The road of the villages, which leads straight from Ukraine to Russia, they know it by heart. They hunted in these woods. They worked the land of this field. They did their shopping in that store, the one that was completely blown up near a building, also devastated, where a journalist, very blond and very made up, was recording a live broadcast in a bulletproof vest the other day, for Polish television. “You would have imagined that the war would come here? », asks Schmidt, who acts as chief, to his two colleagues of the territorial defense, nicknamed “Gray”, for the oldest, and “Green”, for the youngest.
Here, in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s second city, 30% of the territory is still occupied by Russian troops. To prepare for the invasion, soldiers smuggled in on the Ukrainian side a few months before the start of the war. These “saboteurs” were dozens, some came as a couple, all have probably not yet been identified. It remained a trauma, even a fault that the local authorities are paying today: the head of security has just been sacked in Kharkiv. Visas for Russians are now compulsory, officially blocking entry. And, everywhere, all the time, patrols are launched: the hunt for “saboteurs” has become an obsession.
At the checkpoint, Schmidt slips the password to the messenger. The front line is about twenty kilometers away, the border forty. A few bends, a collapsed bridge, a long straight line, and Schmidt’s courier swings from one world to another, brutally. No more cars, no more human beings, nothing moving, only ruins and bombardments in soundtrack. In the gutted villages one can sometimes guess a shadow, that of a Ukrainian sentry in hiding, so furtive that it seems a mirage. White hair in ruffled tufts, impeccable suit, the silhouette of an old man glides along an abandoned factory. Further on, a scooter comes out of nowhere, ridden by a man in his forties, with a shaved head and sunglasses.
Two soldiers in uniform, silent as cats, sneak up to the courier. “Do you have any water?” », manages to articulate one of them, through his cracked lips. A group of “saboteurs” was reported, about fifteen men aboard a minibus, disguised as Ukrainian soldiers and speaking the language for some. The day promises to be superb, with wind, which prevents the Russians from sending drones. “Pass me a tangerine”, slide “Grey” to “Green”. The other pulls a grenade out of his pocket.
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