Igor Mansurov gazes with desolation at the ruins that have become the optical cable factory he worked in, the most buoyant in Chernihiv province, but today reduced to rubble after Russian troops occupied it and used it as a base for launching missile attacks.
“Look, these cable spools were ready to be exported to Poland,” says this technical engineer from Utex, showing kilometers of fiber spoiled and all the machinery destroyed, among rubble, remnants of Russian ammunition and dozens of missile sleeves that were launched from there towards the city of Chernihiv.
They are missiles eight centimeters in diameter and two meters long, capable of traveling up to 40 kilometers, when the city is only ten kilometers away. Although he has won fewer covers than Bucha or Irpin, in the Kiev region, Chernihiv suffers from equally lacerating war wounds.
ENTRY AND EXIT OF THE RUSSIANS
The province, the northernmost in Ukraine and one of the poorest, was the gateway for the Russian Army to invade the center of the country and reach Kiev, the coveted capital they aspired to conquer. And there, too, they gave their last flaps when they completed the retreat to the north, a week ago.
Bordering Belarus and Russia, this region of less than a million inhabitants has been severely punished by the war, with its modest industrial fabric shattered, electricity and communications not yet restored and access roads uncleaned. In addition, humanitarian aid arrives there with droppers.
“We can't relax because the Russians can come back. They have regrouped to go east, but you never know,” regrets Igor, who only intends to rebuild as soon as possible the Utex plant, which employed more than a hundred people, while he looks with contempt at the objects left by the Russians where he was working.
In addition to the remains of ammunition and destroyed tanks, there are two dirty pots, cans of Russian pickles, a military jacket or a pair of shoes, belonging to Russian soldiers who settled there for more than a month of occupation, in which, in addition to attacking various municipalities in the province, they engaged in “looting and extorting” the nearby village of Shestovitsa, where many Utex workers live.
Nearby, in Kikha, another small village on the way to the city of Chernihiv, Mikola Timochenko, 68, fixes the damage left at home by the pitched battle between Russian and Ukrainian troops. His village was the “black zone” where the Ukrainian Army settled to protect the city from Russian attacks coming from the vicinity of the Utex factory and from Chernobyl, just 30 kilometers away.
“In the first attack, on the first day of the invasion, all the windows of the house were broken. I covered them with plastic and we hid in the basement. Then the roof was shattered,” recalls Mikola, who got used to living in the crossfire of missiles, shots and grenades, and who even learned to identify danger based on the sound of each shell.
“If it sounded like a whistle, you had to hide quickly,” explains Mikola, who had to bury several neighbors in a nearby orchard, something he couldn't do with the old woman who lived three houses away from hers. “A bomb thrown by air fell on the house, everything caught fire and it was burned, its remains could not even be found,” he regrets as he points to the mass of rubble that lies next to the hole left in the ground by the bomb.
HELP THAT DOESN'T COME
Mikola complains that the arrangements at home require a lot of money, but there is no building material available in the province, nor is humanitarian aid on which thousands of families depend hardly arrives, as evidenced by the long queues in the few places where food is distributed.
Where humanitarian aid has not arrived either and people continue to feed on what they had before the war, is on Voikova Street, which on March 3 suffered an attack by Russian aviation that destroyed several apartment blocks at that point in the city of Chernihiv.
Six bombs fell in a matter of seconds, one hit the 14th floor of a building, but the shock wave also destroyed the surrounding ones. Fifty-nine people died at that time, although the Russian occupation has claimed more than 700 lives in the city, according to the preliminary account of the city council.
“I was at home with my grandson, I heard a huge rumble and I hugged the child and we ran to the shelter. We have been very afraid,” says Lubov, a 65-year-old woman.
Lubov and his family have returned home, still without windows, but dozens of residents of those blocks that suffered the air attack have not dared leave the basement where they have sheltered since then. Without water or electricity, they spend their hours covered with blankets and making fires in a nearby plot to cook.
“Everything burst, windows, doors, closets, even the tiles were lifted from the floor,” says Elena, who lives on the seventh floor of the building that received the first bomb. She and her 16-year-old son Kiril are still living in the basement because their home, like their country, is “torn apart.”
(with information from EFE)
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