The minds do not stutter for a second, the index fingers tense without hesitation. “On this side”, “Behind the trees over there”, “Over there”…To show where Russia is, no one in this courtyard has any problems with orientation. It was 3.10 pm on Friday, August 30, when a “guided bomb” exploded in building 2D in the Industrialnyi district of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. When asked where this machine, much more precise than an air-to-ground missile, is coming from, everyone in the 2D courtyard points in the same direction: east. The border is at 35. kilometers in a straight line, as the crow flies.
As the attack cut through the afternoon sun and decapitated an entire building just blocks from her home, Tetyana was in the “patio”, as the squares surrounded by residential buildings are called here, and her husband, Mykola, not far away. “Our own building moved, says this 50-year-old high school guard, palm over one ear, humming from the explosion. I thought of my mother, who lives with us up there, and ran upstairs to check on her. That day, only 2D, 150 metres from their building, was on fire. Tetyana, an employee of the Vivat book depository, one of Kharkiv’s leading publishing houses, was quick to reassure the family before the news spread on social media. She warned everyone except her cousin Angelina in Moscow.
Angelina grew up in the same neighborhood as her; she also attended the same school, “119,” before moving to the Russian neighbor with her husband. But, in the spring of 2022, when Putin’s army tried to “take” Kharviv, missiles rained down on this city of 1.5 million people, and Tetyana sent photos of the tanks and the destruction to Angelina, she laughed: obviously photos. “misused”. “She wrote to me: “We will protect you”Tetyana continues. Since then, for me, it was over. I left WhatsApp and Viber with her. Russian TV channels and Telegram ate her brain in no time. » The couple notes with irony that the apartment that this same cousin has in the northern neighborhoods, the most exposed, has never been touched in two and a half years of conflict.
“Here everyone has a cousin in Russia”says Mykola, the husband. Kharkiv is the largest Russian-speaking city outside the borders of Russia, and the The courtyard of the 2D building, similar to so many others in the post-Soviet space, bears witness to this. This court is also a miniature Eastern Ukraine, a precipitate of these regions where family histories, on both sides of the front, create situations even more marked than in other parts of Ukraine: quarrels, lack of love, particular solidarity. Some continue to talk among themselves, but without saying anything, or else they say banalities loaded with insinuations: “Say hello to those around you”, “Hug the family”, “How is your health?”, “Take care everyone”…Others broke the thread.
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