As fierce street battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces continue in the northern part of the town, a band of local police and volunteers have been journeying in daily to evacuate the last, terrified residents out of a place which was once home to 18,000 people.
In the end, Friday’s evacuations went ahead and, although Kharkivskyi’s car came under fire, he managed to make it out with an elderly couple in tow. Dressed in military-style fatigues and with a pistol tucked into his body armour, Kharkivskyi’s years of experience as a beat cop can hardly have prepared him for these rescue missions that require dodging drones and artillery fire. “We barely made it out of there,” he said in a shaky Instagram story filmed later in the day.
This region already spent seven months under Russian occupation at the start of the war, and if Vovchansk falls to Russia, it would be the first time Moscow has retaken a town already won back by Ukraine. In recent months,, as Kyiv experiences difficult shortages of reserves and weaponry, the latter partly caused by months of wrangling in Congress that delayed a huge US military aid package.
The visual consequences of this new offensive have been gut-wrenchingly familiar after more than two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine: urban landscapes assaulted with heavy weaponry, the glazed eyes of displaced residents who had little and have now lost it all, and spirited resolve from many soldiers and civilians who refuse to let the Russian army roll through the country unopposed.
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