the times | Friday March 18 2022 2GM 3News
Russia sends extra troops
to Ukraine as plan falters
Continued from page 1
sailing past its waters, apparently on
their way to Europe. Convoys have
been seen heading west in Russia from
as far afield as Siberia. The Russians
have also attacked civilian targets, in-
creasingly in Kyiv, apparently as a scare
tactic against the hundreds of thou-
sands of residents who have stayed put.
Russian spokesmen have put forward
a different account of the war, saying that
Ukraine has lost 180 military aircraft,
and almost 1,400 tanks and armoured
vehicles since the start of the Kremlin’s
“special operation.” Moscow also claims
to have eliminated 177 drones. Despite
this, Russia has not achieved superiority
in the skies above Ukraine and has
made slow progress in seizing cities.
Moscow has also denied targeting
civilians, saying that images of
bombed-out buildings have either beenmanipulated or that Ukrainians have
attacked their own side to win sympathy.
Putin and Sergei Shoigu, the defence
minister, have said the campaign
is going to plan. “The operation is
proceeding in accordance with the
original plan and will be completed on
time and in full,” Dmitry Peskov, the
Kremlin spokesman, said this week.
Viktor Zolotov, the head of the
National Guard, went off message on
Sunday when he said the invasion was
not proceeding as swiftly as Moscow
had expected. On Tuesday Major Gen-
eral Oleg Mityaev became the fourth
general to be killed, as he led a renewed
assault on Mariupol. A western official
cautioned, however, that Russia was
not close to a point at which it could
“not prosecute its war aims”.
Ukraine’s forces must be given the tools
to finish the job, leading article, page 31Mykola and Nadia Kachkan have refused to join their son in a safer area of Kyiv
PHOTOGRAPH: PAULA BRONSTEIN FOR THE TIMESmy home’
had to say goodbye to them. It was so
painful — I thought I was saying good-
bye to them for the last time.
My sister understood a bit why I had
to go back. But my brothers are very
young and they didn’t understand at all
why we had to be separated.
The answer is that I want to fight for
my country and defend my home. My
older brothers and my stepfather are
here, and I want to fight alongside
them.
I know my mother worries about us,
but she understands — she raised her
children to be strong-willed.
When Ukraine is free again, I want to
be reunited with them all. I want to re-
sume my studies, and I wish my siblings
could play and see their friends again.
We all just want to have a normal life.
We feel the same for Russians. I hope
that the ordinary people there can find
peace and freedom one day too.
Luba Dovzhenko, 18, was a journalism
student in Kyiv before the warThe war is not far now from Vyshhorod,
a weekend retreat in the forest north of
Kyiv. From their fourth-floor flat Nadia
and Mykola Kachkan can hear artillery
firing on the city’s most active front.
On the town’s outskirts, the volun-
teer territorial defence forces have dug
in, their trenches running through the
woods along the west side of the road.
However, like so many of Kyiv’s
elderly, the Kachkans are refusing all
entreaties to leave, even to join their
son in the relative safety of a southeast-
ern suburb. “I have lived here more
than 80 years. I don’t want to be any-
where else,” said Nadia, 86, as she greet-
ed us at the foot of her staircase,
marched us upstairs, and demanded we
eat a large bowl of homemade borscht.
She was keen for us to rank it against
the versions served by soup-making ri-
vals across Ukraine, and was uncon-
cerned by the risk of shellfire. “This is,
after all, the second war I have spent
here,” she said.
Early in this war, hundreds of thou-
sands of civilians fled west. But as the
fighting has progressed the number of
older residents of Kyiv who did not join
their daughters and grandchildren has
become ever clearer. Some of the most
striking images have been of elderly
men and women like the Kachkans
being carried out of burning buildings.
In another part of the city, Mostyska
Street in the Podil district, we went back
to see a large housing complex that had
been hit by shellfire on Tuesday morn-
ing. There we found Vasily Kondraten-
ko, 70, a retired foundryman, and his
64-year-old wife Tatiana dusting down
their flat on the sixth floor immediately
above the impact point. The fact that
the homes of their neighbours had been
destroyed — thankfully no one was
killed — seemed to make them even
more determined not to be dislodged.
They were, of course, aware of the
dangers. Tatiana broke down in tears
and hugged us as she described how the
windows of her bedroom shattered
when the shell exploded at 4.30am, her
curtains catching the glass and savingNews
children in devastated theatre
Little scares veterans
of Second World War
her. The room’s door had been torn in
two. The smell of soot wafted in. But,
she said, she would not leave while her
son was still in Kyiv, and he was now
dug in with the volunteers. Besides, “if
everyone evacuated, to whom would
we leave the city?” she said.
For 25 years Tatiana has edited a
children’s magazine. The last edition
came out the day before the invasion —
with her own grandson on the cover.
She thought it all the more important to
bring out the magazine now that
children were being affected by war.
The Kachkans and Kondratenkos
are representative of a clear genera-
tional divide in Ukraine, between those
who have little memory of life in Soviet
times and those who lived through
them. The middle-class young, in parti-
cular, see their lives as European and
western, with their high-tech jobs and
their freedom to travel to Poland,
Germany and beyond unquestioned.
For the older generation, the idea of
being drawn back into a Russian orbit
sounds less far-fetched. Their feelings
towards Russia are more ambiguous,
but that does not make them any less
hostile to President Putin’s version of
the “brotherhood” of their nations.
The Kachkans are old enough to re-
member the full gamut of Soviet life.
They were born into the Holodomor —
the murderous famine imposed by
Stalin. They lived through the Second
World War, reconstruction, poverty,
the Chernobyl explosion just 60 miles
away, the collapse of communism.
It was a mixed bag, but it was their
bag for most of their lives. Mykola spent
his entire career working for the Soviet
state hydroelectric power company. It
built and paid for the family apartment,
and it sent him and his family to live as
far afield as Mongolia. His two sons
went to Soviet universities and one
even now is an engineer in Belarus.
It was Russian wood and concrete
that rebuilt his parents’ home east of
Kyiv after the Second World War, he
said. His earliest memory is of return-
ing as the Germans retreated, to find
they had burned the entire village to
the ground. “All that was left of my
house was the oven,” he recalled.
“There was still a potato in it, so my
mother gave it to me to eat.” He was five.
For him this historical solidarity
makes Russia’s actions all the more
puzzling. “They rebuilt everything,” he
said. “So why do they want to knock it
down again?”Richard Spencer talks
to elderly Ukrainians
determined
not to leave
their homes