MALA ROHAN. Tatjana returned to her house a week ago. A one-story brick building is now missing a piece of the roof, gate, and splintered outer walls. She had left without carrying anything when the village where she lives, Mala Rohan, twenty-five kilometers east of Kharkiv, was liberated by the Ukrainian army. It was the end of March, in the previous four weeks, Tajiana lived under Russian occupation with her husband, her daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
The son is a soldier, he fights on the Donbass front, he has not been able to contact him for more than a week and does not want to think about the worst, so he crouches down, takes the glass from the windows torn apart during the weeks of war, picks them up from the ground. one by one and arranges them in a small bucket, when full he walks along the street, empties it into a container, stops to greet the few passersby who have returned home, then goes through the gate again, looks at the holes left by the artillery , he crouches again and begins to collect glass. There are hundreds of them. There is not a single window left in his house. He never utters the word fear, and he doesn’t insist on the details of life in the basement. What has been has been. The problem is what it will be, he says as he watches Ukrainian tanks move north. He must first distinguish whose means are, then dismiss the suspicion that the artillery is starting to fire again.
Before the invasion, three thousand people lived in Mala Rohan, today four hundred remain, some ran away in time, others after the liberation and have no intention of returning. Agricultural village, overlooking vast fields from which Kharkiv can be seen in the distance, Mala Rohan is one of dozens of villages and small urban centers occupied by the Russians on 25 February. According to the Ukrainian authorities, two hundred Russian soldiers were based here. Traces of their passage remain everywhere: cans of food rations, bullets, crates of ammunition, charred military vehicles. They have all seen them here wandering the streets looking for the best positions to establish military bases. The house opposite Tatjiana’s was also used as a base. In the garden there are still the remains of the uniforms, above the names of the soldiers to which they belonged, the serial number and the pins with the colors of the St. George’s ribbon, orange and black, a symbol of military glory and honor.
The Russians had made this country one of the positions for their artillery and multiple launch systems that hit and damaged the eastern districts of Kharkiv.
Today in Mala Rohan, workers are trying to restore the electricity and gas lines. The demining units inspect houses and gardens, collect grenades, render harmless the mines left by the Russians before the retreat.
The village is garrisoned by Ukrainian troops, each area from which the Russians withdrew has become the front line of this second phase of intense counter-offensive. It is here, in the countryside surrounding Kharkiv, that one of the most delicate phases of the Ukrainian war is being fought. Country after town, street after street.
Over the past ten days, the Kiev army has regained control of a number of key villages in the north-east, regaining strategic ground. They took Ruska Lozova, Kutuzivka, and reached Staryi Saltiv. Striking the Russians here, in the countries along the route from Kharkiv to Iziym, means threatening their supply lines and trying to prevent the conquest of the Donbass region.
A war of position and artillery that has been going on for two months, fought with rocket systems that have ranges of up to thirty kilometers and heavy mortars. In between the civilians, and the villages that – once freed – remain marked by heavy artillery.
For this reason, taking up the small towns around Kharkiv means protecting the northern part of the city, the most affected in the two months of the war, from the pressure of the bombing. And so it was, the number of Russian missile attacks on Kharkiv in the past week has dropped from fifty to eighty a day, to five or ten at the most.
Russian-speaking city, Kharkiv, forty kilometers from the border, should have been, in the Kremlin’s calculations, an easy city to take. All the more reason should have been the surrounding villages, a rural legacy of a piece of Soviet Union history.
It was only one – perhaps the grossest – of the strategic mistakes of the invasion of Ukraine, being sure to find benevolent citizens to welcome them, especially in Russian-speaking areas.
A borderland, a land of opposing identities and a set of coinciding traditions, today Mala Rohan is divided into the story of the invasion.
The elders, annoyed by the questions, say: this is not Bucha. As if to understand that the Russian army here was not guilty of heinous crimes like those left behind in the suburbs around Kiev, before retreating. Following in the footsteps of Mala Rohan’s new daily life, however, there are other voices, those of the signs of the atrocities, voices that do not scream, on the contrary they murmur.
The shops are still all closed, at noon, in front of the town’s House of Culture, two volunteers distribute food aid. A man complains about the mayor and deputy mayor who ran away on the first day of the invasion, takes a packet of pasta, canned meat, bread and runs off. Two women whisper the secret of Mala Rohan: the sixteen-year-old girl who was allegedly raped by a Russian soldier. She would take her in the evening and bring her home the next morning, saying – the women say – about her that she looked like her girlfriend.
The little girl survived, everyone knows who she is, everyone talks about her, no one says where she is. It is the ghost of the violence of war.
Tatjiana says that the Russian soldiers brought her bread, a can of water and told her to hide and not go out for any reason to protect her twelve-year-old grandson and herself.
She took the bread and water, she did not say that the boy’s father is a soldier of the Ukrainian army fighting in Donbass. But she told them she is Russian. She was born and raised in the Belgorod region, on the other side of the border that once united two peoples and today divides them.
Tatjiana says she can’t understand, and maybe she doesn’t want to. To the soldier who brought her food, she said «I am Russian, you are Russian, we are both descended from the Slavs, I speak your mother’s language. You, tell me, why did you come to kill our children? ».
The soldier did not answer this question but said he understood the fear because he too had children. Two, a boy and a girl. Tatjiana told him: “They are the same children we have. Plus we have Russian blood in common ».
Russian blood was also that of the group of soldiers in the uniform of the Separatist Republic of Donetsk stacked in the countryside outside the city, on the road from Mala Rohan to the hill where the Russians had established positions and deployed artillery.
They are there, under a willow, now rotting.
Not far away are the remains of life in the trenches. Tunnels dug into the earth. Weapons and ammunition. Two bodies poured into a hole, the texts of prayers in the ancient Russian tradition.
Since Mala Rohan was freed, the peasants have started to walk the country roads again and bring some food from house to house.
Tatjiana’s grandson, a Russian grandmother and father at the front in a Ukrainian uniform, is afraid of everything and cannot be alone. Tatjiana has cut off contact with her relatives in Belgorod. Once she always went to visit them, today she of the proximity to Russia she says that the border is an invention of men as long as it does not serve to justify wars.