Sitting on the edge of a five-story building and pitting cherries with a pencil lead, Lioudmila in Siversk, about twenty kilometers from Lyssytchansk in eastern Ukraine, can no longer live in the basement for three months.
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“Three months ago they (the Russians) bombed here, now it’s over there,” she told AFP, pointing to the small road next to the building that leads to Lysychansk, the last major city that Russian forces invaded want to conquer the Lugansk region.
“It’s bombing day and night,” yells a woman who refuses to identify herself, sitting on a bench under a tree at the foot of the building.
Then she gets up, takes her cart with two large empty cans and goes a little further to fetch water from the well.
“We’ve run out of electricity and gas, and we’ve had it for three months,” Lioudmila continues between the sounds of the bombing. Plumes of white smoke can be seen in the distance over Lysychansk.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of a staircase in the basement, two women are preparing potato pancakes in a pan set on two bricks and heated by a small wood fire.
One of them shows the AFP journalist his “room” in one of the flashlight-lit basement rooms: “Look, the mattresses are over there in a corner and we’ll spread them out here on the floor in the evening.”
In the next room, a 90-year-old woman is standing on a walker in the dark.
She needs medicine, but it’s impossible to find her here, says a member of her family. Pharmacies are no longer open in the small town, and most shops have been closed for weeks.
“Kept in the basement”
“You have to go a long way to buy something and no one can take you there,” complained a young man as he passed the building. “You wouldn’t have toilet paper,” he asks the AFP journalist.
Another man, Viatcheslav Kompaniets, continues to live in his apartment on the ground floor of the building whose windows were shattered by an explosion in March during an escape attempt by Russian forces on the approach to Siversk, before being repulsed by the Ukrainian army.
A small fire brigade building adjacent to the building was destroyed by the rocket that struck there and left only a pile of rubble.
At the end of May, Vyacheslav suffered a stroke in his apartment: “I was treated in the basement,” explains the 61-year-old, because of the incessant bombing not too far away.
Living in the open air is possible in summer, but when autumn comes, “we have to close everything,” he says, without knowing how and by what means.
Until then, residents of the building hit by AFP hope that the Russian offensive launched on February 24 in Ukraine will be over, not knowing what the next day will be like, they who live day by day .