FROM OUR REPORTER
KHERSON (Ukraine) — Better to row. “The engine is making noise.” And stay on the shore. «On the other side there are the tar of Putin, who see everything”. And quickly pick up the now unrecognizable wrecks of lives. “I found a painting. It is the portrait of an old man. I put it on social networks, maybe someone recognizes it…».
Engineer Alex Grigorenko’s red motorboat has a white Ud220b code peeling from twenty-eight years of wear, “I’ve always gone there to fish for sturgeon”, and it’s the first time in sixteen months that he’s taken it out of the garage. These waters have never frightened him. Not even the time he crossed the lagoon with his Tatiana and crossed the fin of a real tara two-metre-long Black Sea shark: back then there wasn’t so much terror and all this turbidity (to make friends a bit we tell him: «Do you know he’s quoting a famous Italian song, ‘o mare nero, mare nero, you were clear and transparent like me…”? “No, I don’t know her…”) and above all there were no invading sharks.
Engineer Grigorenko would do without going out, but how can you do it: he still lives and has always lived in the street dedicated to the Heroes of Kutry, those who saved the Ukrainians from the Red Army a hundred years ago. At two o’clock in the afternoon, he puts the hull in the water and goes looking for him too. Gutted roofs, a lacquered kitchen door, smashed furniture, a blue Kia. It smells like oil, rotten fish, burst sewers. Blue water if you look at it from a distance, black as death if you sail in it.
On the beaches of Odessa, after five days, the bodies also arrived with the debris. A bald-headed Russian soldier, three women, one man, swollen, waxy bodies. «More will arrive», Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor, expects: «The water of the Dnipro is returning, but it is still four and a half meters above the average. We have no idea what’s left underneath. For sure, we don’t even know how many victims there are, because many were homeless and many were under Russian control. And there is the problem of the environmental disaster: the Black Sea is a delicate system and it is difficult to say how much this putrid water input can withstand».
On the islet of Shaika, right in the middle of the Dnipro, a woman is saved after days while she is on the roof without food, without drink, with her two children in her arms: «At one point I saw a drone above us and I was terrified was Russian – says Katerina Krupich, 40, in a displaced center in Kherson -, instead he was Ukrainian. She saw me, went away, then came back and joined me with a bag of food and water. They had stuck a note on it: ‘Keep calm. Don’t panic. You are about to be evacuated. Santa Claus’. I started crying: I will keep this note for the rest of my life».
At Mykolaiv station, the 10.06 train to Kiev runs out of seats. Anyone who runs away from the house they no longer have travels for free. But it is the only discount that the new refugee life reserves for him. «We are going to stay with our daughter – says Vladimir Shershen, 51, a gas station attendant in line at platform 1 with his wife and mother-in-law -. Do you want to see what I leave? Nothing!»: he opens the photos on his mobile phone, shows a roof that emerges from the mud, where Pitihavska street used to be, «a beautiful little street full of flowers, now it has disappeared into the mud and I hope there is nothing left, because the Russians they don’t have to take anything!”
In the next few days, as it always rains on misfortunes, clouds and thunderstorms are expected: «With what we have been living for sixteen months, what is a little rain?».
And then there are the dogs. For five days, soaked in anger at the destroyed dam and the thousands of displaced people and the 500,000 hectares flooded and the 700,000 left without water and the nuclear plant without coolers, the Ukrainians have been going out on the Dnipro to fish everything out. But there is a special team that only takes care of the animals. And what a celebration, when an old brown and white mestizo jumps onto a floating island of waste and lets himself be carried by the current for 150 km to Odessa: someone in Kherson recognizes him, his name is Bonifacius, he used to guard the dachas of the Idropark , is now licking his wounds and drying himself from shock in the apartment of a boy, Valentyn Tkachuk, who saw him and conquered him with a sausage. «It is the metaphor of this war», says Paolo Pellegrin, one of the most famous photographers in the world, whom we pass as he lands with his small boat, having just escaped a machine gun: «The Ukrainian who works hard to save the dogs and the Russian who shoots them with mortars…».
War without metaphors strikes here and there. Patchy, as the Ukrainian generals recommended to their men who left for the counter-offensive: Vladimir Saldo, the pro-Russian governor of Kherson, has just finished explaining to journalists how he will evacuate the six thousand flooded, and a roar destroys the hotel room where is it.
The Russians are also very good at the icy shock & awe technique: under the trees of Kherson the new portable concrete shelters appear, but in the afternoon they are not enough to save a sixteen year old girl who was running home. Strike when they least expect it: before the 11pm curfew, on Friday, the center of Odessa looks like the Côte d’Azur and there is drinking, dancing, partying, the “Burlesque” floods the chatter and laughter of beautiful youth with red lights and the sensation is d ‘to be everywhere except in the stronghold of the southern front; an hour later, from the sky, there was a flood of fire. In front of our window, with a view of the Opera, suddenly one, two, three rise up Iranian drones. Killer yellow comets. From the black of the sea, the tracer rosary of the anti-aircraft starts. Half hour break, another attack. More silence, more drones. This goes on until 5 in the morning. The Russians aim for houses: a building over there, far away, goes up in flames. On the eighth floor, two sleeping spouses and a man trying to take refuge somewhere die. It is the heaviest attack on civilians ever seen in Odessa, they will say tomorrow morning. We try to film it, but we soon realize that this is not the case. Even a few seconds of blurry images can help Russians. The rules of war are not metaphors: “For you, a video is just news – a policeman tells us -, for us, it can be life”.