in the footsteps of horror

A bicycle rides past ruined houses. It is a photo by Gilles Gallinaro which induces a movement, that of the cyclist who passes almost nonchalantly, where everything has stopped because destroyed, dirty, reduced, buried. This cyclist, we don’t know where he comes from and what his destination is.

It is with this same calm, which should not be close to stupefaction, to leave intact the faculties of analysis, that the reporters Étienne Monin and Gilles Gallinaro moved forward in the streets of Kharkiv and around Sumy. In the villages taken by the Russians, occupied by the Russians and then taken over by the Ukrainians. But what is taken back will have to be rebuilt.

In the Sumy area, north of Kharkiv and a few kilometers from the Russian border, Étienne Monin, a senior reporter for franceinfo, discovers the traces of an old-fashioned battle. An artillery war. Here, the two camps faced each other, in their trenches, in the mud, the cold, the snow.

New technologies are only in the air. On the ground, we dig, we hide, and we aim at the enemy. In the air, there are supersonic missiles, thermobaric pressure bombs. Just look at the craters their explosions cause. Still in Gilles Gallinaro’s camera, the mayor of Ohtyrka descends into one of these craters to show, in the image, the dimension of the breath.

In this hole, the man appears tiny. And Étienne Monin sees in it a will to crush. The Russians want to reduce the Ukrainians to the infinitely small. As the on-air reporter explains, it’s as if a giant had taken the houses in his hands, kneaded them and then thrown everything to the ground, the debris, the charred material that picks up everything, the broken glass that no longer even exist, the buildings gutted for hundreds of meters around.

This sensation, Étienne also felt it in the Kharkiv metro, where lives have taken refuge to become tiny, as if the tiny allowed them to stay alive. For families, living space has become this stair step on which they have placed the mattress, their mattress, to sleep, and all around it is the intimate, the derisory home that is organized through a few cases that give the illusion of a personalized refuge.

In Kharkiv, surface life is only outside the city. Surprising to see that in the southern and western belts, we live almost normally while also wondering how long this situation will last. To the north, the center is a ghost town. The East and the North are still bombarded. And every once in a while a Russian tank makes an incursion, fires and retreats.

While Étienne Monin and Gilles Gallinaro discover the villages between Sumy and Kharkiv, Boutcha, west of kyiv, has still not revealed its horrors to the eyes of the world. But the testimonies collected by our reporters leave little doubt about the inappropriate behavior of the Russian army.

Even in times of war, rights exist, especially for civilian populations. The testimonies are unequivocal, it was the Russians who beat, raped, killed and looted. It’s probably ridiculous, but they systematically embarked wherever he went TVs, tablets, phones and alcohol. Soldiers don’t have to behave like looters.

And if in Paris, the journalists who present the editions are sometimes cautious in their formulations when they report massacres and abuses, preferring to impute the massacres to the Russians rather than qualifying them as such, the reporters on the ground cross-check the testimonies and understand what which happened a few days before they arrived on the scene. They can affirm what they report.

On the crimes committed by pro-Russian Chechens, Wagner militiamen or groups from Damascus, it is more complicated to know what exactly is going on. For that it would be necessary to stay longer, to investigate.

And for security reasons, we do not linger on the scene, we stay two nights maximum. We made a few incursions into the most exposed areas to quickly return, and set off again on a fallback base, spotted earlier. And walking away as night is about to fall, it’s hard to drive away the heady images of this day of reporting, these things seen, felt, heard.

And we cling to the image of a kiss that we imagine in the Kharkiv metro. This walk where there is the mattress, where the bodies hug each other tightly to taste the pleasure of still being together. A little more.