KHARKIV, Ukraine –
Viktor Lazar shares his war-side balcony with a pair of opera glasses and a tiny orange snake, his only roommate in an apartment that seems to be on the edge of the world.
Opera glasses, more of a joke, are hardly necessary – the front line is visible without them. The rumble of Russian and Ukrainian bombardment is audible even now, though Lazar claims not to notice. Beneath his balcony is a crater, one of many. On the nearby street, a Grad rocket launcher passes by.
Lazar estimates that the Russians are only 10 kilometers away.
As the war moves into its fifth month along deadly fault lines in eastern and southern Ukraine, Lazar and his few neighbors in Kharkiv’s vast and shattered neighborhood of Saltivka enact a life without resolution in which many are trapped. The new communities are told to flee. Not everyone does.
While towns and villages around the capital of Kyiv have begun to rebuild after the Russians withdrew months ago and world powers discuss a long-term recovery, others in eastern Ukraine still cannot sleep soundly.
The Soviet-era apartment blocks in Saltivka once housed half a million people, one of the largest neighborhoods in Europe. Now there may only be dozens left. Some of the buildings are blackened while others are crumbling slab by slab.
“This is my house,” says Lazar, 37, who is shirtless in the summer heat, revealing a machine gun tattoo on his right arm. He proclaims that he is ready to fight the Russians, but his only weapons are kitchen knives.
A broken guitar hangs on the wall of his apartment. Lazar, a musician, dreams of giving a challenging concert in the echoing, cat-ridden streets of Saltivka. In better times, he played to crowds in the squares of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which shows signs of recovering from the war even though it’s a short drive from the Russian border.
Saltivka, by comparison, is almost dead. Beyond a last subway station dedicated to the heroes, all activity fades away. Shops are closed and apartment blocks are open with broken windows. In one, a table-sized chunk of concrete slowly rotates on a piece of rebar, waiting to fall.
Tall grass outgrows abandoned playgrounds dotted with fallen, ripe cherries. The soldiers’ trenches are empty. In some apartments now open, clothes still hang on the clothesline.
Every once in a while, a car crunches through the rubble. You can bring movers trying to salvage some furniture or volunteers providing assistance.
Outside Lazar’s building, people have set up a modest kitchen with a bell mounted to ring when the day’s food arrives. Near the kettle on a wood stove, ammo boxes now contain bread that is slowly going stale.
Some electricity has come back, but not the running water. Lazar goes into a cellar where the water is still bubbling to take a bath. Two middle-aged women emerge from the darkness, looking fresh, and walk away.
But life is less of an adventure for those without options. Pavel Govoryhov, 84, sits in the doorway of a building now as fragile as he is. He has two canes at hand. For four months, he lived in the basement before moving back into his apartment. He tenses at the sudden noises. Just talking about his struggles makes him cry.
“My children don’t help me,” he says. “Why do I need such a life?”
He knows that, in time, winter will mercilessly return to unheated apartment blocks.
The Russians could do the same. More than 600 civilians have been killed in the Kharkiv region north of Donetsk since the invasion, some in Saltiva. Ukrainian authorities have alleged that the Russians used banned cluster bombs.
Communities around Kharkiv are still in shaky hands, reportedly part of Moscow’s strategy to keep Ukrainian troops so distracted they can’t be sent to places like Donetsk, where the Russians are gobbling up entire cities.
“You don’t wish this on anyone,” says Bogdan Netsov, 14, who lives with his family in an apartment with the curtains drawn.
In another building in Saltivka, a sign scrawled on the stairwell warns would-be occupants that “if you go in, you will be killed.”
This is where Viktor Shevchenko still calls home, even when he needs the light of his cell phone to see through the gloom during daylight hours.
“This is me speaking for everyone,” he says, unshaven and invigorated by tea. “We will push Russia away. Because we are patriots and we live in our land.”
Dishes lie shattered in her destroyed kitchen. A religious symbol of his Orthodox faith is burned. A wall clock, like the neighborhood around it, has stopped working.
Shevchenko reaches for the watch and winds it.
“Run,” he says, with a touch of pride. “Runs.”
On unsteady legs, he returns to the silence of Saltivka, with the watch in his hands.
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Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Ukraine contributed.
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