Shelled city in north Ukraine fears becoming ‘next Mariupol’

Nights are spent huddling underground from Russian strikes pounding their encircled city into rubble. Daylight hours are devoted to hunting down drinkable water and running the risk of standing in line for the little food available as shells and bombs rain down.

This is what now passes for life in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine where death is everywhere. It isn’t — yet — quite as synonymous with atrocious human suffering as the pulverized southern city of Mariupol has become in the 31 days since Russia invaded Ukraine.

But similarly besieged, blockaded and pounded from afar by Russian troops, Chernihiv’s remaining residents are terrified that with each blast, bomb and body that lies uncollected on the streets, they’re caught in the same macabre trap of unescapable killings and destruction.

“In basements at night, everyone is talking about one thing: Chernihiv becoming (the) next Mariupol,” said 38-year-old resident Ihar Kazmerchak, a linguistics scholar.

He spoke to The Associated Press by cellphone, amid incessant beeps signalling that his battery was dying. The city is without power, running water and heating. At pharmacies, the lists of medicines no longer available grow longer by the day.

Kazmerchak starts his day in long lines for drinking water, rationed to 10 litres per person. People come out with empty bottles and buckets for filling when water-delivery trucks make their rounds.

“Food is running out, and shelling and bombing don’t stop,” he said.

On Wednesday, Russian bombs destroyed Chernihiv’s main bridge over the Desna River on the road leading to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital; on Friday, artillery shells rendered the remaining pedestrian bridge impassable, cutting off the last possible route for people to get out or for food and medical supplies to get in.

Refugees from Chernihiv who fled the encirclement and reached Poland this week spoke of broad and terrible destruction, with bombs flattening at least two schools in the city centre and strikes also hit a stadium, museums, kindergartens and many homes.

They said that with utilities knocked out, people are taking water from the Desna to drink and that strikes are killing people while they wait in line for food. Volodymyr Fedorovych, 77, said he narrowly escaped a bomb that fell on a bread line he had been standing in just moments earlier. He said the blast killed 16 people and injured dozens, blowing off arms and legs.

So intense is the siege that some of those trapped cannot even muster the strength to be afraid anymore, Kazmerchak said.

“Ravaged houses, fires, corpses in the street, huge aircraft bombs that didn’t explode in courtyards are not surprising anyone anymore,” he said. “People are simply tired of being scared and don’t even always go down to the basements.”

With the invasion now in its second month, Russian forces have seemingly stalled on many fronts and are even losing previously taken ground to Ukrainian counter-attacks, including around Kyiv. The Russians have assaulted the capital from the air but not taken or surrounded the city. The US and French defence officials say Russian troops appear to have adopted defensive positions outside Kyiv.

But with Russia continuing to strike and encircle urban populations, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol in the south, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday that they cannot trust statements from the Russian military Friday suggesting that the Kremlin planned to concentrate its remaining strength on wresting the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region from Ukrainian control. The region has been partially controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014.

“We cannot believe the statements from Moscow because there’s still a lot of untruth and lies from that side,” Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian defence minister, told the BBC. “That’s why we understand the goal of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin still is the whole of Ukraine.

Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Marcin Przydacz, expressed hope that Putin may be casting around for some “kind of a face-saving exit strategy.”

“Definitely, Russia has not achieved its goals. It has not seized Kyiv, it has not changed the government of Ukraine,” Przydacz told the BBC. “And that is only because of the fact that the Ukrainian army is doing so well.”

Britain’s defence ministry said Saturday that it does not expect a reprieve for citizens of Ukraine’s bombarded cities any time soon.

“Russia will continue to use its heavy firepower on urban areas as it looks to limit its own already considerable losses, at the cost of further civilian casualties.” the U.K. ministry said.

Previous bombings of hospitals and other non-military sites, including a theatre in Mariupol where Ukrainian authorities said a Russian airstrike is believed to have killed some 300 people last week, already have given rise to war crime allegations.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, appearing by video-link at Qatar’s Doha Forum, on Saturday compared the destruction of Mariupol to the Syrian and Russian destruction wrought on the city of Aleppo. And he warned that people beyond Ukraine may find themselves short of food if the invasion isn’t stopped.

“Russian troops minefields in Ukraine, blow up agricultural machinery, destroy fuel reserves needed for sowing. They blocked our seaports. Why are they doing this?” Zelenskyy asked. “Our state will have enough food. But the lack of exports from Ukraine will hit many nations in the Islamic world, Latin America and other parts of the world.”

The invasion has driven more than 10 million people from their homes, almost a quarter of Ukraine’s population, and, of those, more than 3.7 million have fled the country entirely, according to the United Nations. Thousands of civilians are believed to have died.

In Chernihiv, hospitals are no longer operating, and residents cook over open fires in the street because the power is out.

Chernihiv Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko has said that more than half of the city’s 280,000 residents fled amid the unrelenting attacks.

Russian forces, he told Ukrainian television, “are deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure – schools, kindergartens, churches, residential buildings and even the local football stadium.”

It has been impossible to count the dead, but Atroshenko estimated the figure was “in the hundreds.”

Located only about 70 kilometres (45 miles) from the border with Belarus on the road to Kyiv, Chernihiv was attacked in the early days of the war and encircled by Russian troops this month, but its defenders so far have prevented a takeover.

“Chernihiv has become a symbol of the Russian army’s failed blitzkrieg, in which the plan was to take the city over in one day and advance towards Kyiv,” Mykola Sunhurovskyi, a military analyst at the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center think tank, said.

Ever since a Russian bomb hit a Stalin-era movie theatre next to his 12-story residential building, Kazmerchak has been spending his nights in a bomb shelter. A Russian missile also destroyed the hotel not far from his house.

“The walls were shaking so much,” he said. “I thought my house would collapse any minute and I would be left under the rubble.”