushed the Russian army out of Kharkiv oblast in a dramatic counter-offensive. Daily shelling of the city finally stopped.
Sabadosh and her neighbour, Vera Gubereva, queued up for a free lunch offered by a charity. Most recipients were pensioners. “We need help, from our government, the international community, from anybody, frankly,” said Gubereva, who is 63. She added: “Winter is coming. We don’t have warm clothes, heaters, or glass for our windows. There are a lot of us who live here with nowhere to go.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, acknowledged that some buildings were so badly damaged they would have to be knocked down. “The houses we can rescue we will rescue. Those we can’t, we will demolish,” he said. He added: “We will turn one of them into a museum of war so future generations can see the horror of Russian aggression.”
The city was planning to build a new micro-district nearby, Terekhov said. It would be a contemporary, energy-efficient development with solar panels and garages that could double as underground shelters. “When Saltivka was built in Soviet times nobody thought about sustainability. Our goal is to have comfortable, cosy and modern homes,” he said.
The British architect Norman Foster had offered to help. In April he published a “Kharkiv manifesto” and promised to assemble the “best minds” to reconstruct Saltivka. They would include “top Ukrainian talent” and international experts in planning, engineering and design. “I speak with Sir Norman by video once a week,” Terekhov said, adding: “I’m very grateful to him.”
According to the mayor, the project would need to attract a “colossal amount of investment”. Large-scale work could only begin when the war was over, he said.
Another Saltivka resident, Oksana Sinko, agreed with the mayor that some buildings could not be fixed. Her 16th-floor flat survived, she said. But the fifth, sixth and seventh floors in her block burned out completely, making the structure unsafe. She left before the blaze with a few possessions and her neighbour’s cat, Filomon. Sinko is now living in a different part of Kharkiv.
“Everything has gone. From the smallest kiosk selling bread to the biggest shops. How can they bring it back to life?” she asked. She continued: “Saltivka is on the edge of town next to a spring. I associate it with the smell of fresh grass; with water and a river. You have a strong attachment to somewhere and it becomes a wasteland, devoid of life. It’s better to move on.”
One Saturday last month, a group of young volunteers gathered outside north Saltivka’s school number 165. A projectile had blasted a hole in a grassy football pitch. The modern structure was a glass-strewn mess. The helpers repaired a hole in the roof and boarded up the ground-floor windows with plywood. As it began to rain, they broke off for lunch, laid on by the community initiative called Edine Dzherelo.
Evgeniya Posledova, an 18-year-old philology student, said they would patch up the school so it did not collapse over the freezing winter months. The government would have to carry out further renovation work, she said. “We’re trying to do something for our kids’ future. We want them to come back and study,” she said, adding: “It’s volunteer power. None of us knew each other before.”
Life is slowly returning to Kharkiv. Families strolled in the central Shevchenko park, underneath autumnal chestnut trees. A banner saying: “Kharkiv, city of heroes” hung over Freedom Square. Workers were patching up the ghostly facade of the city’s regional administration building, hit on 1 March by a devastating Russian cruise missile. Many surrounding buildings lay in ruins.
In an underground venue with a bar, a literary festival was in full swing last month, organised by Kharkiv’s most celebrated writer, Serhiy Zhadan. “The war didn’t stop us from holding cultural events. Kharkiv is a great place with huge potential. We want to do something positive,” he said. A packed crowd listened to Zhadan and four other panellists discuss the city’s future. All bilingual, they conversed in Ukrainian, rather than Russian.
This city is unbreakable. In the midst of the war, just 40 km from the border, in the underground bunker, Kharkiv hosts 5th Literary Festival and a discussion on the future of the front-line city. pic.twitter.com/n8kIPU4FW4
— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) September 25, 2022
Zhadan acknowledged that Kharkiv residents had previously held different attitudes towards the Ukrainian language and to the pro-western government in Kyiv. Kharkiv is a predominantly Russian-speaking city. In 2014, when the Kremlin kicked off a rebellion in the east, some local people sided with Moscow. An activist from Russia briefly raised the Russian tricolour in the main square.
Overnight, February’s invasion consolidated patriotic feeling as people sheltered in their basements. There was a collective sense that Kharkiv was a Ukrainian city. All felt the pull of this identity, Zhadan suggested, regardless of their earlier views. “Totally different people, but as it turned out what united them was the Kharkiv factor. The genius of the city turned out to be pretty strong,” he told the festival.
Back in north Saltivka, Sabadosh showed off the lake where she had taken her grandchildren to feed the ducks. The spot was also home to terrapins. Nearby was a children’s play area, now overgrown and deserted. “I have six grandchildren. They would ask me if they could go and play in the sandpit,” she said. “This isn’t just somewhere we live. For us, it’s a place of memories.”
