Lit by the lamp of her telephone, Tetiana Bezatosna makes her way through the charred ruins. This Ukrainian revisits her apartment destroyed by Russian bombs, with little hope that it will ever be rebuilt.
Located in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, the mother-of-two’s home is one of hundreds of thousands damaged by war.
In the affected Ukrainian cities, rebuilding on the destruction — unprecedented in Europe for decades — remains complicated due to relentless Russian strikes.
Tetiana Bezatosna lives in Saltivka, a particularly targeted residential area in the northeast of the city.
This once prosperous suburb, which had several hundred thousand inhabitants, now offers a landscape of desolation with many high buildings destroyed, gutted, blackened.
Motionless cranes symbolize the slowness of reconstruction.
“We won’t be coming back here anytime soon,” said Ms. Bezatosna, 44, as she walked up to her ninth-floor apartment. “It’s very hard and painful to see all this.”
Shattered glass crunches under her shoes as she walks past burnt-out apartments. His lamp illuminates belongings left behind by residents: abandoned books, mold-covered kitchen utensils, toys.
On one floor, a makeshift post supports the staircase whose concrete is pierced with holes, a sign of the structural weakness of the building, which makes it dangerous.
Ms Bezatosna fled soon after the start of the Russian invasion. She and her family returned when much of the Kharkiv region was liberated by Ukrainian forces last September.
Forced to rent other accommodation, they salvaged everything they could from their apartment, including a half-burnt washing machine and a bathtub.
A sign at the entrance to the building indicating “Do not enter, it’s dangerous”, also serves to scare away potential looters.
Displaced residents now face a dilemma. Some want to return at all costs and have asked the authorities for urgent repairs. Others, including Ms Bezatosna, called for the unstable building to be demolished and a new one to be built in the same location.
“Ukraine needs to start rebuilding during the war to support its home front,” said Oryssia Loutsevich, from the Russia and Eurasia program at Britain’s Chatham House think tank.
“Despite daily missile strikes, Ukrainians are not leaving the country in large numbers. To stay in Ukraine, they need housing and jobs,” she told AFP.
In addition to homes, the war has destroyed thousands of schools, hospital and administrative buildings, factories, bridges and roads, energy infrastructure, and recently port facilities.
Earlier this year, the World Bank estimated the cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery at $411 billion (€378 billion), more than twice the country’s GDP. A cost that increases as the war continues.
Ukraine desperately needs funds, if only to carry out emergency repairs. Long-term reconstruction assistance will depend on how much allies, including the United States and the European Union, are prepared to provide.
The country is also seeking to attract private investors. International companies are expected to participate in the second “Rebuilding Ukraine” conference in November in Poland.
“The recovery of Ukraine becomes the greatest European economic project of our time,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky on his website.
In Kharkiv, located about thirty km from the Russian border, some 5,000 buildings are damaged, including 500 irrecoverable, according to Mayor Igor Terekhov. About 150,000 people can no longer occupy their homes, he told AFP.
According to him, the cost of reconstruction is 9.5 billion dollars (8.2 billion euros), a “very approximate” figure.
Waiting for the end of the war to rebuild is not acceptable, judges the city councilor, for whom “the citizens must return to their homes”, despite the fear of Russian strikes.
“I don’t know how we can rebuild” during the war, however, wonders Tetiana Bezatosna.
In Saltivka, some have returned to spared buildings, but no place is safe.
Ms Bezatosna says she renovated her apartment a month before it was destroyed. A friend of hers had been able to repair her house, which was hit again.
“So tell me, what’s the point of rebuilding?” she asks.
20/08/2023 10:50:56 – Kharkiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
