Ten days ago Kharkiv was a flourishing metropolis and home to 1.5 million people. It was, as one resident, Galina Padalko, put it, “a beautiful place”. There were parks, a new German architect-designed zoo, thriving cafes and restaurants, and a monumental central square, once adorned with a statue of Lenin. The city had several universities, international students, a ballet theatre and a cathedral that had withstood the last century’s darkest moments.
In a few savage days Kharkiv has been transformed into a living hell. Many of the city’s inhabitants are currently sheltering underground in basements, metro stations, and ground-floor corridors. Russian forces have relentlessly bombarded the city this week, pulverising apartment blocks and other civilian targets and threatening to turn Kharkiv into a new Aleppo, which also faced Russian bombing, or Guernica. It has borne the brunt of Vladimir Putin’s rage.
“There is bombing the whole day, from morning to evening, ever since the invasion last week,” Padalko, a communications manager, told the Guardian. “Our flat is shaking and vibrating. We have the feeling Putin wants to kill us totally, absolutely completely. It’s awful. He’s really crazy. Nobody can understand why he does this.” She added: “Kharkiv was the best place to live in Ukraine. Now we are terrified to look out of our windows.”
At 8am on Tuesday Russia bombed the main administration building in Kharkiv in Freedom Square. Several cars were going past. The building was destroyed. At least 10 people were killed. It has targeted schools, residential neighbourhoods, the zoo with its lions and elephants, government offices, the theatre, and the city’s Assumption Cathedral – part of the Moscow patriarchy – where locals had taken refuge. Dozens have died.
The ferocious attack is being carried out with deadly weapons: BM-30 Smerch heavy multiple rocket launchers and, increasingly, bomber planes. On Sunday Russian light armoured vehicles made an unsuccessful attempt to enter and to grab the city. Now Putin appears to have decided to flatten it instead. The message seems demonstrative. It is directed at the defiant government of Ukraine’s pro-western president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy: you and Kyiv are next.
It is hard to disagree with Zelenskiy’s grim assessment made in a speech earlier this week that Russia was seeking to “erase” Ukraine and remove it from Europe’s map. “Russia is fighting with a deliberate violation of all conventions, laws and rules of war, trying to cause maximum damage, to civilian and critical infrastructure and to ordinary people,” the presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said. Moscow’s goal was panic and to cause a refugee crisis, he added.
“There are many destroyed houses. We are underground, hiding in our local metro station,” said Maya Mironova from Kharkiv, speaking on her mobile. “There are about a thousand people here. Women, children and also pets, cats and dogs.” Mironova said volunteers had organised food points; some of her friends were in basements elsewhere in her Kharkiv tractor factory district; during breaks in the shelling she was able to dash back to her home.
“Putin didn’t realise his ambition to take Kharkiv. It’s the former capital of Soviet Ukraine. It’s symbolic for him. He counted on people’s loyalty to Russia and didn’t get it. And so he’s furious. He wants to bomb us so we surrender,” she said. How long could Kharkiv hold out against unbridled Russian firepower? “We won’t surrender. The Ukrainian army is defending. They are here. But I’m afraid Putin will destroy us,” she said.
Across Ukraine similar bleak scenes were being played out. Russian tanks have encircled Mariupol, the once-prosperous port city on the Sea of Azov. Shelling has killed dozens, destroyed the heating and water supply, and left tens of thousands of people shivering in basements, cold and terrified. “They do not plan to occupy the city. They plan to ruin it with grads that do not stop,” a resident, Diana Berg, wrote on her Facebook page.
She added: “It’s the third day all city is left with no electricity, heat, water and any type of connection. Even radio is being blocked. Shelling is non-stop. The only news you can get is the direction of the bomb. People go out into their backyards to make a fire in order to get a little warmth. The humanitarian blockade is terrifying. It’s unbearable. We are in the dark with no understanding of what is going on with our relatives.”
Berg on Friday said she had managed to leave the city – a “miraculous” journey during which she and her husband, Sasha, drove towards and then past a phalanx of 20 Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. “One turned its canon towards us. But for some fucking reason it didn’t fucking shoot us,” she messaged friends incredulously. She apologised for her bad language, saying: “I’ve been swearing for a week now.”
Other urban areas hit by Putin’s missiles resemble a dark phantasmagoria as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. A missile strike on Thursday hit an apartment block in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, killing 47 people and injuring 18. Video shows bright orange flames, black smoke, broken cars, twisted bodies lying on the street amid rubble, and the piercing, inconsolable scream of a woman. It is a medieval hell, made real by 21st-century Moscow.
For now, the capital, Kyiv, is holding firm amid what one former Ukrainian minister described as a “multidirectional raid” by Russia’s army, air force and navy. In the run-up to the invasion little was done to build the city’s defences. Now anti-tank hedgehog traps have been placed along Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, with its Nike outlets and branch of McDonald’s. The city centre is preternaturally quiet, empty, residents say. There are explosions and birdsong
Refugees continue to leave for the west of the country and the relative safety of Lviv, close to the Polish border. Olya Zolotorova, 42, said she had fled her home in the southern city of Mykolaiv, together with her husband and six-year-old son, Leo. Russian troops had blockaded the city but had so far failed to storm it, she said. Its natural geography – Mykolaiv is surrounded by a river on three sides – made it easier to defend from marauding tanks, she said.
Zolotorova said she was appalled by the destruction of Kharkiv and other historic cities. “It’s revenge. Putin thought he could capture Ukraine in three days. Now he’s punishing civilians because of his failure.” Nobody could get in or out of Mykolaiv now, she said, adding Russian marines were seeking to storm nearby Odesa, the country’s third-biggest city, and were landing from the Black Sea.
“This is one of the most barbaric wars in human history. Just a fucking Mordor,” Illia Ponomarenko, the defence correspondent for the Kyiv Independent, tweeted. Others who escaped Kyiv agreed. “Someone needs to kill Putin. When he is dead this war will stop,” Nikita Perfiliev, a digital marketer, said, sipping a cup of coffee outside a Lviv cafe. A home-drawn poster in its window said: “Fuck off Russian warship” – a message broadcast by Ukrainian sailors and now a meme.
“Kharkiv was special. It’s even hard to talk about it,” said Artem Mazhulin, a 31-year-old English teacher. “We had a ferris wheel, a rollercoaster and a cable car in Gorky Park. I went round the new zoo when it opened and saw ostriches and zebras.” Mazhulin said he left Kharkiv on Tuesday, getting on a train packed with students from Nigeria, India and Morocco, with about 100 people in one carriage.
The journey to Kyiv was scary, he said, until the train finally crossed to the right bank of the capital and kept going. “We then stopped at towns and villages. People came to the train windows and gave us home-preserved vegetables and water,” he said. What would happen next? Could Ukraine win the war? Would it survive? “We can’t just give up,” he said. “Our spirit is very high.”
