
February 18, 2015
I like Don Quixote enough to dress as him for Carnival. But unlike Miguel de Cervantes' character, I don't go about attacking windmills, which is lucky, considering we've encountered quite a few during our travels.
I like Don Quixote enough to dress as him for Carnival. But unlike Miguel de Cervantes' character, I don't go about attacking windmills, which is lucky, considering we've encountered quite a few during our travels.
The nation's second-largest city, Kharkiv was quiet for weeks after Ukrainian forces took control. But now it is again under attack as Russia pushes to capture the city that's considered the "gateway" to Ukraine. Die Welt reports from the frontline.
Damages due to Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine
KHARKIV — "Come, I want to show you something," Denys Vezenych says, opening the door of his dental office.
The 40-year-old begins to tell the story in the waiting room: "It was April 16 when the Russian artillery shell hit. The windowpanes were broken, the walls had holes everywhere and the roof was destroyed. But I renovated everything."
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The Russian army has done a great job in its three-month offensive on Ukraine's second largest metropolis. Countless flats have been burned out, the facades of houses have been shot to pieces, entire shopping centers have been bombed. Debris still lie in the streets everywhere.
At the end of May, however, the residents suddenly found new hope. The Ukrainian army had pushed back the Russian invaders. The continuous bombardment was reduced to a few sporadic attacks. A bit of normality returned. Supermarkets, restaurants, cafes and businesses reopened.
Vezenych also believed he could treat his patients again. But the peaceful life now seems to be over again after a month. New Russian missiles are hitting Saltivka and many other districts of Kharkiv every day.
The medic says he doesn't want to give up. "You have to send a signal that things will continue." In the end, he is not confident. Vezenych has not completely repaired the annex to his practice. "You just never know," he says with a depressed expression.
For the past two weeks, the Russian army has been stepping up the pressure on Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million. It's not being done through missile attacks alone. Infantry is also trying to break through Ukrainian defenses on the ground.
In Pytomnyk, which is about 15 kilometers north of Kharkiv, one attack was particularly violent, says General Serhiy Melnyk. He is responsible for the defense of the Kharkiv region. "However, we were able to push the Russians back again." He is convinced that the Russian army will launch a second major attack.
"Kharkiv is too strategically important, it's the gateway to Ukraine," he says in a secret warehouse in front of a Russian armored vehicle. His battalion captured it outside Saltivka. If Kharkiv were actually to fall, the way for Russian troops to Kyiv and the Donbas would be clear. "Of course, we won't allow that under any circumstances," says Melnyk. He smiles smugly and adjusts his bulletproof vest.
Kharkiv is considered the "Hero City of Ukraine." By Feb. 27, the third day of the invasion, Russian tanks had already rolled through the city's historic center. At that time, Moscow had reported the capture of the politically and economically important metropolis. But then, things turned out quite differently. Ukraine repelled Russian troops and they had to retreat for three months.
However, Kharkiv paid a high price for the temporary victory. 621 residents lost their lives and more than 1,200 people were injured. At least 70 historically valuable buildings are damaged or destroyed. The city center is an imposing collection of Art Nouveau architecture, multi-story brick houses from the 19th century and monstrous buildings from the Soviet era.
On this Saturday morning, Brigadier General Melnyk first checks a command post in Kharkiv before continuing to the front lines for inspection. It is a former Soviet nuclear bunker several stories deep in a secret location. In the control room with numerous screens, the senior officer reports on the situation. Every 30 minutes contact is made here with the positions in the field. Everything is going as planned.
Kharkiv paid a high price for the temporary victory.
Only the teams controlling drones are having problems. "The Russians are jamming the signals and contact with some drones has been lost," explains General Melnyk. An encrypted message goes out: "Change position to avoid Russian signal jamming and then report back. Take care of yourselves and your comrades!”
Aftermath of a rocket attack on the Mashhidropryvid plant by the Russian troops in Kharkiv
The general's next stop is Derhachi. The small town, 12 kilometers north of Kharkiv, has also been under fire for days. "Every day we distribute groceries and food to civilians who don't want to be evacuated," informs Melnyk in front of the wrought-iron entrance gate to the church. “Today we are in Derhachi for this purpose.” The mass has just ended. The priest receives the general and his accompanying soldiers in front of the altar. Each is greeted with three kisses on the cheek. Then the Father pronounces his blessing on the Ukraine fighters.
Most of the people who came to the service are elderly and seek God's help. They cross themselves in front of each icon before leaving the church. A satisfied smile comes over their faces as they are handed packages of rice, chicken and even a carton of cigarettes. Afterwards, they are served potato soup. It is served with a ladle from a large white pot into plastic plates. Many of the old people seem to be very hungry already in the early morning. They slurp down the hot soup.
"It is very difficult to accept this help," says Natalia Kunsinzova. You can tell from the 68-year-old woman with a light-blue headscarf that she really doesn't feel comfortable with it. She has never had to ask for help in her life, she stresses. But now she has no choice.
She then says that she was born in a Soviet prison in Siberia. As a Lithuanian, her father was sentenced to 15 years in a prison camp by the Soviet regime. "That's where he met my Russian mother," she says, smiling. "See, we were a cosmopolitan family."
People are also hungry in the city of Kharkiv. Everywhere relief supplies are distributed, you see long lines. Everything is available in the supermarkets. But many people can no longer afford to buy even the most necessary things. There is hardly any work. Savings are exhausted after four months of war.
Then the journey continues at breakneck speed on deserted roads, dotted with mortar and rocket impacts. The destination is the hard-hit region of Ruska Losowa. Hidden under trees, we await the arrival of the commander of an outpost. It is Vsevolod Kozhemyako, one of the richest men in Ukraine, who arrives after a few minutes in combat uniform with helmet, bulletproof vest and rifle in hand.
He is the founder and CEO of Agrotrade Group, which processes and exports 1.2 million tons of grain annually. "Get in," he says in a commanding tone as he opens the side door of his van. Kozhemyako commands the Khartia Battalion. Along with other donors, he funds training, weapons and vehicles for the troops.
After ten minutes of driving, we reach a village whose houses have been destroyed down to the foundation walls. "Get out of here, we have to keep moving, the Russian artillery will fire at any moment," Kozhemyako shouts. He heads for the trenches his battalion has dug. Shortly thereafter, the sound of a Russian mortar being fired is heard.
It falls about two hundred meters away. Dense white smoke rises into the sky. In the meantime, General Melnyk has also joined. "Fuck Russia," he calls out, laughing after the mortar attack, and shows the middle finger.
The command post of the Khartia Battalion is hidden under trees. About a kilometer from here begins a stretch of forest, a so-called gray zone, which is fought over. The Russians are about two kilometers away. The command post is a lonely country house. In the basement is the unit's operations room.
We are fighting for our country, for our families and for freedom.
Here, they keep records of the frequency of Russian artillery and the flight times of enemy drones. "Then we know when we can move relatively freely," Kozhemyako says. His battalion has also placed cameras in the village to detect surprise movements by the Russians. On the wall in the control room are pictures of the Russian commanders and information about their units, which are faced here on the front lines. "After all, we need to know who we're dealing with," Kozhemyako clarifies.
Upstairs on the ground floor are two dormitories for the soldiers. A small kitchen is set up in the entrance area of the country house. There is hot tea. A man keeps an eye on the open door, as if Russian soldiers could appear at any time.
"Don't stand in front of the open door," Kozhemyako orders. "An artillery grenade can explode at any time." The Ukrainian grain mogul does not want to talk about how many of his soldiers he has already lost. "I'm not telling you the truth anyway," he says with a serious expression on his face and then suddenly laughs.
The entrepreneur, who could be comfortably seated in one of his mansions, has chosen to fight. "We are fighting for our country, for our families and for freedom," he says. "There is no alternative." Russian gunfire can be heard again in the background. Kozhemyako listens intently, waiting for the impact of the explosion. "Now we can go," he says and hurries ahead to the car, sheltered under trees.
The nation's second-largest city, Kharkiv was quiet for weeks after Ukrainian forces took control. But now it is again under attack as Russia pushes to capture the city that's considered the "gateway" to Ukraine. Die Welt reports from the frontline.
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Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.