Sergei Gerasimov: Glide bombs on Kharkiv

In the southern part of Kharkiv there is a gloomy residential area. Six or seven high-rise buildings are crowded together, and they are surrounded by a mostly empty area with lawns and parks, football fields and playgrounds. Cars are parked in front of the houses. Old people are resting on benches under horse chestnut and maple trees. Three children are having fun on swings.

It is the second to last day of August, around three o'clock in the afternoon. An air raid siren sounds, but the people of Kharkiv have endured so many of them that they have stopped paying attention. Then, a little further away, there is an explosion, or rather, two explosions follow one another so quickly that the bangs of both merge into one.

The children continue to swing undeterred. The old people continue to sit on the benches. No one is in the mood to seek cover. But then the roar of a jet engine rips through the air. Forty or fifty minutes later, a man in his mid-thirties named Jura will confirm that it was definitely the sound of jets.

“It wasn't an S-300. It was a jet engine. “It certainly wasn't an S-300,” he says over and over.

Jura is rough and plump. He wears long jeans with the fly open. His pants are blood red and blood is running down his leg. He didn't care. He says he was sitting at his computer in his eighth-floor apartment and only survived because he left his desk for a moment. Then he heard the roar of a jet engine and the next second a 500-kilogram guided bomb blew up the eleventh and twelfth floors directly above his head.

Jumped out of the window while burning

Later, the Russians will tell the lie that the citizens of Kharkiv were actually lucky to have the Russian president, because he is stupidly capable of “wiping Kharkiv off the face of the earth every day,” which he does not do, but instead focuses exclusively on military goals.

This time, the Russians claimed to have fired an S-300 supersonic missile at the tractor plant in Kharkiv, and the Ukrainians tried to shoot it down with an anti-aircraft missile, which then hit a residential building. In fact, the S-300 always explodes first, and only then can you hear its whistling sound, which cannot be confused with anything else. There was nothing like that this time. Instead, there was a guided bomb that was deliberately detonated in the middle of a compact group of high-rise residential buildings.

Jura says that everything around him was immediately on fire and that people were jumping out of the windows while they were burning. He is sure that these were people who lived on the upper floors.

“My father jumped out of the window,” he says. “He didn't die, but it would have been better if he had died when he hit the asphalt. . . ” Jura traces with his hands how his father hit the ground exactly after jumping from the eighth floor. He flew headfirst, but his body didn't stay upright, but quickly hit the ground flat.

Judging by the way Jura describes it, he seems to have seen the events with his own eyes. It is astonishing that his father did not die immediately after such an impact, but then he succumbed to his injuries in the ambulance. He did not survive long. When Jura sees him in the ambulance, he is shocked. His father is so disfigured that he does not even recognize him. Now his dead body is not taken to the morgue, but to a special laboratory, because even the doctors cannot understand how one man can have so many injuries.

Jura tells all this with a strange half-smile, or rather a surprised quarter-smile. His expression doesn't show that he is grieving. In fact, he is confused and doesn't quite understand what is going on. He says he can't hear anything in his left ear and only noise in his right ear. “Are you dizzy?” the paramedic asked him. “No.” “Still, go to the doctor later.” They didn't bother to help him any further. Jura is not what matters now.

“I had everything and now it's all gone,” says Jura with the same half-smile. “I lost everything, just like that (he snaps his fingers), my apartment, my father, two cars, my personal documents, money . . .” He tells me that when he ran into the yard, he noticed that one of his cars had already burned out and the second was about to burst into flames. He wanted to take it to safety, but then the car next to it exploded and he changed his mind. A solid house, wealthy people, a happy life . . . The bomb claimed nothing but people.

A black Skoda Octavia, badly damaged by the explosion, drives past with its alarm blaring. The windows are broken, the roof is crushed and there is a shrapnel hole in the hood. And yet the car is still running. Behind the wheel sits a man, naked to the waist, with a kind of oilcloth jacket thrown over his shoulders. There are a lot of men walking around like that. It is a very hot day and they escaped onto the street wearing only what they were wearing.

Back to the Inferno

One of the men, stripped to the waist, runs excitedly between the firefighters. A firefighter blocks his path, but the man shoos him away as if he were an annoying fly. He is Jura's older brother. When the bomb exploded and everything went up in flames, for some reason his mother ran up the stairs instead of down. Jura's brother tried to persuade the firefighters to follow him into the house and get the woman out, but she refused. So he threw a wet blanket over his shoulders and ran into the inferno himself.

He actually managed to save his mother. Now she is sitting on a bench with her head and arm bandaged. The paramedics have given her a sedative and are continuing to care for her. A young man approaches the woman. They hug and cry.

“Do you remember little Borja, who loved playing dominoes and his orange car so much?” asks an old man. “He was killed by the blast right in the courtyard.” The twelve-story building is still ablaze. All of the upper floors up to the fourth are now burned out. The floors have collapsed, but some of the outer walls are still standing.

From below, the scene looks a bit like the iconic photo of the “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away: something charred and misshapen, towering high, completely enveloped in smoke and lit by a strange inner fire. In the neighboring houses, rows of windows are broken, many window frames have burned through.

The air is pearly and opaque with smoke. It is difficult to breathe. Coin-sized pieces of ash fall from above like black rain, fluttering and spinning in the air. Women sweep broken glass from the windowsills, men carry it out in buckets and throw it with a crash into garbage cans. Water bottles are lying around on the lawn, and that is a good thing, because everyone is very thirsty.

A soldier passes by with a huge dog that is supposed to search for people under the rubble. Paramedics carry a child away on a stretcher; it does not move. Firefighters cut down a chestnut tree to make a passageway, and in the space that is vacated a mourning congregation of people forms with water bottles in their hands (that is all they have left). Two eight-year-old girls continue to swing on the swings as if nothing had happened. The daily torture of the peaceful population of Kharkiv, which is carried out at great expense, continues. The Russians are the perpetrators, but those who are delaying the delivery of urgently needed defensive weapons are also to blame.

Two hours later I arrive at Yuryeva Boulevard, where the first two explosions were heard today. It is more of a park and there are hundreds of people here now. At three o'clock in the afternoon two Russian glide bombs exploded over the boulevard, but fortunately there were far fewer people than usual at that time because of the heat.

The first bomb hit the playground, where the dogs were allowed to run. The second bomb exploded over the central walkway. It looks as if the bombs were detonated in the air so that the shrapnel would kill as many people as possible. Several pieces of shrapnel pierced the pavement. One killed a 14-year-old girl who was sitting on a bench.

The entire area is covered with green maple leaves that have not yet had time to wither. The trees are bare, with broken branches – as if after a meteorite explosion. The benches protrude eerily from the chaos.

Teenagers roam around collecting bomb fragments. These fragments are unlike anything I've seen before. They are not the familiar sharp polygonal blades, but black, flattened lumps of molten metal. They are thin and wide, and only three of them fit in the palm of the boy who brags about his find.

These bombs were deliberately detonated exactly over the geometric center of the park, which means that they were aimed at people, at nothing but people. And now babies are crawling around the playground again, a dozen meters from the site of the explosion. More than a hundred people were injured in Kharkiv today. Today, the Kharkiv blood transfusion center is reaching the limits of its capabilities: every blood group is needed. The torture continues.

*

Addendum of September 1. A new attack has taken place, a dozen ballistic missiles at once. The Sports Palace, which is only a ten-minute walk from my house, is in ruins. Our cats, who were not afraid even in the first days of the war, are now hiding in the hallway and under the sofa. The shock waves are killing the birds in the air: dead pigeons are lying on the streets. The birds that survived are mad with fear, jumping around on the asphalt and pecking people's legs, as if asking: “What do you think you are doing, you people?”

Sergei Gerasimov is a writer and lives in the city of Kharkiv, which is still being bombarded by the Russians. – Translated from English by A. Bn.