Where does this cackling come from when Mykola Fechtchouk turns the key in her lock? From the back of his apartment, on the sixth floor of a building in Irpine. The city grew like a mushroom in the last years of the Soviet Union, before becoming a pleasant suburb of kyiv. Then, nine months ago, the symbol of the terrible shelling of the Russian army and its hasty withdrawal.
At the beginning of winter, here it is affected by the cold and the darkness: the light only shines for a few hours a day – ” thirty minutes “ this thursday 1er December, calculates the forties in an anorak and black cap. It’s the glow of his headlamp that reveals his embarrassment when opening the door of his three-room apartment. “Excuse me, I took chickens this summer, it allows me to have eggs. »
Mykola Fechtchouk lives in one of the buildings hit by air raids in March. Four holes, all tiles broken. Wounded by shrapnel, he fell in the mud and fled “like a rat” take his wife and daughter to safety in Poland. In his absence, despite the blown windows, the Russians occupied the nine floors of his bar building. Except his apartment: this professional locksmith had made the most beautiful door in the world, “150 kg of shielding”, he laughs. He reinvested it in the spring, spent the summer there. Nothing has been repaired, except that it is snowing heavily, night falls at 4 p.m., freezing, and due to recent airstrikes on the country’s water and electricity systems, it’s all dark. Another new decor.
One in five residents has already left kyiv and its outskirts. About 80% of the exiles are between 18 and 35 years old, like the wife and daughter of Mykola, still refugees in a Polish village. He stayed in Ukraine, like the men of his age, but without money, without a car, without a job, because “the inhabitants have left the city”. Barely if, from time to time, he helps out the imprudent ones stuck in the elevator by a power failure.
The rest of his life is shared between toasted cigarettes in the courtyard of the city, chatting with what remains of the inhabitants, and a trip to the supermarket, reopened thanks to an electric generator. The generators! In Ukraine, individual or company, everyone wants their own today. But the prices are rising (25,000 gryvnias, around 500 euros, double that of 2021), because shortages are looming: people club together to find them on the fly, in Poland.
In darkness requires discipline
On Facebook pages, demonstration bricks heat up on gas stoves. Hard-boiled eggshells lie on Mykola’s kitchen table, remnants of her lunch in front of a gutted, blackened building—the view from her patched-up window. In a few weeks, kyiv and its suburbs rediscover the old “tricks” of yesterday.
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