Back to the U.S.S.R.: For Vladimir Putin, winter is a weapon of war, writes Paule Robitaille, who visited a war\u002Dtorn neighbourhood in Irpin
IRPIN, Ukraine — In war-weary Irpin, an elderly woman emerges from a building pockmarked by shrapnel, making her way between a pair of burned out cars. It’s cold and wet, and the ground is covered with a thin layer of snow. She walks slowly in felt slippers, leaning on a stick and holding a small bag of potato peels which she places with difficulty into a container that serves as a trash can.
From her second floor balcony, it’s a grim sight: her little neighbourhood of high-rise apartment buildings, grouped Soviet-style around an interior courtyard, are mostly burned-out shells. There are gaping holes where missiles punched through walls. In the early weeks of the invasion, Russian armoured columns drove down the highway that runs alongside Tanya’s building. They were met by Ukrainian troops desperately trying to push them back.Power, water and heating went out during the fighting.
Why stay? “Where would we go?” says an upstairs neighbour. “We are offered temporary shelters, but what will happen next? Here, we are at home.” An Austrian organization has since replaced the shattered windows. Electricity, reconnected in September, has become intermittent again since Russia began destroying the country’s infrastructure. There are approximately four to six hours of electricity per day.
Life hasn’t been gentle to Babushka Tanya. She started working at age 12. She had the first of her three children at 17. The eldest died of an aneurysm at 31. Her daughter worked at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and was left disabled by the reactor meltdown in 1986.Article contentBut when she talks about the Soviet years, her eyes sparkle. It was during the Soviet period that she was given the spacious, three-room apartment she still inhabits.
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