Postwoman Iryna Fedyanina’s laughter drowns out the mortar fire ringing out as she hands out pensions to the frightened masses near a river splitting Ukrainian and Russian forces.
A sullen driver takes her Ukrainian post office van past barricaded checkpoints and positions so dangerously exposed to Russian fire that soldiers try to blend into the surrounding forests.
He then leaves her parked on a patch of grass for hours on end while she counts out the cash owed to every pensioner and writes down their names in a complicated ledger.
Photo: AFP
Fedyanina giggles at her utter helplessness in the face of the overwhelming danger posed by the thuds and blasts echoing across the verdant hills.
“I tell myself in the morning that everything will be alright and hope that God will protect me,” the smiling 50-year-old said from inside her van. “I pray and then I drive out to the front. What else can you do? We cannot leave our people without money. If we do not pay them, who will?”
The answer worrying Ukrainians is that the Russians would be delighted to hand out the pensions should they manage to push south past the Siverskiy Donets River and seize settlements such as Mayaky.
Fedyanina’s unspoken duty thus involves winning over the Russian-speaking elderly who comprise the vast majority of people still clinging on to their homes in the war zone — and whose attachment to Kyiv’s pro-Western leaders is wavering.
She must do this with everyone’s nerves fraying and instant death a random, but real possibility at any moment.
Rocket and missile fire has already killed dozens of civilians gathered in crowds in cities such as nearby Kramatorsk and the more distant Kharkiv.
Both sides have accused the other of shelling civilians fleeing in evacuation buses.
The few dozen people crowded around Fedyanina’s van sighed and grumbled among themselves at particularly threatening blasts of incoming and outgoing fire.
Some simply covered their ears and patiently waited.
“Of course I am afraid. We have had so many cases like this, when a shell flies right into a crowd of waiting people,” pensioner Larisa Zybareva said.
“Every time they come here to hand out pensions, they start shelling again,” the 63-year-old former farmhand said. “Last month, we did not even think they would come, there was so much fighting, but in the end, they still came.”
Not everyone is as sensitive to the danger.
Ukrainian soldiers occasionally stop off at Mayaky’s two tiny shops and Sunday market to stock up on cigarettes and candy.
An intelligence officer who agreed to be identified as Misha was basking in the sun with an assault rifle on his lap and telling tales of his troops’ rising morale and the futility of the Russian offensive.
“Now that the West has started to help, we have had no problems with supplies or weapons. We have everything,” Misha said. “The only real problem is with uniforms and cigarettes. We wear uniforms from all over the place in one unit.”
Misha then stretched his back and pulled off his shirt before running down to the ravine and diving headfirst into the frontline river at the heart of the latest wave of battles.
“Since the war started, this is my first dip,” he shouted after coming up for air. “It feels good to get the summer season started.”
His trousers and assault rifle rested unattended on a picnic table while he splashed around.
However, rumors were filtering in from further out east that the Russians had made their first serious break across the river Misha was splashing in near Mayaky.
The ultimate target of the battalion tactical groups Russia has fanned out across the northeastern front appears to be Ukraine’s main administrative center in Kramatorsk — the home base of Fedyanina’s postal unit.
The bespectacled Russian and Ukrainian-speaker might be one of the first civilians to know how close the Kremlin’s forces are really getting to her symbolically and strategically important city.
“I visit one village after another, and by the end, I end up visiting each one of them once a month to pay the pensions, “she said of her frontline travels. “We go where it is safe — or at least, relatively safe. We cannot enter places with active fighting.”
REBUILDING: A researcher said that it might seem counterintuitive to start talking about reconstruction amid the war with Russia, but it is ‘actually an urgent priority’ Italy is hosting the fourth annual conference on rebuilding Ukraine even as Russia escalates its war, inviting political and business leaders to Rome to promote public-private partnerships on defense, mining, energy and other projects as uncertainty grows about the US’ commitment to Kyiv’s defense. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were opening the meeting yesterday, which gets under way as Russia accelerated its aerial and ground attacks against Ukraine with another night of pounding missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. Italian organizers said that 100 official delegations were attending, as were 40 international organizations and development banks. There are
The tale of a middle-aged Chinese man, or “uncle,” who disguised himself as a woman to secretly film and share videos of his hookups with more than 1,000 men shook China’s social media, spurring fears for public health, privacy and marital fidelity. The hashtag “red uncle” was the top trending item on China’s popular microblog Sina Weibo yesterday, drawing at least 200 million views as users expressed incredulity and shock. The online posts told of how the man in the eastern city of Nanjing had lured 1,691 heterosexual men into sexual encounters at his home that he then recorded and distributed online. The
TARIFF ACTION: The US embassy said that the ‘political persecution’ against former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro disrespects the democratic traditions of the nation The US and Brazil on Wednesday escalated their row over US President Donald Trump’s support for former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, with Washington slapping a 50 percent tariff on one of its main steel suppliers. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva threatened to reciprocate. Trump has criticized the prosecution of Bolsonaro, who is on trial for allegedly plotting to cling on to power after losing 2022 elections to Lula. Brasilia on Wednesday summoned Washington’s top envoy to the country to explain an embassy statement describing Bolsonaro as a victim of “political persecution” — echoing Trump’s description of the treatment of Bolsonaro as
CEREMONY EXPECTED: Abdullah Ocalan said he believes in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons, and called on the group to put that into practice The jailed leader of a Kurdish militant group yesterday renewed a call for his fighters to lay down their arms, days before a symbolic disarmament ceremony is expected to take place as a first concrete step in a peace process with the Turkish state. In a seven-minute video message broadcast on pro-Kurdish Medya Haber’s YouTube channel, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said that the peace initiative had reached a stage that required practical steps. “It should be considered natural for you to publicly ensure the disarmament of the relevant groups in a way that addresses the expectations
RSS