Most of the reesidents of Irpin, a once well-to-do commuter suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, have fled the Russian army’s bombardment.
The streets are dotted with rubble where Grad missiles have burst open high-rise apartment blocks, and modest wood and brick bungalows.
Sometimes the empty streets are so silent that a woodpecker’s tapping in a tall tree sounds more insistent than the distant guns, but sometimes there is the roar of racks of Grad missiles and volleys of mortar shells being launched nearby.
Photo: AFP
It is more than Mykola Pustovit, 69, can take.
He bursts into tears as he and his wife start the long walk to find relative safety in Kyiv.
They had hoped the front line would move away from Irpin, “but now, after such bombing, it’s unbearable.”
In fact, the front line has not shifted for days. By the reckoning of Ukrainian troops manning checkpoints in the town, maybe 20 to 30 percent of the district is in Russian hands.
The next suburb, Bucha, a few hundred meters further north, is already in the hands of the invading Russian army and violence is never far away.
As reporters crossed a makeshift wooden bridge into Irpin early on Sunday, Ukrainian forces were shipping the corpses of three of their comrades back out.
Later in the day, a car carrying American journalists came under fire near a Ukrainian checkpoint, killing filmmaker Brent Renaud and wounding photographer Juan Arredondo.
After the incident, Irpin Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn banned reporters from the town, but before the restriction came into place reporters found some civilians not ready to leave.
Iryna Morozova is clearly frightened, she raises her hands in surrender when journalists approach, as if being held at gunpoint.
Her house is badly damaged, lying next to another that was all but demolished by an apparent missile hit, but the 54-year-old cannot leave — who would feed her dogs?
She has the keys to a neighbor’s house where three excitable puppies, a placid golden retriever and a nervous German shepherd, confined and circling in a kennel, have a home.
“This one bites, we closed him up in the cage. We found him, he was scared and was shaking,” she says of the distressed dog.
The others have the run of a garden and play happily with visitors.
“They sleep there in the kitchen. They play during the day. How can you leave them?” Morozova said.
The few remaining neighbors look out for one another and take food to the elderly, but Morozova is more worried about the pets.
“There’s nothing left here,” she said, welling up in grief in front of a ruined home. “Now we collect stray animals and feed them, because people left them behind and moved away.”
Another neighbor, 76-year-old Vera Tyskanova, retired to the once pleasant suburban street after a career as a train driver in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe.
She has been without power since an airstrike early in the war and is also consoling herself by feeding neighborhood strays.
“There’s water, but no electricity. There’s a fireplace in the part of the house which is not ruined ... I’m surviving,” she said.
She might be putting a brave face on things, but just around the corner 84-year-old Mykola Karpovych — who once drove a tractor in farmland near the then-friendly Belarus border — is bewildered.
“Where would I go? My legs and my hands hurt,” he said. “To leave? Where would I go? Shall we go to Kyiv? I won’t go anywhere. What happens, happens. I’m too old.”
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