Sometimes with makeshift means, they are also organizing to support the forces that have so far been crushed by the Russian assaults on the road to Odessa, the great Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

"I came to take my service, but there is no service, so I just take my clothes", she despairs.

"I used to work here but now everything is destroyed. At 56, how am I going to find a job? It's over for me."

"Why are they bombing?" the nurse asks indignantly, "these patients need our care".

As in support of his point, on the other side of the building, in an alley hidden from view, in a feverish atmosphere, a small crowd of drug addicts rushes for the distribution of methadone.

Despite the damage, the strike caused no casualties, said Oleg Kondratenko, one of the establishment's managers.

"Patients in the psychiatric hospital are in other buildings that were not affected," he said.

Nurses in tears in the courtyard of the psychiatric hospital in Mykolaiv, in the south of Ukraine, hit by a Russian bombardment, on March 22, 2022 BULENT KILIC AFP

In the main courtyard, staff members and a handful of young volunteers work to erase the most visible traces of it, sweeping up and picking up the pieces of glass.

"In the face of Russian aggression, we have to participate in one way or another," says a young volunteer in a black down jacket and hat from western Ukraine.

"I want to join Territorial Defence, but they don't have enough guns for everyone, so for now I'm helping like that," he adds.

"We have to clean everything up because they can bomb again and if there is broken glass left it will be even more dangerous."

"Yesterday we cleaned a warehouse and protected the windows with tape," he says.

"I'm a handyman, I need to do something and I'm more useful here," continues the young man, before being interrupted by the hospital manager who prevents him from giving his name or giving it. say more for security reasons.

"Totally Disturbed"

An employee of a road company, Oleg Yarchenko and his wife Lilia travel in his brown van around the territorial defense checkpoints to ask the men on duty what their needs are and to supply them.

He brings them "wood for fire, cigarettes or food", but also medicines or sleeping bags, lists this 54-year-old man with a beard in battle who leans on a cane.

The company's trucks also supply the surrounding villages whose access roads have been destroyed, says Oleg Yarchenko, whose children fled to Bulgaria via Odessa a few days ago.

"You have to be totally mentally deranged to start a war in the 21st century," he rages about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the parking lot of the Walmart supermarket, one of the city's shops still open, Nikolaï Oskchik, a former professional driver, also makes his modest contribution to the war effort.

Helped by a deaf-mute friend, he displays on the hood of his blue Moskvitch car, a 37-year-old quasi-antique, a bric-a-brac of vacuum cleaner parts, kitchen accessories and other utensils, which he offers to soldiers or sells them at half price "to buy medicine".

Nikolai Oskchik, a former professional driver, sells on the hood of his Soviet-era Moskvitch car, a bric-a-brac of second-hand parts, in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, March 22, 2022 BULENT KILIC AFP

"I'm too old to fight," sighs the 69-year-old widower, father of a military nurse, but I can at least do that for them."

© 2022 AFP