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The Russian invasion of Ukraine came on the ninth day. Despite dozens of attacks and violence in the country’s major cities, the capital Kiev is fighting mostly in the suburbs. The city center and its main buildings are still under Ukrainian control. However, there are fears that a siege by Russian forces could begin at any moment.
As the capital of Ukraine, it will probably be “the country that decides who wins the war.”
City life is completely upside down. For days thousands of people have lived in subway stations, which have been turned into emergency shelters, or into the basements of various buildings. Finding drinking water and food is becoming increasingly difficult. Train stations are full of people trying to get away from the city, sometimes not knowing where the trains they are riding go to, but there are also those who are preparing battle trenches through the city streets to fight.
Predicting how the situation will evolve, if, and when the Russians can take control of Kiev is currently very difficult. But among the people living there, the fear that the city will soon fall under Russian control is real and tangible, those in Kiev, are preparing in various ways for the arrival of Russian forces and for the escalation of the war.
Those who have decided to fight and stay in the city are facing the fear of bombing, despite the fact that on the first day of the occupation, mermaids sound in Kiev, which have become the daily soundtrack for city life. Many people have decided to stay in their homes, sleeping in the basement or on the ground, in the middle of corridors, to take shelter near the strongest walls or in points of the house that are considered safer in the event of bombing.
Thousands of people have fled their homes to take refuge in underground tunnels. Especially in the subway, where according to the mayor of Kiev, have found shelter about 15 thousand people, mostly women and children.
Kiev subways are filled with mattresses, on which sleep three or four people at once. There, in fact, the few benches that were were occupied by the persons who managed to arrive first, placing their blankets there. Other people have brought some camping tents with them to create a space as private as possible to other people. But there are also those who have brought pets with them.
Where there are electrical outlets, the New York Times wrote, they have become “charging stations for cell phones”, where most people who live for a few days, want to learn about what is happening on the surface through the information spread on the Internet. In the subway, for now, there are functional toilets.
Many families are separated, a woman who currently lives on the Kiev metro took her six-year-old daughter with her, but left the boy with her grandmother, who lives on the outskirts of Kiev, while her husband has joined the war.
On the subway platforms there are not only mattresses, but also suitcases, bags and plastic bags full of food and other supplies.
Andrew Kramer, correspondent in Kiev for the New York Times, writes that there are many volunteers who bring food and basic necessities to the subway, who come in and out of stations, often run by soldiers. However, as the bombing continues, the shelves of Kiev supermarkets are increasingly empty.
As soon as the curfew was imposed over the weekend, long queues of citizens formed outside the supermarkets.
In a supermarket in central Kiev, Al Jazeera wrote, only the most expensive goods remained, such as Swiss chocolates, French cheeses or Spanish bacon, while bread, vegetables and water ran out. Also, the city has encountered logistical problems with the supply of goods, while the owner of a supermarket said that since the city is surrounded by Russians, he is not sure if the supply loads that are planned to arrive. There is a similar problem with medicines.
In addition to the subway, Kiev residents are also taking refuge in other fortified underground areas, such as basements of palaces and hospitals.
A maternity clinic in Kiev is trying to continue operating underground, its director Dmytro Govseyev told the New York Times that five babies have already been born in those cellars since the beginning of the war.
In addition to soldiers, a large number of civilians are preparing for war in the city.
“Almost every road,” Andrew Kramer wrote in the New York Times, “have physical barriers to block them.” “As of Wednesday, many roads in Kiev have also been closed to civilian vehicles, and numerous warning signs have been displayed for the presence of anti-tank mines.”
The Ukrainian army also blew up several bridges that could be used by the Russian military to reach the city. They began to use such a strategy from the second day of the invasion, rendering many of the country’s bridges obsolete.
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