Alla Riabko stands in the courtyard of the city morgue, shaking with grief and rage. Her son, Roman, was killed in the fighting on the first day of the war in Ukraine, but two weeks have passed and his body still hasn’t been prepared for burial.
“He’s over there, in a bag,” she says, pointing to covered corpses lying on the floor. “They didn’t even give me the body so I could wash it. I’ll have to take it away in a garbage bag.”
The morgue is overflowing. The bodies are handed over to the families in the condition in which they arrived. There are dead bodies in the hallway, in administrative rooms, in the courtyard, in a shed next door. They are soldiers and civilians.
As Riabko expressed his anguish, artillery attacks shook the earth from under his feet. There were 132 bodies in the morgue that day.
Mikolaiv is being bombed daily. Russian forces want to take it because the city is in their way. The Varvarisvski Bridge is the only way for many kilometers to cross the wide mouth of the River Buh. If they take the bridge, Russian fighters will be able to advance westward along the Black Sea coast towards Odessa, the Ukrainian navy’s headquarters and the country’s largest civilian port.
To get to the bridge, they have to get past the Ukrainian fighters, who so far have not given way. And so Russian troops are indiscriminately bombing the city, hitting, according to local authorities, neighborhoods, hospitals and markets — at least 12 civilians are said to have been killed in air strikes over the weekend.
But there is also a refusal of the population to surrender. Garbage is still being collected. A family closed its interior decorating business and now drives around town taking food to needy residents. A group of men have banded together to try to fix a Russian tank damaged in combat so it can be used by Ukrainian forces.
It’s still busy at Coffee Go, a few blocks from the morgue, despite its glass windows shaking under the shock of artillery fire. When the owners tried to close the establishment, the teenage employees rebelled, says Viktoria Kuplevskaia, an 18-year-old barista with an orange streak in her hair.
“We wanted to keep working,” he says. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
Once a shipbuilding center for the Russian Empire, Mikolaiv was one of the first places to be attacked when Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order for war on February 24. Russian troops have already advanced into the city but have been driven back. They left behind the burnt-out armored carcasses.
No one knows how long the Ukrainian defenders will be able to hold out. Russian forces attacked the city from three sides, with tanks, artillery and fighter jets. Each day is accompanied by more deaths, but also by resistance.
the governors
“Good morning. We are from Ukraine.” So begins the usual morning video message from Vitali Kim, regional governor. His upbeat videos on Facebook and Telegram, which he invariably starts with a peace sign and a big smile, are often seen by 500,000 people, roughly the number of people in the city.
“When he smiles, we can lie down,” says Natalia Stanislavchuk, who has been delivering food to people in need as a volunteer. “If Kim says we can sleep soundly, we can sleep soundly.”
He posts videos throughout the day, mixing reassuring messages with criticism of Russian troops. The aim is to strengthen the spirits of Mikolaiv’s residents, even if the crashes they hear are eerily close.
“What can I say? It’s the 17th day of the war, everything is going well and morale is excellent,” Kim said over the weekend, which began with news of an airstrike on a residential neighborhood. “We have freedom and we are fighting for it. As for them, all they have is slavery. We want all our dreams to come true and we are moving in that direction. Together towards victory.”
the targets
The fireball lit up the night sky as if it were an early dawn. It was another day of Russian bombing. On the 7th, Russian forces had launched an early-morning attack that dragged residents out of bed.
A cruise missile had hit a barracks of the Ukrainian 79th Assault Brigade, full of sleeping soldiers. Eight were killed and others were missing, their bodies buried under rubble.
In a neighborhood of high-rise buildings, residents alternated between clearing debris from their homes and rushing to underground bomb shelters amid continued shelling. The missiles blew up windows and scattered shrapnel across furniture and appliances.
“See how the Russian world is rescuing us,” says Marina Babenko, a mother of two, mocking Putin’s claim that Russia is fighting a war of liberation. “We were living very well and we had what we needed. Now they are bombing residential areas, women and children.”
Those who don’t surrender
Two elderly women were sitting on a bench in a city park, caring for three small children, when their conversation was interrupted by the eerie sound of an air raid siren. The women continued to talk. After a few minutes, they got up slowly, put the smallest child in a stroller and left without haste.
Russian rocket attacks set the pace of life in Mikolaiv, but many townspeople are determined to play the song in a key of their own choosing.
There has been an exodus in the last 15 days. Large convoys of cars and buses jammed traffic on the Varvarisvski Bridge — an escape route and a prize that Russian forces covet.
But if they enter the city, in addition to Ukrainian military forces, Moscow troops will have to face people like Dmitri Dmitriev, a journalist who put down his pen to wield a submachine gun. On a recent visit to the newsroom of the website he works for, there were more guns than journalists. Ammo boxes littered the floor. “We are all participating in the resistance.”
the wounded
At Urban Hospital No. 3, Anna Smetana sits on a bed, crying. She is a mother, is 40 years old and wears a peach colored dress with black polka dots. His shoulder and leg are wrapped in bloody bandages.
Two days earlier, Smetana and six of her co-workers at a local orphanage were driving to a village where children had been taken to when the war broke out. About 25 km from the city, she says, a Russian armored vehicle opened fire on the van they were in.
Three of Smetlana’s colleagues were incinerated in the fire that consumed the vehicle. She was shot twice in the shoulder and one in the leg.
The hospital’s medical director, Dmitri Kosolov, said Smetana was one of 25 patients who were being treated there for injuries sustained from shelling and gunfire in just one day. “We thought the coronavirus was a nightmare, but this is hell.”
the defenders
A propeller plane parked on the runway of Mikolaiv’s small international airport is covered in black marks from machine gun fire. Inside the airport building, the security screening area is completely destroyed.
Russian troops briefly seized the terminal at the start of the war, but were driven out shortly afterwards by Ukrainian fighters. Since then, Moscow forces have not stopped trying to retake the airport so that its transport planes can bring in troops and equipment.
But, at least so far, the Ukrainians have not stopped stopping them.
“We have a very strong position. We are waiting for them,” says Sergeant Ruslan Khoda. “There’s nothing unexpected. We know when they’re arriving and where from. And we’re ready to say ‘hello, stupid Russian boys’.”
a boring night
Last Monday, Governor Kim was in a somber mood in his video message posted earlier in the evening. He recognized that the situation had worsened. “There’s no logical sense in that,” he said. “But the initiative is on our side, and we are moving.”
And with that he said “good night” to the inhabitants of Mikolaiv on the 18th day of the war: “I wish you all a boring night.”
