Lidia's face tears in a sob as she watches her home from the window of a minivan preparing to take her miles away. The intensified bombing of her village of Yunakivka, Ukraine, eventually forced her to request an evacuation with her elderly parents.
On Sunday, August 11, on the eve of this storming departure along a dirt road, two Russian guided aerial bombs crashed a street away. “It was terrible, she gasps, shaking with spasms, as other civilians enter the vehicle. All I could do was pray.” No one knows if she will ever see the village and her home again. The families' belongings have been hastily prepared, gathered into bags containing entire lives.
The outbreak of the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Federation a few days earlier, on August 6 – the border is just a few kilometers from Yunakivka – led to an intensification of Russian bombing of the nearby areas. Since then, these territories have suddenly been transformed into a war zone where Ukrainian military convoys are moving at high speed in and out of Russia.
The evacuations of civilians, which were impossible to carry out before the incursion due to military secrecy, require rapid action. They are carried out by military personnel, police officers and volunteers when Ukrainians cannot leave on their own. Serhiy Nadyarny, the communications officer of the Sumy region administration, says that “more than 45,000 people” are likely to be remote, “including 3,600 children”According to the spokesman, around 20,000 residents have already fled.
In the small village of Yunakivka, on Monday, August 12, the Vostok-SOS volunteer organization, already active since 2014 in the east of the country, was still assisting several Ukrainians, while offering other civilians to leave. Explosions sounded in the distance as the minivan prepared to take the road to the city of Sumy, located about thirty kilometers away.
Russian strikes intensify
The intensification of strikes on villages has forced many people to seek refuge in the nearby large city, which has been spared from the bombings in recent times. While artillery fire on border areas has reduced with the retreat of Russian armed forces, the civilians they met all say they are seeing an intensification of strikes with guided aerial bombs.
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Source: Lemonde
