Chernihiv The rampage of Moscow’s ground forces in the area around Kyiv ended almost six months ago. But while life in the capital is almost back to normal, in Chernihiv there is at most superficial normality. For 40 days, the Russian army besieged the city, 140 kilometers north of the capital.
Today a lot of shards and rubble have been swept up, most of the duds have been cleared. But the destruction remains just as visible as the distrust is palpable.
The state of emergency continues to prevail at the entry axes. Signs with skulls warn of roadside mines. Only a temporary pontoon bridge crosses the Desna River, the main crossing fell victim to the fighting in March. Heavy machines and welders are at repair. But several hundred meters of bridges are not built overnight.
Finally, at the roadblocks, the soldiers take their work extremely seriously. The foreign journalists are put through their paces, their passports are sent to headquarters, the images on the camera are inspected and some are deleted. “Please understand,” says the young officer apologetically. “But we must be wary of divers and spies.”
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On February 24, the Russians tried to advance into the center of Chernihiv. But the unexpectedly fierce resistance on the north-eastern edge of the city, which then had a population of just under 300,000, made her abandon the plan.
Russian missiles and fighter planes
They laid a siege ring around Chernihiv and shelled the residents almost continuously for weeks – with artillery, rockets and fighter planes. Today, the city center looks almost normal again over long stretches, people stroll in Ditinez Park, eat and drink together in restaurants.
By the end of March, the city of Chernihiv was completely destroyed.
(Photo: IMAGO/NurPhoto)
Only a few streets away is the semicircular high-rise building that became notorious on March 3rd. At that time, 47 civilians were killed in a Russian air raid while they were waiting for medication in front of a pharmacy.
It was one of the worst crimes of the entire war. Roman Petschera is waiting in front of the makeshift covered window of the meat shop, which is back in operation. The small business owner in the textile sector remained in the city throughout the siege. Today he helps as a volunteer. He deliberately chose the “House on the Tschornowola” as a memorial at the starting point of our journey through a traumatized city.
“Half of my neighbors fled in the first week,” the 30-year-old recalls as he stands in the cold autumn rain, wearing only a thin jacket, lighting up one cigarette after the other. “Then the electricity went out, and for a few days the gas supply too. When it got cold in the rooms, almost everyone left.” Up to three quarters of the people from Chernihiv left the city at the time, although there are no reliable statistics.
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Only 6 of 35 apartments in his house remained occupied, says Petschera, who held out because he didn’t want to leave his mother and disabled sister behind. They would have dug makeshift toilets in the yard when the water supply failed and cooked over wood fires. “When the light in the apartments went back on after several weeks, there was spontaneous cheering.”
A destroyed neighborhood
The outskirts of Novoselivka were hit particularly hard, and large parts of it were razed to the ground. He was directly at the front during the siege. Petschera works here with his colleague Sascha Bordei in a soup kitchen for those people who have lost everything.
Ukrainian soldiers take part in training in the Chernihiv region to repel a possible enemy offensive during a press tour organized by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
(Photo: dpa)
A walk through the neighborhood gives an idea of how many didn’t get out of their homes alive: all that’s left of two multi-story dormitories is a pile of rubble and bricks.
In one of the two, says Petschera, the Russian shelling ignited a gas pipe. The building then exploded, and the protective basement became a death trap. People suffocated or burned in it. Only a teapot and a few cups remain of the furnishings of an apartment on the ground floor, the ceiling has been blown off. There is a burnt washing machine over the hole, and a mailbox with a bent door in the collapsed stairwell.
No one knows how many civilian casualties the siege claimed. The mayor’s only official estimate from early April put the deaths directly related to the siege at 300 to 400.
Those who died of starvation, cold or lack of medical care are not included. Four times higher numbers are circulating in the city. The dead were hastily buried in mass graves during the siege when the shelling paused briefly.
The failed soldier
For Petschera, working as a volunteer is a kind of occupational therapy in order to better process the shock. Actually, he would have wanted to fight the Russians directly and volunteered on the first day of the war. But the military authorities, faced with an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men, turned him away.
On March 4, a Russian attack hit a large building in Chernihiv.
(Photo: IMAGO/UPI Photo)
His colleague Sascha Bordei, on the other hand, was accepted into the Landwehr. “I was given a gun and ten grenades to defend my country,” says the 31-year-old. But he too was helpless: his nearby home village of Chaljavin was quickly occupied by the Russians. “We were two against hundreds. We kept it nice and quiet there,” says the former dancer. The occupiers forced people to stay indoors and robbed them of their food. “They even traded their gas for food.”
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When Bordei tried to shop in the village center, he was arrested. The Russians would not have known that he was serving in the army. They held him in three different cellars and interrogated him several times. After five days they released him. “We walked 60 kilometers back to Chernihiv with shells flying overhead between the Ukrainian and Russian positions.”
The taboo of betrayal
For their resistance against up to 20,000 occupiers, according to the Ukrainian army, who withdrew from the area on April 5 with great losses, Chernihiv received the award of a “hero city”.
A school was also hit by the Russian attacks.
(Photo: dpa)
But both Petschera and Bordei know that not all corresponded to this idealized image. “Idiots and complete idiots have betrayed their country for money or their pro-Russian sympathies,” Petschera says, fuming about the local collaborators who worked with the Russians. Bordei, on the other hand, swears on his honor that he did not reveal anything about the Ukrainian positions. “You would have had to kill me for that.”
The last stop on our city tour also shows that moral standards can shift in a life-threatening situation. The building and garden center Epizentr K was once one of the most modern shopping centers in Chernihiv. After the Russian bombardments in the first days of the war, all that remains of it is a bombed-out ruin.
Charred fertilizer bottles, the skeletons of bicycles and smashed toilet bowls can be seen behind and in front of the shattered shop windows. Only the front door remained whole.
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It is an open secret in Chernihiv that after the shelling, local people looted those goods for sale that remained intact; Another casualty of the siege was public order.
Today it has been restored and people are talking about a return to normality – at least compared to spring. Some public transport has been running again since June, and many people have returned. The water supply is working again, albeit only with cold water in most quarters.
The gas stations are repaired but charge much higher prices. Electricity and heat are flowing again in the grids, although the Russians damaged the city’s most important power plant so badly that it is still standing still today.
Bordei thinks it’s not easy to remain optimistic. “People are depressed, many have no work and no money,” he describes the mood in Chernihiv. It is clear to everyone here that the reconstruction of the city, which has been estimated to be 60 percent destroyed, will take years. At least people have one certainty: the worst has been behind them since April 5th.
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