‘Always frightened’: life in ruined estate

Galyna Chorna sobs as she recounts the Russian rocket strike that obliterated the apartments above hers, shattering her windows, her door and any inkling of safety she still clung to.The 75-year-old is the only remaining resident of her nine-storey block in Saltivka, one of Europe’s largest housing estates that has been ruthlessly and relentlessly shelled by Russia since the start of its invasion of Ukraine in February.“I’m so afraid because I’m alone here — I’m really alone. I had a daughter, but she died a year ago because she drank too much,” she says, trembling despite the warm sunshine.“So now I just sit here on this bucket. When a missile comes in, I just fall to the floor, on my front. That’s why maybe I am still alive.”Saltivka, in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, was once a thriving district, built in the 1960s as a “bedroom community” for Soviet industrial workers, and home to upwards of half a million people.A relentless barrage of Iskander missiles and unguided rockets began on February 26, hitting apartment blocks at random.As the war grinds on, much of the neighbourhood now lies in ruins.Early spring was so cold that the nails on Galyna’s hands and feet turned black with the beginnings of frostbite.There was no running water in the area for the first six weeks of war, and no electricity until last month. The gas only returned this week.Scorched edifices overlook every street, their broken windows and the gaping holes smashed through masonry testament to the intensity of the bombardment.Many of the buildings are scarred by deep fissures and look as if they are on the verge of collapse. Rusting cars with roofs pancaked by fallen rubble and twisted metal decay in the streets.Several apartment blocks appear to have been spared further into the estate, but no corner is genuinely safe, due to the random character of the shelling.Many of the attacks have been carried out using banned cluster bombs, rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say, accusations the Kremlin has denied.Parts of the district have returned to nature, and grass verges grow waist-high.With most of the children gone, the cherry trees have remained unpicked, their fruit left to drop on the pockmarked pavement.The residents who stayed eke out what life they can on government handouts of less than $100 a month and ready meals delivered by police and charity workers. A few of Chorna’s neighbours have moved into a cavernous, gloomy shelter below the local school, where the dim light of bare bulbs reveals rock-ribbed floors that kick up thick dust.The beds are fashioned from school desks, chairs and wooden pallets. The refugees from the chaos above hunch over saucepans of soup heated in a makeshift kitchen.Antonina Mykolaieva, 71, moved into the shelter with her husband and around 40 others when war broke out, but he died of heart failure a month later.