A first bombardment on Friday left 15 dead before new strikes overnight from Monday to Tuesday in Sloviansk, Ukraine, where residents are encouraged to leave.
The blast knocked the heavy gate of the beauty salon off its hinges. Any help is welcome for Alexei, 86. “There was an explosion around 1:30 a.m. last night, a powerful explosion: the roof was blown, all the windows were broken. Look at the courtyard, what a state it is in!” There are no more walls and a large crater with dangling electric wires. The city of Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine, was experiencing a relative calm but the strikes resumed on Friday April 14 and 15 people died in the explosion of their HLM, and on the night of Monday 17 to Tuesday 18 April, a series of strikes hit the city center.
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Ludmila, 76, approaches the edge of the hole formed by the explosion in front of the beauty salon. “There you go, everything is destroyed, it’s maybe four meters deep, this crater is huge! laments this Ukrainian. For the past two weeks, it has been bombarding more often. Maybe the front is getting closer, you know?”
Nadiia had just found her family
The beauty salon belongs to her family who remained in the West of the country. Ludmila had chosen to return to Sloviansk this winter. With these new strikes, the municipality encourages the inhabitants to leave and Ludmila hesitates. “Oh I don’t know, we’ll see. If it continues like this, I’ll have to leave of course because I don’t want to die. Even if I’m old, I want to live!”
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The city has set up evacuation trains but, in the Sloviansk station, there is no crowd. Alina put her suitcases in a corner. She lives in Lyman, near Sloviansk, and takes refuge in kyiv with her granddaughter and her grandmother. “The Lyman police have asked us to get ready and then evacuate. I don’t plan to leave for long, a month, maybe, if it gets calm again, we’ll go back home.”
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The bombing of an HLM on Friday marked the spirits. Nadiia, displaced for a year in Dnipro had just found her family when things exploded, and her plans suddenly changed. “We were here for the New Year, there were no bombings. We thought we could come back here.” We will come back here one day, adds Nadiia, “because we miss our city”.
War in Ukraine: Sloviansk, evacuations resume after new bombardments – Report by Mathilde Dehimi
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