(Kyiv) Behind his sandbags and the gun at his feet, Kyiv waits. At 27and the day of the invasion, the advance of Russian troops seems to be frozen to the northwest and east of the Ukrainian capital, again under curfew on Tuesday.
Posted at 10:56 a.m.
Updated at 12:43 p.m.
Sirens of bombardments and detonations in the distance sounded at regular intervals throughout the day, strange drums of war in a ghost town, bathed in an almost spring-like sun that makes the golden cupolas of Saint Sophia’s Orthodox cathedral shine.
For this third curfew since the start of the war, imposed from Monday evening to Wednesday morning, all businesses have closed. Everyone stays at home with the order to go down “into the shelters when the sirens sound”, according to the mayor and former world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko.
“For people, constantly under pressure since the start of the invasion, it’s an opportunity to breathe a little,” says Alexis, a German teacher before the war, who guides an AFP team in the city. . “Anyway, they are traumatized, they don’t really want to go out…”
“High Morale”
Many of Kyiv’s 3.5 million inhabitants, mostly women and children, have fled the capital since the conflict began on February 24. Remain mainly men mobilized and some elderly people.
This curfew is “like a break, with the temperature warming up,” smiles Maxim Kostetskyi, a 29-year-old lawyer.
“We don’t know if the Russians will continue their efforts to encircle the city, but we are much more confident, morale is high and inspiring”, assures this member of a volunteer unit.
In the deserted streets of the city, only the white cars streaked with blue of the police circulate, a few military trucks and rare civilian vehicles whizzing by, occupied by men in arms or in fatigues.
“Russian army, fuck you! », « Glory to Ukraine », or simply « Stop! “, tagged in paint on concrete blocks placed on the roadway, announce the countless checkpoints that now line the city.
In the west, the north and the east of the capital, not a corner of a street, an alley or a crossroads which is not cut by a wall of sandbags or anti-tank hedgehogs, made of bars of star-crossed metal.
Trenches and combat posts have been set up at random from the slightest potential axis of fire, at the foot of blocks of buildings or in vacant lots.
The forest on the northern outskirts of the city, where the inhabitants liked to go to mushrooms on weekends or eat with their families in a “Rancho el Gaucho” resembling a dacha, is now nothing more than a vast entrenched camp where the soldiers are buried. .
The irruption of a vehicle immediately arouses the suspicious glances of the soldiers and volunteers on duty, their fingers on the trigger, who hardly relax when they hear the password which allows them to cross the roadblocks.
Drones and “saboteurs”
If the infiltrated Russian “saboteurs” are less talked about these days, the hunt continues.
After the strike on Sunday evening by a Russian missile on an ultramodern shopping center in the northwest of the city, where according to Moscow, munitions and artillery pieces were camouflaged, the fear is that of spy drones or suicide bombers, like photos on social networks that could reveal Ukrainian positions.
At least one person was killed Tuesday in an attack by one of these Orlan-type Russian drones, which hit a building in the northwest of the city. A total of 228 people, including 4 children, have been killed in the capital since the start of the invasion.
A thick black smoke rises in the direction of Irpin, about ten km to the northwest, where the guns thunder. The locality is now off-limits to journalists.
“The soldiers know what they have to do, they know their job. There is a reason for this curfew”, judge Olga Alievska, 38, for whom “the Russians do not want, and especially cannot take Kyiv”.
“Their bombardments are aimed rather at military objectives for the moment, the time for bombardments on civilians has not yet come”, analyzes this marketing executive, who has remained in the city.
In the heart of the capital, on the hills overlooking the imposing and winding Dnieper River, where only two bridges remain open to traffic, war seems almost distant.
At the foot of the walls of the famous monastery of the Caves of Kyiv, weapons and soldiers are more discreet. Indifferent to the curfew, a sixty-something woman walks her dogs, as if nothing had happened, on the lawns of the Memorial to the victims of the Great Famine of the 1930s, overlooking the left bank of the Dnieper and its concrete towers.
The sandbag dams are back on the iconic Maidan Square and a few surrounding streets, where crashed cars are abandoned.
“Today we are optimistic, even if we have no choice,” continues Maxim. “We are protecting our country against someone, Vladimir Putin, who simply wants to destroy our country.”