Heavy silence in the dark corridors of the Pokrovsk maternity ward. “It's getting more and more difficult,” warns the director, Ivan Tsyganok, as he enters his office on Sunday, August 18. “There are rumors of a departure, had warned midwife Svitlana Pidchenko a few days earlier. We may evacuate at the end of the month.” The director of the establishment located on the outskirts of this medium-sized town in eastern Ukraine, in the Donetsk region, does not really know. Here and there, behind doors and in stairwells, incubators for premature babies and packed medical equipment nevertheless bear witness to preparations for departure.
“We'll leave maybe in a week,” Ivan Tsyganok comments laconically in his warm, deep voice, before mentioning the neighboring town of Pavlohrad, about a hundred kilometers away, as a potential next place to settle.
The employees of the Pokrovsk maternity hospital have no choice but to prepare for this departure while the fighting thunders, ever closer. Village after village, the Russian forces have continued to advance in recent weeks towards the Pokrovsk logistics hub, which they have been trying to take for months. According to the site DeepStatesclose to the Ukrainian army, the Russian soldiers would be only about ten kilometers from the city center. The bombings are more and more regular.
Six months ago, “We were only bombed once or twice a month, remembers Svitlana Pidchenko, a 53-year-old midwife, thirty-three of whom worked in the maternity ward. Then it was once or twice a week. Now it's several times a day.”.
“Within range of enemy weapons”
While the Ukrainian army hoped to ease Russian pressure on the Donbass front by launching an offensive in the Russian region of Kursk on August 6, Moscow's forces still seem determined to continue their conquest of the Donetsk region. Despite the new front opened by Kiev to the northeast, on the border, the enemy continues to advance on its territory. Local authorities have been sounding the alarm in recent days. Then, on Monday, August 19, the governor of the oblast, Vadym Filachkin, ordered the evacuation of families with children living in and around Pokrovsk.
“When our cities are within range of virtually all enemy weapons, the decision to evacuate is necessary and inevitable,” he explained on social networks, assuring that 53,000 inhabitants, including 4,000 children, continued to live there (compared to more than 60,000 before the war). They have “a week or two, no more”he told the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty, in response to a question about the expected time frame for the evacuations.
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Source: Lemonde
