Viktor Grozdov was at rock bottom when an AFP team came to his aid. It was in April. The 77-year-old pensioner had slipped in a crater while returning from shopping in the town of Avdiivka, pounded by the Russians in eastern Ukraine.
“I was going up the avenue and I thought I was going to quickly bypass the bomb crater, or shells I don’t know,” recalls Mr. Grozdov, sitting today in his apartment near the cinema of the city.
“I tripped and fell in. I was trying to get out, but the ground was soft and crumbling under my weight. I couldn’t get out at all,” he adds.
Although there is no longer an intact building, no more water or electricity, 1,719 inhabitants still live in Avdiivka, the majority of whom are elderly, according to Vitaliy Barabach, the head of the military administration.
“About 60% are people over 65,” he says.
An industrial suburb of the city of Donetsk built around a massive coking plant, Avdiivka is a grim and dangerous place, bombed an average of 30 times a day, according to Barabach.
“In recent months, there has not been a day without air strikes or rockets,” he said.
Mr. Grozdov, meanwhile, takes a stick to go out into the street and sticks to paths he knows well.
Despite his poor eyesight which makes the task even more perilous, the old man is determined to stay where his wife and son are buried.
“No matter what, I won’t leave,” he said. “My soul is here, not on the run. I am not anxious, I have reached calm”.
All the windows in his apartment were blown out. One is veiled by a sheet.
There’s a radio on the bed, and bottles of sunflower oil and preserves in the bathtub.
Volunteers bring him humanitarian aid and water, and he can cook on a camping stove.
On the walls, scraps of wallpaper and slightly stuffy family photos.
When the shelling started, Mr. Drozdov says he took refuge in the bathroom, and sometimes flattened himself on the floor.
But it seems that he no longer pays attention to the roar of the tanks maneuvering in the street.
After his mother had been killed when he was still an infant, he grew up in an orphanage in Donetsk. He then worked all his life in the Avdiivka coking plant.
Life has not been kind to him. His son, a violent drug addict, once punched him in the head, causing him to lose sight in one eye.
On the ground floor of the building, a shell remained embedded in the wall.
His 63-year-old neighbor, Vitaliy Zemin, is in the cellar, carving wooden animals by torchlight.
“It distracts from thoughts that don’t leave us: about people, Ukraine, why peace isn’t being made,” he says.
The main refuge for the last inhabitants is an underground shelter where volunteers provide food and hot drinks, and where one can access wi-fi, watch TV and charge a phone.
About 20 people are there, mostly wearing headphones and loaded with phones and tablets.
Pavel, 65, watches war news on a tablet. A branch of his glasses is broken.
He confides that this shelter is the only place where he can relax a little.
“At home you wonder if a bomb is going to hit or not – it’s like Russian roulette”.
“I am sometimes desperate, I would go to the end of the world not to see these destroyed buildings”, he says. His family has left but he feels he must stay to protect his home from looters.
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04/07/2023 09:12:51 – Avdiivka (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
