Kharkiv – AFP
In Kharkiv, the second city in Ukraine in the north-east of the country that is constantly targeted by Russian missiles, the emergency service receives calls from which demining experts respond to go to sites to remove the remnants of dangerous projectiles.
“Generally speaking, we receive at least fifty phone calls a day,” said Igor, a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Defense Department who specializes in demining. The number changes every day. For example, on Wednesday, we received 82 calls, although a large number of people are calling to remove the missile itself.”
And on Thursday morning, his little team’s tour of a school began. The city itself does not live under intense bombardment. But the northeastern neighborhoods are targeted daily with precise, random and spaced strikes at any time of the day or night, in which there are often fatalities.
This particular school is located in one of these areas.
The ceiling of an office on the first floor penetrates the strong morning sunlight from a gap of one meter in diameter. The windows were shattered and the floor was covered with a pile of rubble.
“There was shelling in the neighborhood and the roof was hit,” said a woman from the school, who declined to be named, as she led the deminers upstairs. All windows were broken. We were very scared and did not know whether the projectiles had exploded or not.”
It was this woman who called the experts, who found nothing when they rummaged through the pile of rubble with their feet. But they found part of the missile just outside the office windows.
At a distance of only 300 meters on a path that passes through the bars of Soviet-era buildings, a portion of a rocket planted like an arrow appears in the asphalt. It caused a shallow crater with a diameter of 50 centimeters.
A deminer tries to remove it by hand, but the empty metal tube does not budge. Like the road repair workers, the man holds a shovel and digs around the pipe to move it.
The missile is a remnant of a shell fired by a Soviet BM-21 Grad launcher, with a range of five kilometers to 45 kilometers. The launcher can fire 40 missiles in a row.
Two tower blocks away this time, experts have to climb 11 stories up stairs, then climb a small ladder to reach the roof of one of the typical Soviet-era housing blocks in these neighbourhoods.
