“You never get used to it. It’s always terrifying.”
It has been more than a month since Russian troops advanced on Rubizhne, a small, well-appointed city nestled in a verdant slice of land. Families have taken refuge in a bombed cultural palace.In May, a combined force of Russian troops, separatists and Kremlin-allied Chechen fighters blitzed into the city, taking a series of Ukrainian positions in residential neighborhoods.
“To compare,” he said, “they’re using one ton; we’re using a kilogram. So they’re just burning everything.” “We have Russian logistical hubs nearby that we can’t reach. Why? Because we don’t have enough weapons,” said Mariana Bezuhla, the deputy head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee on national security. She spoke in a government building in Lysychansk, where she was helping coordinate evacuations from there as well as Severodonetsk.
It wasn’t enough: Soon a hole opened up in the ceiling, dumping a shower of ash and red-hot embers into a corridor while Nikolai ran in and tried to gather up some of his family’s belongings. Watching the fire engulf one of the rooms, Victoria began to cry, screaming through tears of rage, “My home, my home is gone!”
A man tries to put out a fire with a bucket of water as the ceiling collapses in a home damaged in bombing that destroyed the home next door in Lysychansk, Ukraine, on Saturday. During the fighting for a town adjacent to Severodonetsk, Artyom and his comrades came under heavy shelling near a house. They tried to run in for protection, but the woman who owned it refused to help.Such attitudes have given the Russian army an edge it didn’t have in its earlier forays around Kyiv and Kharkiv, where residents would report Russian troop movements to Ukrainian authorities to help destroy them.