Work and friendships help residents of Ukraine’s second city cope with life near the front line
People walking through the centre of Kharkiv beneath a sign that translates as 'We are together, we are Kharkivites'. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin, and bombs and rockets now hit the city every day, but Liliia Muntian says nothing was worse than being 1,000km away in the relative safety of western Ukraine.
Tetiana Siniuhina and Liliia Muntian own and run the Pouhqué bakery and Pakufuda cafe that share a building in central Kharkiv. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin At first Siniuhina had to have cane sugar posted to Kharkiv from other cities to bake some of her pastries, and the electricity supply could be patchy: “But as time went on more and more products were available again here. And now we have three generators, so power is not a problem.”
“The electricity power system and city services are resilient to these attacks. Despite all the power plants being destroyed recently in Kharkiv region we still have electricity,” he says. “The chains of city services and medical supply services was re-established quite soon after start of war and they work pretty well...In general if I didn’t hear explosions very often I wouldn’t say that war is only 20km from Kharkiv.
Kharkivites have had to learn how to calibrate risk to maintain a semblance of normal life, but they are not impervious to danger, and the current escalation in Russian air strikes on the city and ground attacks on the region has made many reassess their options yet again. As the air raid siren howls again she is sitting with colleague Ruslan Misiunia and a visiting Kyiv journalist and discussing the film Slovo House, which tells the story of an apartment building of the same name about a kilometre away. The Soviets built it in the 1920s to house Ukrainian writers – “Slovo” means “word” – dozens of whom were later jailed and executed when Josef Stalin purged Ukraine’s intelligentsia.
Kharkiv’s resilience is real and remarkable, but some of its residents roll their eyes when they hear nicknames for the city such as “nezlamniy” or “zalizobetonnyi”, the Ukrainian word for the reinforced concrete that was used for the first time in the Soviet Union to build Derzhprom.
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