Ukraine rebuffed the attempt to take the second largest city, but the artillery attacks did not stop. Many residents who left have returned, but fear that another offensive is imminent.
Jane Arraf and
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Alina Titova fell to her knees on the steps of the central station for her first glimpse of her home city after getting back on the train.
“I want to kiss these steps,” Ms. Titova, 35, told the two friends who had come to meet her. It was her first trip back to Kharkov since she left the besieged city in March and ended up in Germany with her three young children.
It was hardly an uplifting return. Ms. Titova only stayed long enough to take care of some business and try to persuade her parents to leave their nearby village before winter set in.
“Everyone wants to go back to Kharkov,” she said. “If it is safe to return, we would go on foot from Germany. But it’s not safe for the kids yet.”
Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers from the Russian border, is Ukraine’s second largest city and one of the hardest hit cities in the war. But despite relentless bombing, Ukrainian forces repelled Russian forces attempting to take the city, eventually driving many of them out of the northern suburbs and back into Russia — a limited but meaningful success that offered the promise of a reprieve for Kharkov’s beleaguered residents. .
The relief was transient. Although Russian troops withdrew, the attacks never stopped. Air raids have devastated the city’s infrastructure, and five months after the war, rockets and artillery are still hitting the city and surrounding suburbs every night.
Military analysts have said the attacks are a way to force Ukraine to keep troops in the north, preventing them from participating in the larger battle in the eastern Donbas region. But in June, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia was rallying troops to attack Kharkov again. And the city is committed to it.
“We know that they have not abandoned the idea of taking the city of Kharkov,” said Oleh Synyehubov, the regional governor. “As soon as they find a weak spot in our defenses, they will immediately exploit it.”
With his administration’s offices in ruins, Mr Synyehubov spoke to The Times in an underground concrete complex that has been converted into the city’s media office.
Mr Synyehubov, who is also the head of the regional military administration, said there are an average of four or five air raids on Kharkiv every night, many of them in schools and universities.
As Russian forces have been pushed back, Mr Synyehubov said, most attacks have now been carried out with missiles with a range of 40 miles.
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“They are trying to prevent people from sending their children to school in September,” the governor said, adding that he saw the continued bombing as an attempt by Russia to influence any negotiations.
According to city officials, half of Kharkov’s pre-war population of 1.8 million has left and 90 percent of businesses are closed. The normally lively center of the city, a cultural center of eastern Ukraine, has been largely abandoned. There are few cars in the wide streets where largely empty trolley cars rumble along the tracks.
On a recent morning, a man in a motorized wheelchair with a large Ukrainian flag behind him made his way through the middle of an empty street, between buildings with planks in the windows that accommodate broken glass.
Next to a badly damaged bank building, two customers walked into a shawarma shop – one of the few businesses open in the area.
Valeria Golovkina said her Turkish husband and his brother had reopened the shawarma shop, the Ala Cafe, just two days earlier, after replacing broken equipment and repairing water damage from the shelling.
“We have to work – what else can we do?” said Ms. Golovkina, 42, who left for Istanbul with her husband in March. When they returned in June, she said, all the windows had been shattered and the ceiling had fallen to the floor.
“At the beginning, when things calmed down, many people came back, but now it is fearful again in Kharkiv,” she said.
She said many Kharkov residents who left after the invasion had returned because they ran out of money.
Most of those who remain are either city workers – the city is now Kharkiv’s largest employer – those too poor to leave or young people determined to endure the city’s sharp wartime half-life. There are almost no children.
Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said 109 of the roughly 200 schools in the city were damaged by the strikes. He said the city now plans to offer online classes for a third year in September.
“You understand that no parent will send their children to school while they are being bombed,” Mr Terekhov said.
The mayor said 4,500 buildings were badly damaged or destroyed, including a large scientific library and Kharkiv’s main art museum. About 50,000 apartments in more than 400 buildings are now beyond repair.
In June, Mr. Terekhov that during a lull in the fighting, up to 5,000 inhabitants per day returned. The city resumed bus, tram and metro service, all free for its many cashless and jobless residents.
Even now, he said, as some residents continued to leave, more were returning despite the threat of renewed Russian attack.
“For Kharkov residents, Kharkov is a nationality,” he said. “Because the Kharkiv people cannot imagine life without their city.”
“Our main task now is to survive the winter,” he added, noting that the city was trying to replace 120 miles of damaged gas pipelines used to fuel its buildings’ heating systems.
The devastation is evident throughout Kharkov. Down the street of a gutted telecommunications building, where twisted aluminum bars hung like ribbons in the wind, city workers tied to cranes, gauged plywood sheets to replace the shattered glass of nearly every window in an apartment building.
“We’ve been working from the early days of the war,” says Vadym Maramzin, 30. “It’s hard to count how many windows we’ve done — thousands, I think.” He said many of the men he knew had sent their families out of the city and stayed to work or do military service.
Dmytro Konovalov, 19, waiting for a workman to open the gate to the house he inherited from his grandparents, fled in March when the house next door was hit.
“We packed our bags and ran because the house was on fire,” he said. When he returned in May, it was too damaged to live in. In front of the house was a luxurious coffee bar whose ceiling had collapsed. “Come and have coffee” was written on a cheerful sign. Inside, a chalkboard menu hung over fallen wooden chairs covered in debris.
Mr Konovalov, a cook, said he had come to see what he could salvage from the house, but would not stay in Kharkov because there was no work.
Despite the danger, Kharkiv has a small but thriving bar scene, filled with customers who consider it a badge of honor to stay in the city despite the danger.
“Half of the people don’t have a job right now, so all they can do is go to eventing to chat with people, meet friends and somehow release the tension,” says Vlad Pyvovar, who served plastic red cups. of cherry liqueur in the Drunken Cherry bar.
Customers poured out of the small bar into the street, sitting on the wall of a subway entrance and listening to live music. Every now and then an explosion would boom in the distance—too far away for most people to tell whether it was an incoming or outgoing fire.
“People in Kharkiv got used to it and those who couldn’t get used to it left,” said one of the customers, Iryna Holub, 21.
Outside another bar called DAF, short for “Drunk as”, followed by a powerful olive green military van roaring past with sirens.
Inside, a few customers were ready to leave before the mandatory 9pm closing time.
“A lot of my regulars come here and see we’re open and they say, ‘Sorry I don’t have any money right now, but maybe see you soon,’” said the bartender, Evheniy Moskalenko, 27. Here and chat a bit.’”