Ukraine: in the countryside of the southern front, the poorest sow under the bombs
In front of his boss’s house, recently hit by a bombardment, Vassili Kouchtch swears against these “bastard Russians” who destroy his village a little more every day, then picks up his shovel: “I have to work. I have nowhere else to go. »
Mala Tokmashka, 70 km southeast of Zaporizhia and a few kilometers from the invisible line separating Moscow’s troops from kyiv’s forces in southern Ukraine, is awakened each night by Russian rockets slicing through the sky, and contemplate their disastrous contribution every morning.
Recently, the metal fence of Vassili’s employer has played the accordion. Several windows of his two outdated tractors, parked in the garden, imploded. Rubble litters the ground. The small bomb responsible for the damage left its signature, a neat hole in the ground, just in front of the house.
On the other side of the street, the roof of a red brick building, destroyed by another projectile, reveals its frame. “The neighbor was in the kitchen. She went to hide in the fields,” says Vassili. Before adding: “Thank God the cow is still alive. »
Vassili Kouchtch is one of a few hundred inhabitants who have decided to stay in the village, which thousands of others have deserted after two months of conflict. The last ones on the spot have in common to be the poorest, often the oldest, and to have as wealth only what brings them the ground.
Vassili is 63 years old, but looks fifteen years older, with his toothless and somewhat wrinkled face. The field jacket he wears was “given to him by a prison guard. His baggy pants “date from the Soviet era.” He lives in a tiny reduced, which “trembles” with each Russian impact.
– “Like naked” –
“I’m like naked, sighs the former driver, who has been doing odd jobs for thirty years. I have no money to buy anything. »
Since no one is waiting for him, this divorced father of five children, none of whom has kept in touch with him, would like to “bury alive” the “Katsapi” – a pejorative term designating the Russians. But he knows he will have no chance against them with his only shovel, and will therefore stay in Mala Tokmachka.
“If we don’t sow the potatoes, we won’t harvest any. Same for onions. And then the cows will starve,” he is frightened, while rolling in newspaper some tobacco that he grows himself.
A disaster for the one whose parents, born in 1927, experienced the great famine of 1932-33 – known as the Holodomor, and which kyiv describes as “genocide” orchestrated by Stalin – and that of 1946-47. These dramas taught him one thing: “You can’t live on water alone, but you survive on milk. »
Olga Touss, who hosts Vassili, accuses him of being “a drunkard”: “When he drinks, we don’t approach him. Then, how are you doing. »
– “Bastards” –
But the robustly built sexagenarian, who has tied her hair under a purple kerchief, shares with him two values that are now cardinal in rural Ukraine: first, her hatred of Russians, which this woman who worked for 20 years in Moscow describes as “bastards”, and especially his desire to sow the earth, because according to a local adage, “when the flowers start to bloom, everything ends”.
Olga wants to believe that the war “will end soon”, she who does not “even consider for a second” that the troops from Moscow could take Mala Tokmashka, despite the rockets rumbling above her.
A bet that the “rich” who fled the village obviously did not make, unlike the “poor” who, according to her, remained there.
For several days, AFP has been able to observe several convoys of combine harvesters and other gleaming tractors on the secondary roads leading to Zaporijjia, a large southern city still under the control of kyiv.
According to Youri, a territorial defense official from Mala Tokmashka, “it’s to prevent these devices from being looted by the Russians”.
Natalia Bouinitskaya and her husband Gennady, in their early sixties, seem beyond these considerations. The couple could not leave because Natalia’s mother, Vera, a tiny little woman in the twilight of her life, did not wish to die anywhere but in the village where she was born.
“I’m scared when it shakes too much. So, I stay lying down and I look at the window”, says this woman at 84 years old, who says she can no longer walk, “not because of an illness but because of (her) age”.
The old lady then thinks of a future without war, or of her glorious past, when she “ran, ran, ran”. Without any bombs to avoid.