Monday 2 May 2022 The Guardian •
13fi ghting. “This is what I was built
for ,” he said.
As the Guardian interviewed
people in the queue, several said
they were nervous about talking
to the media in case it attracted
an attack. Police asked us not to
identify the postal branch. In late
March, six people died and 15 were
injured when a rocket hit a queue at
another Nova Poschta.
Meanwhile, about 1,000 young
people in Kharkiv are distributing
food door to door to those who are
unable to leave their houses, said
Oleksandr Getmantsev, who has
been active since the fi rst weeks
of the war. Alex and his group of
friends collect donations mostly
from Kharkivans who have fl ed and
want to help those still in the city.
Alex and his friend Zoya
Zakharova visit about fi ve
addresses a day of people who
reach them through word of
mouth. Many of the people they
visit are pensioners who have
money in their accounts but cannot
walk to the few functioning post
offi ces to receive it.
Others, like his mother , live
in north Kharkiv, which is under
constant bombardment. People
in the worst aff ected areas on the
edges of the city have nowhere to
buy food and often no means to
cook because gas and electricity
have been cut off. Many are
living in basements and only
come out to cook on make shift
barbecues outside.
“My mother doesn’t want to
leave her home ,” said Alex , adding
that he visits her about once
a week.
There are at least two
international organisations that
have recently started working in
the city but Alex said it is diffi cult
to evaluate the impact they are
having on the ground as they have
not been visible.
The last time the Guardian
visited Kharkiv in late March, the
city’s governor said international
organisations were sending large
quantities of aid but were not on
the ground.
One woman, Viktoria
Anatolivna, is 32 weeks pregnant
with twins and alone with her six-
year-old son, Danylo. She said they
had only been outside four times
since the war started. She wraps
Danylo in duvets in the bathtub
with the cat when the shelling
starts and takes the fl oor in their
corridor for herself.
“I’ve run out of money and all
my relatives have left,” she said.
She relies on the volunteers and
some soldiers who also bring food.
Anatolivna will have her twins
in a hospital in the centre. The
maternity clinic next to her house is
overseeing births in the basement
because of the shelling.
The last stop on the food
donations route is Nadia
Chaikovska, a 70-year-old woman
who now takes care of more than
20 cats abandoned by fl eeing
neighbours. Alex and Zoya bring
her sacks of cat food.
“I’ve already buried fi ve that
I’ve found lying around,” said
Chaikovska. “I just love animals.
These cats are sterilised, some of
them pedigree. They can’t survive
on their own.”
Isobel Koshiw
KharkivElderly residents trapped at a nurs-
ing home near the frontline in eastern
Ukraine are to be evacuated thanks to
a fundrais ing event held thousands of
miles away in New Orleans.Ukrainian-born Katya Chizayeva,
who now lives in the American city,
organised the event at a restaurant
after reading in the Guardian about
the plight of residents at the home
in Chasiv Yar, a village a few kilome-
tres from the frontline in the Donbas
region. A total of $8,000 (£6,360) was
raised.
Without the means to leave,
elderly people have borne the brunt
of the fi ghting in the Donbas over the
last eight years. The situation only
worsened when Russia invaded in
February.
When the Guardian visited the
home last month, most of the resi-
dents interviewed had been made
homeless by Russian shelling.
The home’s director, IevhenTkachov, said they were in the pro-
cess of evacuating the last 12 people- a mixture of those who are bedrid-
den and new residents they have
received because of the fi ghting.
Tkachov started searching for a
place to move the residents when the
invasion started. “I know there will
be no water, no electricity, no heat-
ing, no medicine. This lot will become
a mass grave in a matter of days,” he
said , referring to his vulnerable res-
idents. “We have to go.”
Over a month ago, he wrote a post
on Facebook as he panicked about
approaching Russian soldiers,
though they have not made much
progress along the eastern frontline
where Chasiv Yar sits.
A church in the Khmelnytskyi
Nursing home
US fundraiser
helps escape
from frontline
region of western Ukraine reached
out to Tkachov. They asked the local
authorities for help and a disused
school was allocated for the elderly
evacuees.
Tkachov and his team are renovat-
ing it and, so far, they have evacuated
over 30 people to the school.
“The biggest chunk of the money
will go towards making the accom-
modation suitable for the old people,”
he said.
“We are going to buy a boiler to
make it warmer. At the moment it’s
suitable for a student who comes in
for half a day and then goes home but
our people will be there full time. “
“We want to buy some special
beds, they cost around $500,” added
Tkachov.Scores of civilians leave Mariupol
steelworks as evacuations begin
water, heat or electricity, to escape
bombardment, Russian forces closed
in. Vladimir Putin decided not to
storm the steelworks, but called on
Russian troops to blockade the area
“so that a fl y can’t get through”.
Yesterday, Ukraine’s president,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said about
100 civilians were being evacuated
from the steelworks to the
Ukrainian-controlled city of Zapor-
izhzhia. Zelenskiy’s chief of staff ,
Andriy Yermak, suggested the evac-
uations could go further. “This is just
the fi rst step, and we will continue
to take our civilians and troops out
of Mariupol,” he wrote on Telegram.
Earlier, Reuters reported that more
than 50 civilians in separate groups
had arrived from the plant yester-
day in Bezimenne , a village about
20 miles east of Mariupol in territory
controlled by Russia -backed separa-
tists. The group arrived in buses with
Ukrainian number plates as part of a
convoy with Russian forces and vehi-
cles with UN symbols.
Mariupol is a target for Moscow
because of its location near Crimea,
which Russia annexed in 2014.
News of the evacuation came as
the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi,
met Zelenskiy in Kyiv, where she
pledged enduring support for his
country’s “fi ght for freedom”. Pelosi,
whose visit was not announced
beforehand , is the highest-level US
offi cial to meet the Ukrainian presi-
dent since the war began.
Earlier in the weekend, a senior
soldier with the Azov regiment at the
steelworks said 20 women and chil-
dren had managed to get out. “We
are getting civilians out of the rubble
with ropes – it’s the elderly, women
and children,” Sviatoslav Palamar
told Reuters. On his Telegram chan-
nel, Palamar called for the evacuation
of the wounded: “We don’t know why
they are not taken away and their
evacuation to the territory controlled
by Ukraine is not being discussed.”
Russia’s defence ministry said
yesterday that 80 people, including
women and children, had left the
works, according to the state news
agency Ria Novosti.
In his Sunday blessing, the popefrom Russia to 12%, compared with
35% before the Russian invasion. Rus-
sian gas imports to Germany have
dropped to 35% from 55%.
On the 67th day of the war, Russia
continued its refi gured campaign to
seize parts of southern and eastern
Ukraine. Its defence ministry said
yesterday that it had attacked an air-
fi eld near Odesa and claimed to have
destroyed a hang ar containing weap-
ons provided by foreign countries.
“High-precision Onyx rockets at
a military aerodrome in the Odesa
region destroyed a hang ar with weap-
ons and ammunition from the United
States and European countries, and
also destroyed the runway,” said a
spokesperson for the Russian defence
ministry, quoted by Ria Novosti. The
report has not been independently
verifi ed.
As the fi rst civilians were reported
to have left the Azovstal plant, pic-
tures showed a dire situation for the
several thousand who remained.
Video and images shared with the
Associated Press by two Ukrainian
women who said their husbands were
among the fi ghters refusing to sur-
render at the plant showed men with
stained bandages , while others had
open wounds or amputated limbs.Additional reporting
Associated Press▲ An Azovstal steelworks employee, Valeria, is reunited with her son yesterday after being evacuated from MariupolPHOTOGRAPH: ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO /REUTERSrepeated his implicit criticism of
Russia, as he said Mariupol had
been “barbarously bombarded and
destroyed”. He added that he had
suff ered and cried “thinking of the
suff ering of the Ukrainian popula-
tion, in particular the weakest, the
elderly, the children”.
Meanwhile, Zelenskiy released
footage yesterday of the meeting
between him, Pelosi and the US
House representatives Jason Crow ,
Jim McGovern , Gregory Meeks and
Adam Schiff. Pelosi pledged US sup-
port “until the fi ght is done”. “We
are visiting you to say thank you for
your fi ght for freedom,” she said in
footage released on Zelenskiy’s Twit-
ter account. “And that your fi ght is a
fi ght for everyone, and so our com-
mitment is to be there for you until
the fi ght is done.”
It has also emerged that the EU
is looking at banning Russian oil
imports from the end of 2022 , in the
latest eff ort to cut funds to Putin’s
war machine. Germany said yester-
day that it had slashed oil imports▲ President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
with Nancy Pelosi in Kyiv yesterday‘Our commitment
is to be there for you
until the fi ght is done’Nancy Pelosi
Address to Ukrainians Continued from page 1