Marcel Gascon |
Kiev (EFE).- Around 6,000 displaced people from the hardest-hit municipality on the eastern front continue to receive all kinds of services from their former local officials in Kiev, where they have created a “little Bakhmut” that allows them to maintain social cohesion while they wait for Ukraine Drive the Russians out of your city.
“They feel this place as a part of their homeland,” Lyudmila Bondareva, one of the municipal officials who works so that the most vulnerable citizens of Bakhmut, told Efe in the center in northern Kiev where these refugees are cared for. including children, do not find themselves alone or lost in the capital.
To do this, it has the support of organizations such as Right to Protection, a Ukrainian NGO dedicated to helping internally displaced persons that offers Bakhmut refugees in Kiev legal services and humanitarian and psychological aid.
Bondareva is part of the organization “Ya Bakhmut” (I am Bakhmut), which operates centers such as the one in kyiv in other Ukrainian cities.
The official hopes that the society of her hometown will also keep her fabric during her forced displacement, so that the residents do not lose contact with their city and return when the time comes to clean up the rubble and rebuild it.
“Despite all the destruction, we believe in the future of our city; I am convinced that Ukraine will free her and we will be able to make an even more beautiful Bakhmut ”, she declares.
“Our whole life is in two suitcases”
Irina is a retired woman who worked as a farmer in a village near Bakhmut.
With the arrival of the Russian forces, Irina and her family had to give up going to the countryside and stayed in their apartment in the center of Bakhmut, where they ended up leaving last summer. Her husband had to have an operation and there were no doctors left in the city.
The couple hoped to return to Bakhmut soon, but the Russian offensive intensified and they decided to settle in kyiv with the two suitcases they brought.
All of his photographs and personal effects remain in his Bakhmut flat, which was recently burned down in a bombing raid. “We don’t know what’s left of him,” says Irina.
The Kiev center helps them solve “all the problems”, but nothing can ease the pain of seeing the neighborhoods and towns in which Irina spent her entire life being attacked with huge bombs and intense artillery fire.
“Bajmut was a beautiful city; there were roses in the parks, on the islands, on the sidewalks”, says the woman on the verge of tears.
“They have to kick them out anyway”
Another of the women who come to the center is Alexandra Ivanova, a Bakhmut pensioner who has seen how the war destroyed her apartment in the city and her dacha in the countryside. Alexandra left Bakhmut forced by her children in August, when the Russians “began to attack houses.”
In the city and the surrounding villages there was no electricity, gas and heating. Alexandra found remains of projectiles in the courtyard. Despite the fact that she did not want to leave, she understood that she had to get out of it and she took refuge in kyiv, where she shares a flat with her mother-in-law and her two daughters.
The woman is clear that she wants to return, but the Ukrainian army must first regain control over the city. “They have to kick them out anyway,” she says. Asked if she would go back to a Russian Bakhmut, Alexandra answers that she is “no” forcefully: “They are not ours”, she says through tears.
Disabled help
It also belongs to kyiv’s ‘little Bakhmut’ Natalia, a woman who uses a wheelchair and lives with seven relatives in a three-room apartment in the capital.
Natalia was part of the association for the disabled in Bakhmut, and has put all the members of the organization who have settled in kyiv in contact with the center.
“The center offers us very important support here,” says Natalia, who also highlights the benefits of staying united with the rest of the Bakhmut refugees, who had 70,000 inhabitants before the war, to adapt and thrive in a city of three million. of inhabitants like Kiev.