Minds do not stutter for a second, index fingers are extended without hesitation. “On this side”, “Behind the trees, there”, “Towards there”… To show where Russia is, no one in this courtyard has any problem with orientation. It was 3:10 p.m. on Friday, August 30, when a “guided bomb” exploded on building 2D in the Industrialnyi district of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. When asked where this device, much more accurate than an air-to-ground missile, came from, everyone in the courtyard of 2D pointed in the same direction: east. The border is 35 kilometers as the crow flies, as the shell flies.
As the strike pierced the afternoon sun and decapitated an entire building a few blocks from their home, Tetyana was in the “courtyard”, as the squares surrounded by residential buildings are called here, and her husband, Mykola, not far away. “Our own building has moved, says the 50-year-old high school janitor, his palm over one of his ears, which has been ringing since the explosion. I thought of my mother, who lives with us, up there, and I ran up the stairs four at a time to check that she was okay.” That day, only 2D, 150 meters from their building, was on fire. Tetyana, an employee at the book depot of Vivat, one of the major publishing houses in Kharkiv, rushed to reassure the family before social networks announced the news. 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 in with the Russian neighbor with her husband. But, in the spring of 2022, when Putin's army tried to “take” Kharviv, that missiles were raining down on this agglomeration of 1.5 million inhabitants and that Tetyana sent photos of tanks and destruction to Angelina, she laughed: obviously images “fake”. “She wrote to me: ‘We will protect you’Tetyana continues. Since then, it's over for me. I stopped WhatsApp and Viber with her. Russian TV and Telegram channels ate her brain in no time. The couple notes with irony that the apartment kept by this same cousin in the northern districts, the most exposed, has never been touched in two and a half years of conflict.
“Everyone here has a cousin in Russia”says Mykola, the husband. Kharkiv is the largest Russian-speaking city outside Russia, and the The courtyard of the 2D building, similar to so many others in the post-Soviet space, bears witness to this. This courtyard is also a small Eastern Ukraine in miniature, a precipitate of those regions where family histories, on both sides of the front lines, create situations even more marked than elsewhere in Ukraine – quarrels, divisions, particular solidarities. Some continue to talk to each other, but to say nothing, or else banalities heavy with innuendo: “Say hello to those around you”, “Hug the family”, “How is your health?”, “Take care of yourselves all”…Others have broken the thread.
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Source: Lemonde
