Our Enemies Will Vanish by Yaroslav Trofimov

Author:Yaroslav Trofimov [Trofimov, Yaroslav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

Unleash the Kraken

Russia’s renewed focus on Donbas meant that Ukrainian forces could probe undermanned Russian positions near Kharkiv. The need was dire. More than two months of daily shelling by tanks, artillery, and multiple-launch rocket systems had turned the sprawling Saltivka residential neighborhood of high-rises on Kharkiv’s northern edge into an uninhabitable wasteland. Virtually every building was singed with soot from fires and defaced with shrapnel. Trees and electric utility poles had collapsed onto disfigured cars. There was no electricity or water. The few remaining residents cooked on open fires when they emerged from basements during pauses in Russian attacks. Most were old and disoriented, surviving on food brought by the military or gutsy volunteers. Unexploded ordnance was strewn on the streets, and puncturing a tire on jagged shrapnel was unavoidable.

In central Kharkiv, too, the thuds of explosions were constant, some far away and others close enough to rattle windows. In late April, we stayed in the city for a few days. At the one hotel that had reopened, I pushed my bed to the corner away from the window at night, sleeping wedged between the wall and an unfastened flak jacket to shield me from glass shards or worse. Most buildings around us had already been hit. A surprisingly well-stocked supermarket, on the basement floor of an otherwise shuttered shopping mall, operated around the corner.

Death in the city was random. On a drive in northern Kharkiv, we passed a hatchback sedan ablaze. It had been hit by a Russian Grad rocket minutes earlier and was sending up dark, acrid smoke. We hadn’t realized that a man and a woman were burning inside. Half an hour later, on our way back, the fire had been doused. Three ambulance workers in red overalls were trying to extract the remains. Maksym, a bystander who told me that he had survived because he jumped into a ditch as he heard the Grads fly, took it upon himself to direct the paramedics. “The skull, don’t forget the skull!” he shouted. Then, wearing latex gloves, he picked up two other body parts, impossible to identify, and carefully deposited them into an open black plastic bag. By then, Mayor Terekhov told me, some two thousand Kharkiv apartment buildings had been damaged by Russian shelling. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilians had been killed. Nobody knew for sure how many.

“A genocide is under way here. Kharkiv is a Russian-speaking city, and people here used to be rather loyal to the Russian Federation,” he said. “But now the situation has turned 180 degrees. The east of Ukraine has become more radically anti-Russian than the west of the country. There is a reason. It’s one thing to see the horrors that they inflict on TV, and it’s another to live them in real life.”

To reduce casualties and protect the city, Ukrainian forces needed to push the Russians as far as possible from Kharkiv’s edge, Terekhov said, out of range of Grads and field artillery. Already in early April, Ukrainian forces launched local offensives east of the city, taking the villages of Mala Rohan and Vilkhivka.

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