A grave dug in a sidewalk, in front of one of the few buildings still standing following the relentless Russian offensive once morest the town of Siversk, in eastern Ukraine, exudes an apocalyptic atmosphere.
Siversk breathes fear and death. It is an area in the middle of the fighting. Russian troops are on the outskirts of the municipality, while Ukrainian artillery fires relentlessly.
The streets are riddled with huge craters, the buildings destroyed or blackened by fire, a dog and a cat play around a shell embedded in the ground.
Through the broken windows of the first floors of the buildings are reminiscences of the lives that its inhabitants left behind in a hurry: cupboards, family photos and overturned armchairs.
The grave of Oleksii, who was born on February 19, 1976 and died on June 30, 2022, was quickly dug, next to a culture center in Siversk. A small mound of earth covered with two concrete barriers as a tombstone.
There someone left a bouquet of yellow flowers and an inscription on a cardboard with the message: “Rest in peace, my brother, we will love you, we will remember you, we will mourn you.”
“What can I tell you? He was sitting there in front of his house, there were two missiles and they killed him instantly,” said Valeri, a 56-year-old neighbor. About the victim, nothing will be known. You cannot be more than 15 minutes in the same place in Siversk.
Missiles fly over Siversk
Missiles fly over the city, launched from both sides, by the Russians and the Ukrainians.
Despite everything, some people wander the streets on bicycles or on foot, with that indecipherable expression of whether they are really scared.
“I would want to leave, of course, but I have a 90-year-old mother who told me that she will die here, I can’t leave her,” says Olexandre, a man in his 60s.
“Here we have our house, it is the work of a lifetime and we don’t have money to leave,” explains Anjela, a 50-year-old woman.
At the exit of the cellars where the civilians who remained in this city, which previously had regarding 10,000 inhabitants, take refuge, braziers are installed for cooking.
Some people, however, left. They waited until the last moment to do it.
The last family to flee left in their vehicle loaded with a refrigerator and a bicycle.
A torn Ukrainian flag flutters over what remains of a flame-blackened building, likely a workers’ hostel.
In front of a nearly destroyed house comes the ominous sight of an empty, partially destroyed wooden coffin. No one had time to put the person for whom it was intended.
