Chasiv Yar – In this Donbass dirty war, people die in the living room, buried by Iskander missiles. But you do not die by chance: there are serious responsibilities, and they are not only the most obvious ones of those who press the “fire” button. The sixteen deaths of Chasiv Yar – a still partial count, stopped last night while still digging in the rubble – are mostly Ukrainian soldiers. Two days ago they had entered this huge half-empty building, “inhabited by eight civilians” and with two large apartment buildings across the street. Someone betrayed them, and the Russians sent three rockets to close the game. The game closed is Sacha, crying and screaming. She is a girl of twenty, she has just seen her father’s body come out of the rubble and the bricks. Mom is in Poland, she stayed with dad because they worked as guardians of the large fireproof brick factory around which Chasiv Yar was born. Their building was owned by the factory, which had been “closed for two years”. Once the families of the employees lived there, now there are only a few left: many apartments were vacant, the soldiers took advantage of it.
In the affected building was Denis, the youngest child on the block: “He is nine years old, he lives with his mother Ira”, tell the neighbors of the building next door, who went out to drink tea in the rubble. Their building was also hit, the window frames and part of the top floor came down. But the dead, those are all in the other building. “Tatjana with her husband Vitaly, employed in the municipal services” also lived there. And then “the grandmothers, Viera Ivanova and Tamara”. Nobody here knows if the tenants on whom the missiles rained are still alive.
Russian military cynicism is well known: they hit their targets without caution. If there are civilians, civilians die. If they miss their aim, civilians die. It happens often enough to be a constant. But there is also another cynicism. It is that of the Ukrainian authorities who did not officially disclose the number of dead and missing yesterday evening, but limited themselves to saying that “they hit civilian buildings, there were no military targets”.
This is not exactly the case. The soldiers fighting to stop the Russian advance must sleep somewhere. Some slept there, next to the civilians. But it is a dangerous choice, civilians end up acting as human shields and everyone knows that this does not stop the hand of the Russians. However, the Ukrainian authorities fail to mention the presence of soldiers.
War Russia-Ukraine, the timeline of the conflict
curated by Flavio Bini and Paola Cipriani
Journalists take care of the dead: last night they reached 16. There is little doubt about the dynamics. “At around 21.10 on Saturday the first missile arrived – tell Elena and Ekaterina, Liudmyla, her husband Piotr and the young Roman, who is 13, in front of the condominium refreshment tea – and it destroyed our windows. A few minutes later a second missile broke down all the doors “. If they’re alive, they owe it to the fact that those first two missiles hit the old factory building, not theirs. The third probably got the wrong aim: he hit the roof of their building and gutted the top floor, “but we were all already running to take refuge in the basement. A few minutes later it was already full of emergency teams”. They were holed up until morning. Then they went out to have a look, while the firefighters digging their arms for survivors. One came out last night, after twenty hours underground.
“It has been a long time – tell the people here – that there have been Ukrainian soldiers shooting at the Russians around. And they are responding”. Arriving along the road we saw armored vehicles and cannons crouched in the edges of the forest. “We all – they say – don’t care. What do we want? Let this damned war end and leave us in peace at home, and who cares if the Ukrainians or the Russians win”.
Ukraine, building bombed in Chasiv Yar: someone spied on the Russians
A few days ago a “spy” was arrested in Kramatorsk. She gave the Russians the position of the Ukrainian soldiers. Two civilians had been killed in front of the house by a missile sent to hit an old, out of use hotel, occupied shortly before by the military. The Russian Defense Ministry never talks about the collateral damage of her actions, which are tears and funerals: it says that in Chasiv Yar they “destroyed a hangar with American 155mm howitzers”, using “high-precision weapons”. And he claims the killing of “up to 30 soldiers”. For the Ukrainians they hit “the unused station and civil buildings”.
The opposing propaganda crushes these poor people. Whenever Ukrainian authorities blame the Russians to hit a school, they omit that schools have been closed since February 24. Soldiers often occupy them: Russian “high-precision” missiles are the nightmare of those who, without knowing who they host, live nearby.