When she picks up twisted pieces of metal near her child’s trampoline, Tatiana Filipova thinks of the Russian drones that hit her neighborhood in northeast Ukraine, where she returned months after fleeing war.
His family are among hundreds of thousands of people who left the Kharkiv border region, which was relentlessly pounded in the early months of the Russian invasion, leaving many destroyed residential areas empty.
People started to return there after a lightning counterattack by Ukrainian forces in September 2022 drove out the Moscow army that had occupied most of the area.
They are trying to rebuild their lives despite the constant threat of bombardment and at a time when the Russian military is claiming advances in the vicinity of Kupyansk, about 100 kilometers to the southeast, near the front line.
The authorities of several dozen localities in this region ordered the evacuation of their inhabitants on Thursday in the face of the Russian advance, which raises the specter of a second occupation.
“My life stopped,” Ms Filipova recalled, recalling the day she fled the fighting in March 2022.
This 35-year-old marketing manager had taken refuge in the Cherkassy region (center), with her three-year-old daughter, three cats and everything she could put in her car.
She had left behind her husband, who remained at the side of her sick grandfather.
After months of uncertainty, she finally returned after the Russians withdrew, but the illusion of security was shattered when their neighborhood was hit one night.
The disturbing noise made by Iranian-made “Shahed” explosive drones in flight prompted the family to move away from the windows and the father to protect his child with his body.
A machine crashed on a nearby technical college, the explosion shook their house and cracked walls.
Another exploded in the immediate vicinity of their home, shrapnel punctured their fence.
“When you live in Kharkiv, you can be touched at any time,” says the young woman.
Like her, many displaced people who have returned to Kharkiv live in fear of the bombings of their city, located about thirty kilometers from the Russian border.
Victoria Revenko, 38, sees her two children aged nine and eleven blame her for the death, on the eastern front, of their father, a volunteer in the army.
He had returned to Kharkiv after leaving the Ukrainian capital where the family had taken refuge.
“If we had stayed in kyiv, this would never have happened,” her son told her, the mother says.
The children are not coming to terms with their father’s death, so they are still texting his phone.
Victoria Revenko said to refrain from crying in front of her children, before bursting into tears in a city park where AFP questioned her.
According to its mayor Igor Terekhov, around 1.2 million people currently live in Kharkiv, almost as many as before the conflict – 1.5 million -. They were 300,000 to have remained there after the start of the war.
The city, the second largest in Ukraine, was never taken by the Russians who came up against a fierce Ukrainian defense.
Many places bear the scars of the bombardments: museums pierced by shrapnel, universities with torn roofs and streets with gaping holes.
The many returns illustrate the “fatalistic” attitude of those who experience exile with difficulty and aspire to return despite the risks, when others want to believe that the war could still end soon, according to Natalia Zoubar, a political analyst working in Kharkiv, interviewed by AFP.
A joke is that the natives of this city find their way easily in a crowd of Ukrainians: they are the least reactive to aerial alerts.
Many don’t see the point of going to a shelter because the border is so close that the missiles often arrive faster than the alert.
Alina Ostrykova, a 31-year-old NGO worker who returned to Kharkiv this summer with her toddler, wants to illustrate this attitude by pointing to a woman in heels standing outside a trendy bar.
“She knows it won’t be easy to run to a shelter in heels,” she told AFP.
“What option do people have? Just to run?” she asks.
For her, it is this fatalism that somehow kept Ukraine from collapsing.
A feeling that we find in Tatiana Filipova whose house was recently renovated at great expense despite the risk of strikes.
The family intends to stay there and the mother is delighted to see her child taking the explosions for a storm.
“I don’t think a three-year-old can understand the concept of war and death,” she says. “She better think it’s thunder.”
08/15/2023 18:10:23 – Kharkiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP