Had to live underground
Ukrainian families live in the Kharkiv subway
Residents of Kharkiv live a new life underground.
From the source
The subway station is safer than the surface of the earth.
From the source
Ukrainians had to live in shelters.
From the source
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Thousands of residents of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv have been living for nearly a month in the halls of the city's underground network, which protects them from Russian artillery, rockets and cluster bombs, as well as daily rain, as Russia's attack on its neighbor has displaced 10 million people. That is, up to a quarter of the population of Ukraine, in a matter of weeks.
For the remaining residents, the city's metro system, built to withstand a nuclear war, appears to be the safest place.
Tents and mattresses are spread out on the platforms, while subway carriages remain idle, their doors open to provide more shelter.
Children chase each other on escalators, and it has become their favorite playground in this underground town.
Underground small town
In one of the subway cars Vladelina Igorevna, her mother and young children have been living for more than three weeks.
They often climb the escalators to get the fresh air that is scarce in these underground places, and their eyes hurt from the bright sunlight when they go up, which is why her two sons Nizar (six years old) and Makar (three years) are afraid to go out.
"Children hear bombs exploding in the distance, which is why they prefer to go down again and stay there," says Igorevna, 31. "Every day I want to go out for a walk, but I can't."
"It's like a small town," says Olek Kocha, holding Makar's hand. "There are about 50 children living in this station, out of about 200 or 300 people who live here. The children drew pictures supporting the Ukrainian armed forces that were hung on one of the marble columns." to the station.
He concludes: “We have been here for a long time;
We are all like a big family.”
The station's microphones, which once announced train delays, are now alerting new residents that volunteers have arrived with food.
There are electric kettles in the station, but no place to cook.
At least 25 people sleep in a single subway car, with clothes hanging from handrails and food boxes scattered on the floor.
Igorevna, a single mother, says that leaving is very difficult and dangerous.
They have no car and nowhere to go.
Besides, Kharkiv is their city.
“We are the people of Kharkiv to the core,” says her mother, Yelena, 61. “We had a beautiful city. They bombed our zoo and our churches;
They bombed all the beautiful things we had.”
Safer than home
The explosion destroyed the windows of their apartment.
Like many people who have taken refuge in the metro station, they have been here since February 24, the first day of the war.
That morning the family woke up to the sounds of explosions, but they could not believe that the war had begun.
She only realized this when she read the news.
And then the family left for the subway and they haven't left yet.
At first the new residents of the station slept on the benches.
It was so crowded that some had to sleep upstairs by the turnstiles, because the platforms were full.
And everyone thought they'd only be there for a night or two.
Station staff estimate that between 1,000 and 3,000 people remain at the station each day, with the number dropping even lower after some manage to escape.
Some live in these conditions since the first day of the war.
"Sleeping in this place is better than sleeping in the house with the danger of bombs," says Inna. "The conditions here are very bad, and we would not prefer to live here if we were not really afraid."
cold floors
People sleep on cool marble floors, occupying everything from the dressing rooms to the corridors.
Entire families set up makeshift small homes in stationary train cars.
The place is stuffy, the air thick with the smell of sweat, and some say it looks like a grave.
Hundreds of people use a few bathrooms, with a table on one side to carry their food and toiletries, and on the table are placed milk and biscuits next to soap and shampoo.
People seem tired.
The Kharkiv metro was opened in 1975, at the height of the Cold War, becoming the sixth metro system in the Soviet Union.
This is evident from the thick metal doors designed to protect civilians in the event of a nuclear attack.
Now the station's officials shut it down every night at 6 p.m., when the city is under a curfew.
4 wars in the city
Kharkiv bore the brunt of previous wars, which were the target of four battles between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
The memory of the Holodomor of the thirties, or the great famine, still evokes some resentment from Moscow by the citizens of Ukraine, where four million Ukrainians died in that famine when the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, imposed the system of forced labor on the collective farms.
Svetlana Yaroslavskaya, who also lives in the subway carriage, recounts how she accompanied her mother and grandmother, considered part of the aristocracy, to a camp in 1937, only to be released when Stalin died in 1953. “My mother cried all her life from The pain...they were very hard and brutal times.”
"The memories of wars are passed down through generations," says Martinova, as she eats popcorn.
The three women are shocked that this could happen again.
The buggies were much warmer, because they were originally intended largely for families, with young children or the elderly.
Citizen Alina Beluchitska, 25, had just started a new job as a social media manager when the war began.
Now, she is alone waiting for news from her husband in the front lines.
"I can't leave without him," she said, sitting on a bench on the subway.
She cried a lot at first, but she held on to hope after the few moments he called her online, and now she can text him, and she's less nervous.
bunkers against nuclear attacks
The construction of the Kyiv subway system, first begun in 1884 when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, is a feat of engineering and architecture.
Its stations are decorated with marble arches, beautiful mosaics, and decorative chandeliers.
But many stations, especially those in the city centre, were also built to serve a tactical purpose during the Cold War, when nuclear war was a constant threat.
Completed in the 1960s when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it houses stations built deep underground, designed to double protection in the event of a nuclear attack.
Arslan Station is the world's deepest underground metro station, located 346 feet (105.5 meters) underground.
In April, amid escalating threats from Russia on Ukraine's eastern border, the Kyiv city government released a map of nearly 3,000 designated bomb shelters in 47 of the city's 52 subway stations.
The Great Famine
Historians say the desperate starving residents of Ukrainian villages, deprived of their livelihood by the harsh decrees of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, were forced to eat grass, tree bark, flowers, rats and dogs.
People died on the streets, on sidewalks, at train stations, in agricultural fields, and on country roads.
About four million of them died in the famine, known as the Great Famine.
Today, as Ukraine battles Russian invaders and the dead are once again on the streets of cities, including Mariupol, which has been cut off from food supplies, the memory of the famine and its links to the Kremlin remain strong.
Former Washington Post columnist Ann Applebaum, author of the 2017 book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, says famine is one of the things in the back of the heads of Ukrainians now fighting on the ground. Part of history, remembered by Ukrainians as an attempt to eradicate them.
They are aware of trying to eliminate them again, which is why they are fighting now.”
Applebaum wrote that 13% of Ukraine's population died when Stalin imposed a "politics of forced labor" through state confiscation of private property, livestock, and equipment, and brutally punished peasants for failing to meet their quotas by taking their food.
Fearing inflaming Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin applied economic "sanctions" to areas that could not meet government demands.
• Four million Ukrainians died in the Great Famine when the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, imposed a system of forced labor on the collective farms.
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