11 March 2022 11:38
The soldier picked up little Erik to cross the Irpin River and walked quickly on a rickety wooden plank, under the concrete bridge that was blown up by the Ukrainians to stop, or at least slow down, the advance of the Russians. The Moscow army is on the other side of the river: it has already occupied a part of Irpin, the town of sixty thousand inhabitants northwest of Kiev that has become the front line.
From the bridge, mortar shells can be heard in the distance and columns of black smoke can be seen rising, while a long human chain crosses the river aided by volunteers and soldiers. On March 10, Kiev and Moscow agreed on a new truce, which allowed the civilian population to move from the ten areas most affected by the conflict to safer places, while in the Turkish city of Antalya there were negotiations mediated by Ankara that did not led to no result. In previous days, the ceasefire and humanitarian corridors had not always been respected, and civilians paid the highest price.
“Above all, the most fragile people, the sick, the elderly have remained behind,” says Ruslan Onoprichuch, a Red Cross volunteer who is helping to transport people with an ambulance. The children are picked up by the soldiers, the elderly are carried on stretchers. “We have to hurry, because at this point people are still exposed to sniper fire, it’s dangerous,” he continues. “On the other side of the river, the Russians already have control of the territory,” assures Onoprichuch.
On March 6, on the second day of truce, a family consisting of a mother and two children was killed by artillery shells while fleeing Irpin, shortly after crossing the river. The woman was called Tatyana Perebeynos, she was 43, worked in a computer company and was taking care of her sick mother in Irpin. She was killed with her children Alisa and Mikita, aged nine and eighteen. Her husband, Serhii Perebeynos, was in Donetsk in the east of the country. He only arrived in Kiev to bury his family several days later. On March 10, three days after their death, their suitcase is still where they fell to the ground, it is open, their clothes on the asphalt, while other families continue to cross the bridge to get to safety.
Valentina bursts into tears, a forty-year-old woman who has just arrived on the other side of the river: she has spent the last fourteen days underground, in a cellar, with rationed food, without electricity. Before the war she was employed in a hotel, while her mother worked in Milan. “The important thing is that we are safe, then she will see you”, she says through tears, while she takes her son from the arms of a soldier and puts him in the stroller to continue walking. “We don’t know where to go, we’ll stay a few days in Kiev”.
Army buses and ambulances make their way up and down the bridge. In Bilohorodka, a district north of Kiev, a frugal welcome has been organized in front of a supermarket for refugees who have arrived via the humanitarian corridors from Irpin and Buča: they receive food and hot tea, then they are transferred to other districts of the city . Gleb Semenov is seventeen years old and escaped from Buča on March 10, with the whole family: nine people, plus the dog Artom.
“The Russians are there, you could hear the fighting, the gunshots all the time, the last five days have been terrible,” says the boy. Not only does the front line pass through this bridge, but also the border between the past and the future of the Ukrainian capital, between salvation and death. Nobody knows what will happen, the refugees from Irpin and Buča have left behind everything they had and are not sure what to expect.
In their eyes, Kiev is a safe place compared to the days they have spent so far, but the Russian tanks are already at the gates of the city. On March 10, columns of smoke rose in Skybyn and a shower of rockets fell on Velyka Dymerka, about five kilometers away. The Ukrainian capital is semi-deserted, enveloped in a surreal calm. Half of the population has fled, those who remain are preparing to fight.
On the fourteenth day of the war in Ukraine, a “completely different” phase seems to have begun. These are the words used by Oleksiy Arestovyč, adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, commenting on the March 9 bombing of the pediatric hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol, a port city in the southeast of the country.
Fire on civilians, interrupted humanitarian corridors, bombs on health facilities: it seems that the Russians are using warfare techniques that they had already used in Chechnya and Syria to terrorize the population, lower their morale, force them to flee, then buy time, reposition their means and try to conquer the cities. A twelve-hour truce was announced on 9 March to allow civilians from besieged areas to flee, but the ceasefire was interrupted by a bombing that killed five people and injured seventeen others in Mariupol.
A video released by the Ukrainian presidency showed the interior of the half-destroyed building, among rubble and rubble. In another video of the Ukrainian police, some charred cars and a huge crater are seen. Since the war began on February 24, there have been at least nineteen attacks on hospitals, health facilities and ambulances. The head of human rights of the Ukrainian parliament Liudmyla Denisova called the attack on the hospital in Mariupol “a crime against humanity”.
The city of Mariupol is in a dramatic humanitarian situation: water, electricity and supplies have been lacking for days. Denisova complained that the humanitarian corridors that should have allowed civilians to leave Mariupol and reach Zaporižžja were interrupted on the morning of 9 March by heavy bombing. In the city, an estimated 300,000 people are trapped in critical conditions, without receiving humanitarian aid.