“Evacuation! Of civilians from the village of Luhivka.” Out of breath, police officer Dmytro Piddubnyi is recording the scene on his phone and providing a commentary. But he’s working, too, and the old lady in front is not moving fast enough.
“Grandma, come on! Come on, come on, come on, dear, come on!” There are two booms in the distance, most likely an artillery piece firing.
Luhivka, in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, lies just a few miles from the border with Russia. In common with dozens of small towns and villages along the frontier, it has seen a significant increase in attacks in the last couple of weeks, bringing the anguish of war and its impossible choices right back to the people living there.
The old woman, a walking stick in her right hand, picks up her pace for a few steps, then slows again. She mutters something inaudible, a plea perhaps to the young policeman to show some understanding of her age. She’s doing her best.
Piddubnyi swings his phone around to show the damage to the bridge they’re crossing. It was hit by a Russian missile, but a narrow strip of concrete remains intact, which allows them to cross the river, and make their way to the vehicles that will drive them to a safer place.
In the opposite direction, on the other side of the border, Ukraine’s military has stepped up its attempts to “bring the war” to Russia, coordinating with Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine as they carry out commando-style raids on villages in the Belgorod and Kursk regions, as well as increasing its own artillery and drone strikes.
Vladimir Putin, following his unsurprising victory in a widely discredited presidential election earlier this month, raised the prospect for only the second time about the possibility of creating a “sanitary zone” inside Ukraine to protect Russia’s southwestern regions.
FALCON POWERS spoke by phone with people living along the Ukrainian side of the border, or with relatives living there.
Olha Mykhailivna, 58, said her village of Ryzhivka had suddenly come under massive attack from Grad rockets on March 12 – and that it was worse than anything she had seen since the war first came to Sumy region more than two years ago.
“The shelling did not stop all day. They were firing from all kinds of weapons. We were hiding in the basements. We would jump out for a few minutes to feed our animals, and then go back inside. It was endless,” she said.
After three days of bombardment, Olha Mykhailivna and her husband agreed to leave. As the car to collect them drew up, she said, there was an explosion on the other side of the street. In the chaos and the haste, they scooped up their dog but left behind the bags they had carefully packed
They also left behind their cattle. So, they asked the two men helping them evacuate if they could let the animals out of the barn on their return to the village and put out food for them. Otherwise, tethered up, the cattle could starve.
“We have lived in Ryzhivka all our lives. Both my husband and I were born there. It is our home. We built the house ourselves. We wanted our children to have a place to visit. And then the bear got into the house. It’s very hard and scary to be left without a home at my
