Chernihiv, Ukraine, special envoy
The sirens sound and the dogs howl. After a while the power goes out and a multitude of generators thunder from the sidewalks. It is normality in Chernihiv, north of kyiv, capital of Chernigov, a province bordering Russia and Belarus and therefore bconstant side of the war that torments Ukraine from February 2022.
Due to its location, this region is strategic. If the invaders take it, they would threaten the national capital, just two hours away by road. So here is one of the heaviest fronts of the conflict along with the one that has opened north of Kharkov.
Only once did the invaders manage to enter from Belarus, at the beginning of this drama. They arrived with military trucks and, among other objectives, took over a school, converted into a barracks. They immediately locked 367 people in the basement of the building for 27 days. including fifty children. They had no light, hardly any water, nor space to rest because the number of people forced them to crowd together and remain standing.
Ten civilians died inside, whose bodies were piled in a corner until the soldiers contemptuously authorized their burial. They relieved themselves in buckets that were passed from hand to hand and that the Russians took a long time to remove from those darknesses, with the windows and respirators boarded up.
Chernihiv, a beautiful, well-kept capital, with gardens and many people in the streets with their children enjoying the summer, seem to live forgetting the war. But the city is only 60 km from Belarus and 80 from Russia. The province, in turn, has a common border with these two enemies, a meeting of limits that they previously defined as that of “the three sisters.” There is no such thing today.
The region’s military administrator, Vyacheslav Chaus, a civilian businessman who quit his job to join the army, shows a map of the province with flames drawn on those borders. “We have bombings every day, only one day this year there were no shots. “The entire northern limit is constantly under fire,” explains to this envoy part of a team of five Latin American journalists that tours the country.
But the threat also flies over the provincial capital itself. On April 17, a barrage of three Russian missiles killed 18 people in this city and left another 60 badly injured, including several children.
Urgent order for defense equipment
The projectile hit an eight-story building in a highly populated area of the urban center. The military administrator repeats the demands of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government regarding the urgency of more anti-aircraft equipment that avoids leaving the sky uncovered and stops projectiles in the air or before they cross the border.
“We have an air defense deficit. We ask for help because this is a war of civilization,” he says and defines the attacker as mere terrorists who “need to be stopped.”
Chaus, who defines himself only as a soldier although he has the posture and in general the attitude of a military leader, explained that the start of the war caused a strong departure of residents from the district whose population fell from about 280 thousand inhabitants to 80 thousand.
After two and a half years of conflict, people began to return and there are now slightly more inhabitants than before the invasion. A strong fact is that they did not manage to evacuate the front line. People did not want to abandon their houses and fields or their animals. A local activist, Olha Palkova-Svirchevska says that “Since time immemorial, there is a saying: to kyiv to trade and to Chernihiv to fight,” a highlight of the bravery of these people.
The truth is that beyond the legend, for 38 days, in 2022, the city was subjected to permanent artillery fire and bombing, completely besieged and without communications. The military and volunteers confronted the invaders and even attacked the armored vehicles and transports of the Russian and Belarusian troops with Molotov cocktails, which finally retreated.
One of the places they abandoned was the basement school converted into a catacomb. Ivan Polguy, a 65-year-old survivor of that confinement, who was in charge of keeping the structure of the Kindergarten in order, guides journalists through the building and overflows with words.
images of terror
The staircase that descends is narrow and comes out to a corridor that opens to several rooms of about four meters by two, there is a larger living room, where In one corner the children were piled up, and at the other end the corpses of the ten people were piled up. who died there.
There is garbage on the floor and pieces of furniture piled up. Since that was the gym, there was residue from the equipment. In one of the narrow rooms you can see a pipe that dripped sewage from the bathrooms that the military used upstairs onto the people trapped there.
Polguy claims that the soldiers arrived in trucks in March 2022, days after the start of the war. They were mostly Belarusians, a satellite country of Moscow. They immediately settled in the building. “They made their headquarters here. And then they went house to house in the town and took the people out and took them to the basement. For three days they did that.”
Many went crazy in there, remembers the man. It was difficult to calm them down. They also had to negotiate to be allowed to remove the bodies and bury them in the local cemetery. They were given only one hour to do it. At another time, when they were warned that one of the children could die, they responded: “Leave it, you die in war.”
They warned that they left because of the sound of the trucks, but they left the basement door blocked and mined the neighboring fields and the town’s houses, many of them were destroyed. Polguy had been detained along with his wife, his two sons, his two daughters-in-law and his two grandchildren.
All They endured that torture, but they survived. In the messy rooms, there are still children’s toys and drawings made by children on the walls. One of them is impressive, it looks like a woman with her mouth and eyes wide open. On other walls the days of the month are repeated, engraved with some iron. They all arrive until March 30 when the Russians leave and the 31st when the Ukrainians appear. The Liberation.
