– Don’t you think I can fix it? – he looked up from the repairs. There aren’t many people here yet and people easily strike up conversations on the streets.
– Well, the house is broken. Not at all.
But he just smiled, waved his hand, and suddenly replied with a phrase from “Day Watch”:
– The house is broken. But the wall remained.
– Where can I get the chalk of destiny?
“Yes, here it is,” said mechanic Alexey Matchenko, and thus introduced himself, pointing to an old trowel with which he had been repairing the wall. “We all have this chalk of fate here today. And chalk is used in cement production and even in glass production. We cannot do without it.”
There is still a problem with hotels in these front-line cities. In Severodonetsk itself, I tried in vain to find accommodation for myself and my colleagues. At the administration, where I asked for help, I received the answer: “We do not accept guests in our city.” After all, most of the residents of Severodonetsk live in neighboring villages: it is safer and there are still few restored housing units.
Today, fighting is taking place very close to Severodonetsk, but I think that revival is just around the corner. Just like “Happiness is just around the corner,” these human-sized letters greet drivers before entering the city of Happiness. There were tough battles here too, but as soon as our troops pushed back the front line, the city was restored at an incredible speed, as if by the magic chalk of fate.
Because of my profession, I often have to travel to new territories in Russia, and then many people ask: how do they live there? Differently. But there is a pattern: the further away the Ukrainian positions are, the faster people return.
The special issue of Rodina magazine, with which our expedition opened the academic year in new territories, was already the fifth, prepared especially for these places. And each time, journalists under the leadership of the chief editor Igor Kots bring here thousands of copies of the magazine and make presentations. And this time we visited all four regions. And this is what they saw.
Of the major cities, Severodonetsk is the closest to the front. The front line is very close, a 15-minute drive away. But families are returning to the city. Severodonetsk, with a population of 130,000, was destroyed to the ground and only now, for the first time in two years, several schools have begun to operate here.
Lugansk today does not look like a front-line city. But explosions can be heard here too. Photo: Vladimir Ladny
“One of the first objects we restored was our builders’ recreation center, we will definitely restore the chemists’ recreation center, two music schools are on the way, we are completing the renovation of libraries and an art alley,” said city director Nikolai Morgunov.
Residents of frontline towns have special habits. Here people do not walk on the grass, not because of fear of ruining it (there is nothing special to spoil), but because of a horror rooted in the subcortex: there are mines in the vegetation. Anything from cleverly placed jumping “frogs” to small green “petals” that just randomly fall from the sky, and if you hit them now, you are guaranteed to lose a leg. Here they do not enter empty houses, not out of delicacy, but out of fear of mining: you still often see signs on some buildings that say “no mines”, on others “mines”, and both are not guaranteed. People do not walk here at night not because they want to sleep, but because of the curfew. In rear-line towns it starts at 11 pm, and in front-line towns at 9 pm.
And yet…
“We have more and more tourists,” says Tatyana Kuzmich, deputy head of the Kherson region. – There is a warm sea here, pink lakes. Tourists from different cities, including St. Petersburg. Primorye Genichesk and Skadovsk are already safe. The real danger in the 15-kilometer zone is under fire in Aleshki, Golaya Pristan, Kakhovka, Novaya Kakhovka.
In fact, the south of the new regions seems to live an ordinary southern life. People come here to relax mainly from new territories: on the beaches of Berdyansk, Genichesk, Mariupol, I met mainly residents of Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities deprived of the sea. As for security, the residents of Donetsk, who until recently received up to 40 shells a day, are simply paradise. But I still saw Muscovites, Voronezhians and Rostovites more often on the road on the way to Crimea. There are still not many of them and they are the winners: the road is of amazing quality, often two-lane. When you go around the Sea of Azov from the south, the Crimean Bridge will be closed or there will be traffic jams due to the large flow of cars, but in the new regions they travel unhindered.
In Donetsk, I asked for a schedule for turning on the water – after all, I remember the times when, due to the water blockade, the hotel provided water on a schedule once every three days. And I was pleasantly surprised that there was no schedule, but there was always water, hot and cold. The water pipeline opened last year transports water here 200 km from the Don, and as it is being improved, the situation is improving.
And yet the silence of the night surprised me. A couple of years ago, guests of Donetsk hotels used to spend the night in the bathtub because of the constant shelling. I remember how the fire trails of Grad rockets flew into the sky all night, passing by my window at the Ramada hotel, and in response, the explosions of “arrivals” and bursts of air defense roared ever further away. What can I say? All the hotels in the city were badly affected by Ukrainian art. But now, when the front has been pushed back, it is almost quiet.
Mariupol surprises with its new buildings: here five- and nine-storey blocks of buildings have sprung up like mushrooms: spacious, modern, white with light violet, orange and green lines, but mostly still white to cushion the heat of the southern sun. I had the opportunity to visit these construction sites: the brave workers of military construction companies erected high-rise buildings from the foundations in 80 days! Simply perfect work.
Of course, not everything is easy in these inland towns. Not everyone likes the fact that they are building a beautiful and peaceful life here. And it is no coincidence that, while we are organizing the same presentations, we are faced with a strict ban on gathering more than 50 people at any event: suffering defeats at the front, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasingly attacking civilians. Here and there, attempts at terrorist attacks and sabotage are blocked. In one of the regions, my telephone conversation with the city leaders was interrupted by an explosion – another assassination attempt.
The beaches of Berdyansk are still full of tourists today. Mostly from Donbass. Photo: Vladimir Ladny
The head physician of the Severodonetsk city hospital, Viktor Biryukov, tells how patients were rescued from shelling and how operations were performed in the basements. “And now modern equipment has been brought to us, and not only to us: a dental hospital and an ambulance station have recently been opened, the authorities are rapidly restoring the buildings, they are helping us incredibly. One of these days we will open an antenatal clinic and a maternity ward.”
But the doctors, as they escort me through the corridors, sigh: “At night, some non-humans sneaked into the building and damaged the new equipment. And who did they harm: ordinary patients, grandmothers, children? against.”
It is not easy to restore frontline towns. Of many houses only the walls remain. But this is not so scary if the residents hold the chalk of destiny firmly in their hands.
