Volunteers between Kharkiv and the front line: Death is everywhere, you can’t just wash it away

(From our colleague from Kharkiv)

There is still smoke and sticky soot in the air, on the ground dishes, porcelain, spoons, charred fabrics, leftover furniture melted by the heat of the explosion… The torso of the walls has collapsed into a pile and instead of them there is a gaping hole somewhere where no one wants to look.

“We go through the houses and look to see if anyone is under the rubble,” says Andrej. In one of the houses, the ruins of which are still smoldering, it is necessary to find Mrs. Tatána and evacuate her. Fortunately, he lives. The shadow of a human figure is projected onto the stunned wallpaper. Confused and shocked, he walks around the room, which was partially spared from the explosion, and so does she. Her face resembles the faces of St. Nicholas’ devils, her hands are also black from soot.

“Ms. Tatana, do you have documents? A passport or at least a QR code? Do you have them around here? Have you seen them? Andrej asks a confused woman who walks around the apartment in an apron and with bare feet in flip-flops, where pieces of the walls are missing.

When she receives a confused answer, Andrej replies that it doesn’t matter, that he will help her with everything and solve it. He helps her look for things. The most important are documents, medicines, money and mobile phone. “Be careful, Saša,” he calls out to another of the evacuation volunteers, whom he took in charge as a more experienced one.

It is necessary to pay attention to the remnants of bombs underfoot, falling pieces of walls and roofs, to fresh pits leading unexpectedly somewhere into the depths of the earth. Around Sasha, confused and unhappy newly homeless dogs run around.

“Death is everywhere,” Andrej tells me later that day, casually touching his stubbled face. “You can’t just wash it off,” he adds.

Andrej Nikolaenko is a native of Kharkiv, originally a history teacher, the owner of a confectionery at the beginning of the war, and today he is also a volunteer. In addition to the fact that he collected more than twelve million hryvnias from ordinary people since the beginning of the war (about seven million crowns in conversion) and bought dozens of cars for soldiers and medics, he has been driving his car to the front for many weeks and helping to evacuate the people.

I ride with him sometimes. This time we are heading to Kupjansk for the first time.

We have the exact addresses and apartment numbers of the people that our crew is supposed to take to Kharkov from officials from the regional evacuation center. Like us, dozens of volunteer evacuation cars, sometimes even a bus, operate in this area alone every day.

As we get closer to Kupjansk, the roads are more deserted, the number of blockposts increases and soldiers check us every now and then.

And we are already passing through Kupjansk, a dead, bombed-out town. The figures we see can be counted on the fingers of a hand. On the other hand, the number of closer or more distant explosions is countless. Also abandoned dogs and cats. Unfortunately, this final wave of evacuations usually does not include animals. The streets of Kupjansk, Borová and other towns close to the front are full of unhappy, frightened and hungry dogs and cats. He tries in vain to hide from bombs, snow, rain, winter, death. They needlessly look forward to the return of people. And so at least we bring them pellets. The last few locals, who refuse to budge despite the increasingly high risk of violent death, share their dwindling supplies with them.

The vast majority of houses are empty, the streets are deserted, electricity, heat and water supplies have already been stopped in a large part of the city. Around us is a scorched earth. With each subsequent trip here, we see everything even more devastated. Ruin and ruin merge with me too. As if from a certain limit the destruction becomes absolute, omnipresent. Everyday apocalypse.

We get out, and in the freezing midday, a neighbor of a man who needs to be evacuated is waiting for us on a bench in front of a bombed-out house. Both have long been retired. Dogs are coming. He tells us that he feeds these. It can be seen. He is not hungry yet. They smell us and run away. More explosions are heard between the houses in quick succession. Dogs do not react to them. The cat that hid with the kittens under the rubble of the collapsed balcony after an earlier explosion, neither. Neither do we. It is at a safe distance, approximately half a kilometer. And now another one a little further.

Explosions shake the city at very short intervals. Often a few seconds in a row, then there is a few minutes of calm.

Of course, Saša, Andrej and I have vests and helmets – unlike the local people.

“But we have to get them out of here. The safety and lives of others matter to us. We have to have protection,” Andrej repeats to me, when we stop at the roadside about two kilometers before Kupjansk and put ourselves through the so-called “ballistics”.

I’m not protesting, our colleagues caught an indirect hit by KAB yesterday right here in the streets of Kupjansk. Thanks to the ballistics, everyone survived fortunately, but the car was left with an iron shard.

We also learn from acquaintances from the Ukrainian armed forces that the Russian aggressors managed to break into Kupjansk a few days ago. They disguised themselves in Ukrainian uniforms. Fortunately, the Ukrainians caught them and defended the city.

But off the record, everyone shrugs their shoulders wearily: towns like Kupjansk, close to the front, are full of Russians dressed in civilian clothes, waiting for their moment. And sometimes, unfortunately, someone from the locals helps them, most often an old person, for whom the time of the Soviet Union is a return to the sentiment of youth, when everything was better, the grass was greener, the world was simpler…

We personally encounter one of these. I photograph Andrej with all the evacuees every time. Even as a document. Here you never know which photo will be the last…

I’m still taking pictures of them now, when suddenly a man in his seventies comes and says without greeting: “What are you photographing?” What’s your name? What? Who are you?’

Andrej tries to calm him down, but the man is furious. If he could, he would like to hit us with the stick he is leaning on. In the end, it only works when we want his name and identification, and we call the soldiers and the police. He leaves quickly.

Roughly the same old couple as him, who have mobility problems and who we are currently evacuating, tell us that the local Ukrainians have had problems with him for a long time. This person is unofficially waiting “for his own”.

Saša and Andrej load their bags, help people get into the van and we go to get the last woman.

Every evacuation is a quick action, the shorter the time we are in the city, the more the chances that nothing will happen to us increase. All evacuees are at least of retirement age. The younger ones or families with children left a long time ago.

“In the stress of packing, I forgot my glasses at home. What will I do without them?” Ms. Zina’s eyes burst with tears. But we are not going back to the four-story apartment building from which we just picked her up.

“Don’t worry, when you are in the evacuation center in Kharkiv, you have to tell the people who will take you there. They will arrange new glasses for you. can you hear And the rest of you? If you forgot something important at home, such as your teeth or medicine, don’t be shy to say so. Humanitarian aid is,” says Andrej over the noise of the engine and the rumble of war. Mrs. Zina nods, but her tears continue to flow. She silently stares out the window at the city that has been her home for more than forty years. She is over seventy. He does not count on the fact that he will return. She has no idea where she is going, what and who and where is waiting for her. Like many others, she does not have a family to take care of her. They are all dead.

The rumble of Russian KAB glide bombs is uncomfortably close today. It is worse than last time and the year before last. And we still don’t know that next time the soldiers won’t let the evacuation cars into the city. It will be necessary to take over the fleeing inhabitants of the city directly from them. Not us anymore, but fully armed soldiers will pick them up amid the sounds and shocks of bombs falling closer and more often at home and will bring them to the outskirts of the city for a drop-off in the Ševčenkove-Chugujev direction.

Mrs. Zina pinches the leather ears of the purse on her lap, and her neighbor, a woman who, together with her husband on crutches, shares with her the fate of a recent wartime homeless, tries to calm her down with a whisper. Her husband is silent, he too has tears in his eyes. When he notices my look, he asks me: “What did we do to them?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, he looks out again through the muddy window of the eight-seater van.

All seats in the car are always occupied, the cargo area is full. Each of the evacuees is allowed two pieces of luggage. Two bags in which their whole life is packed. Most of them know that they will never return home.

We have to keep going, because even the roads are unimaginably damaged by bombing and shelling. The worst craters on the main street and drop-offs are covered non-stop by volunteers among road users at least with sand. So that soldiers and evacuation vehicles can pass.

In Kupjansk there is no longer a single functioning shop, the last pharmacy is closing. There are countless such bleak places full of destruction and death in the east of Ukraine. And more are added.

The main emotions that our evacuation Mercedes is full of are sadness and pain. Everyone is crying, more or less secretly. He doesn’t talk much. He is silent. They are watching. Into the eyes. They stick into you and suddenly you feel that something like telepathy exists, you feel their pain, regret, sorrow.

As soon as we leave Kupjansk, this time also fully loaded, we stop and take off the ballistics. The evacuation lasted less than an hour today. It is just above zero, it is not snowing at the moment.

Through the crowns of bare trees, I see columns of smoke over Kupjansk. It is not smoke from a heating plant or power plant. The queue is approximately three to four kilometers from the city.

Andrej uses the stops to write down all the data of the evacuees in the forms in relative safety. An hour later, in Kharkov, everything goes smoothly. The evacuation center is already a well-worn machine full of professionals and volunteers both from Kharkiv and its surroundings, as well as from international humanitarian organizations. There are free doctors, social workers, lawyers here for everyone…

Those who have nowhere to go are taken care of. In an emergency, of course. No luxury. Only the most necessary. In less than three years of war, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of war refugees in the Kharkiv region alone. Hundreds more are added every day.