Siege of Kiev: “Run, it will be hell” – Corriere.it

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How – she does not know why God left her alive. What is the life you have left now? In the Ukrainian infantry complex, behind Boryspil AirportPoor Ira Mikalinka wipes broken glass with her foot and all over the yard. Shop revelations, house windows, cutting out what were his happy days. Look, look here, they hit the building and everything is already up! …, crying under a spray that penetrates his soul more than a siren: Where am I going tonight? Where do I go in this cold?

Not the old rage. But she felt old In the morning space, in the thunder of bombs
, and now embracing his red jacket, squinting, and showing his ruined fruit and vegetable store. Not knowing why she is alive, perhaps it would have been better if she had died. Damn them all! She doesn’t care that we film her pain on the phone, we feel a little shy.

At 6 a.m. in the darkest dawn, a rakita suddenly rained from the sky And who would have thought so? Putin did it for real: I woke up and opened hell on earth, damned!.

The unimaginable throws us all from our sleep. It makes dreams die at dawn, yesterday’s illusions and above all Dozens of lives, 57 will be said at the end of this day. The first explosion, which thrust Kiev into war, shakes the silence between Five and Five. Boring jingle, away. This is ahead of me Hollow bark of antidote, triggering car alarms, makes WhatsApp vibrate in the homes of those who did not escape: here we are! , writes a friend from Lviv. Uncle Vlad has arrived! From the hot air vents, in our hotel, as journalists, they broadcast a recorded mechanical audio in Ukrainian, without English: Attention, reach the nearest collection point! caution…. Down, down the stairs. quickly. Shoulder bags, briefcases, computers. The second level is incomplete. in the garage. A policeman runs and uses a plastic cone, the orange that is used for road construction sites, as a megaphone, shouting Rakita! , missiles. A colleague shouts, go downstairs, get down quickly.

Metropolis at war

Dobre utro, good morning Kiev. The Russians are here. Break through the clouds and bomb BoryspilThey transferred troops to Belarus and stormed another Antonov airfield to advance in the evening. It explodes everything and everywhere. They are taking over the capital, but where does he see them? Hard to find a driver, they all ran away, the translator didn’t come, sorry, I have my parents in the east and other things to think about…. we improvise war tour With a Ukrainian taxi driver who passed through Parma, I worked there for many years, and it was the first stage Maidan, the navel of the anti-Russian world, the beginning of all chaos: terrible, inevitably empty. The streets are silent. Cars line up like refugees on the E30. At distributors, the least eagerly awaits the full tank. Even the taxi driver checks the tank and turns off the lights, so I use less…. In a few hours, the city of the richest oligarchs smells of war: There is also a queue at the pharmacy, ATM and supermarket, because under it Nobody believed that Kiev had melted so much, and in very little. Until Wednesday evening, they did not postpone until the kick-off of the football tournament.

Reach the bank of the Dnieper and go up the South Bridge, a winding line between wrecked cars, hundreds of desperate people navigating long distances, sticky asphalt. On the left is a burning building and a military intelligence headquarters that we don’t know about: We get out of the car in a crowded crowd, climb over the railing, risk taking a picture, about fifteen soldiers shout nervous and point their guns at us – get out of here! – Since midnight there is martial law and such a thing there is immediate danger of execution. On the horizon, plumes of black and white smoke. The barracks are engulfed in flames, little destruction hanging in the air. Under a flyover, three Ukrainian soldiers are sheltering from the rain and trying to repair the remains of a very old tank. On the M04, damn it, half an hour straight to a checkpoint: saboteurs, terrorists, Putin jokes and special forces are terrifying, with mephistos landing on their faces, on the ring road they check cars one by one that circles the capital.

The rhythm of the explosions

The explosions set the most harmonious and deafening rhythm of the day in the history of independent Kiev. By mid-afternoon, there are 203 people and strong. Don’t leave us alone, he begged Mayor boxer Vitali Klitschko, who has never tried such a punch before: Only now a 10 p.m. curfew is imposed, traffic is forbidden, but he knows very well that there is not much left to cover himself. Bishop Svatoslav Shevchuk also has to hide in air raid shelters, under the Resurrection Cathedral, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president, who knows where he’s hiding as he launches his desperate pleas for help from the world: We are forming an international coalition against Putin, he is having courage, while the Russian President calls his French colleague Macron to explain the reasons for the attack.

It is better to go and find a good basement, advice to journalists from his spokesman, Mikhailo Podolyak: here it is getting worse and the Russians want to go to the Mariinsky Palace, the presidency, to remove all the Ukrainian leadership. Ignazio Ceylon said that disasters are democratic because they affect everyone This is a war that keeps those who are known in their luxuries as being unknown because of their poverty: Actor Sean Penn, here to shoot a documentary, Some Football player Shakhtar Donetsk forced to camp in star-studded halls.

Ukraine’s three offensive fronts, hypotheses about Kiev are many: that Putin’s tanks stop at the city gates, and are satisfied with that; that they began a long siege like Sarajevo, dangerous; who try to invade the capital at night and target the palaces of power. The latter is the scariest, it goes without sayingThe defensive belt of the Ukrainian army is a Friesian horse in the face of the latest tanks. We pass through Brovari, a small village in the forest, the houses still smoke with bombs and the answers fade: I know nothing, a boy in a rapper costume runs away and looks at us like spies. It was awful‘You can hear endless blows,’ says a Marshall gas station worker, cigarette in one hand and toothpick in the other.

When evening has already come, and we return to the cradle of dawn, this endless Thursday is not yet over. We found out that hotels are firing reporters because the staff is angry with fear and fled. Historic Ukraina closes in on the square. The media convoy sits wherever possible, on the floor or in sleeping bags, even in the garage on the minus second floor. Agency: Russian forces are advancing Bloombergand now on both banks of the Dnieper. It’s raining an intelligence report: Ain.. the night will be a massacreThere is a tank battle in the streets, get out of there, you are very central and close to sensitive targets.

Some phone calls, some confirmation. M.It is better to change the area for at least one night. Embassy guards come to pick us up, and we also go in seven crammed into a car, but the stampede, tense: just before we unload, Ukrainian National Guard worker breaks jeep keys, maybe the journalists didn’t want to leave the battlefield, maybe he consumed a little defiance at the last minute. Evacuation, Evacuation! Another breakthrough race. We set out towards a safe address, in the sky of the second night, waiting for another rak’ah. Meg’s herd roars. Dark again in Kiev.