“You can call me ‘Italian’. As long as that Russian devil is alive, I’d rather people not call me by my name.”
Ukrainian Vladimir Karpenko, 37, has lived in the city of Naples, Italy, for ten years, where he works as a painter. Certain that Russia would invade his country, he and his wife formed an online group two weeks ago to ask for donations of clothes, non-perishable groceries, medicines and hygiene products that he personally took to Ukraine.
Once there, he was unable and unwilling to return — the Ukrainian government has banned men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Everyone of age and fighting ability is needed at this time.
Before joining forces of popular mobilization, units made up of civilians and reservists, Vladimir went to the central hospital in Lviv, western Ukraine, to donate blood. “My blood will be with the Ukrainian people, one way or another.”
There is a risk that Russian invaders will detonate thermobaric bombs during the conflict, a weapon known as “the father of all bombs”. These bombs do not use conventional ammunition — they are filled with high-temperature, high-pressure explosives, sucking oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a powerful explosion and immense pressure wave that can destroy the body’s organs.
Under the possibility of a large-scale invasion, the mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, declared that the capital is surrounded, but stresses that the population and the Ukrainian army are ready to resist.
Russian threats would not be restricted to the killing of the local population with thermobaric bombs or the Ukrainian borders. Putin has put the nuclear forces under his command on high alert.
On the front lines of this conflict, the Ukrainian population – noble and courageous – unites to fight with homemade weapons: bottles full of gasoline and styrofoam bran, Molotov cocktails that symbolize more the courage of this people than exactly a threat against the machine. Russian war.
Before they become victims of the crimes that the Russian army has already shown it is willing to commit, hundreds of thousands of civilians, women, children, the elderly, people with physical disabilities and a few young people too terrified to put themselves on the front lines against a powerful military force try to leave Ukraine towards one of the neighboring countries, mainly Poland.
A line of more than 50 km stretches between the city of Lviv and the Polish border. Many abandon the cars or buses in which they travel and start walking, not knowing where they will be able to eat, rest or seek shelter from the cold and snow for the night. At the train station, thousands more people jostle each other, not knowing when the next train leaving the country will arrive. There is no food and water, and the toilets are filthy. Right now, Lviv is the umbilical cord between Ukraine and the rest of the world.
So far, the Ukrainian army has managed to stop Russian forces from advancing into this region. The arrival of “stinger” missiles donated to the Ukrainian Army by European countries and the United States limit the possibility of air strikes, but the city’s sirens repeatedly sound alerts for the population to seek underground shelter, often in the basements of houses and buildings in the city. .
In the streets, what prevails is not fear, but the patriotism of Ukrainians, expressed in admiration for the national army. The relationship of trust between the population and the military is mainly mirrored by the charismatic president Volodymyr Zelensky, who maintains the role of defender and living example of the “Ukrainization” of society, a phenomenon that Putin accuses of being the beginning of an ultranationalist phenomenon.
Without ignoring its inferiority to the Russian army, but using it to its advantage, so far the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been able to face and repel the Russian advance by combining guerrilla techniques with traditional military actions. The method, however, cannot be used forever, and fighters like Vladimir, Ukrainians willing to offer their blood for the country, would have little effect against bombs that, even if not detonated, are capable of setting fire to the lungs of their victims.
