Everything feels deceptively normal in this bustling, modern European capital. But then the war intrudes, in the form of Russian missiles
“Do you know how to put on a tourniquet?” my friend Lena asked me out of the blue as she and her husband Dima were showing me around. “You know, you only have 15 seconds before you’re too weak to put it on properly. I used to carry one all the time.” Before the arrival of the Patriot battery, you never knew where the missiles might land.Dima was serving in the army last year when he was hit by shrapnel in the foot. He just managed to get a tourniquet on before he became woozy from blood loss.
The work was simple enough: carry bricks and debris over to a dump truck, and fill it up as many times as possible in the course of the day. There were a lot of broken grey roof tiles. I noticed that one of the volunteers, a builder named Manfred from Australia, was covering his face when he handled them. “They’re asbestos,” he said. I put on an N95 mask, and tried to convince one of the Ukrainian volunteers who was standing in the bed of the truck where dust was rising, to follow suit.
It’s fully reciprocated from the other side. Before they left, Russian forces wired the Bucha cemetery with booby traps. The way cemeteries in this part of the world are designed — a tightly packed jumble of fences and trees and overgrown plots — it will be impossible to entirely de-mine, ensuring that innocent civilians will be killed and maimed there for years to come.Article content
That weekend we were in Zaporozhiya in the south, where the current counter-offensive is under way. There, people mostly ignored the air raid sirens. The missiles arrive so quickly, there’s no time to get to shelter anyway.Article content
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