war and summer
By KONRAD SCHULLER, photos: DANIEL PILAR
Like the grown-ups: Danilo and his friends play "Blockpost".
The password is a Ukrainian tongue twister, the toll goes to the army.
August 31, 2022 · Kryvyj Rih, that was always iron and hard work.
Now Putin has invaded Ukraine, and everyone is meeting at the lake.
Kryvyi Rih, that is colonized iron.
Crooked like a centipede, the city's plan follows the conveyor belts of the pits, and these follow the ore a thousand meters underground.
Overburden heaps, opencast craters characterize the industrial area "Krywbass", and now in summer everyone meets at the quarry ponds as if there were no war.
In between, the residential quarters are lost: sometimes the strict grid of the blocks, sometimes the dirt tracks of the shantytowns populated by skinny cats.
650,000 people live here, and the Kryvorischstal steelworks is always the vanishing point.
During the Soviet Union it was a legend of industrialization, today it belongs to the global company Arcelor Mittal.
Its blast furnaces were once the largest in the world, and to this day they tower over the city like pyramids from another era.
Legend of the Soviet era: The blast furnaces of the Krivorischstal steelworks were once the largest in the world.
Since Russia closed the export ports, most workers have been on forced leave.
And from these blast furnaces the tracks go out again.
First to the Ukrainian sister district of Donbass, a few hundred kilometers to the east.
It doesn't have ore, but it does have coal, and that's why Donbass and Kryvbass have had a brotherly barter relationship for generations.
Ore here, coal there, and steel mills at either end.
And then, of course, the route to the ports on the Black Sea starts here at the steelworks.
This is where Ukraine's steel, coal and ore are shipped around the world.
Or rather: They were shipped.
Because since Vladimir Putin closed the coast, since the Russian army either conquered or destroyed the coal mines and metallurgical works over in the Donbass, Kryvbass no longer gets any coke, and it also has no export ports for its ore and steel.
A little is still possible by rail via Poland, but the distance is long and ArcelorMittal says costs have increased fivefold since the beginning of the war.
The group has therefore shut down its iron mines for the time being.
The same goes for the city's second major pit king, oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.
However, both companies have retained their workforces for the time being.
They continue to pay two-thirds of their wages, even if all the wheels are no longer turning.
According to local union leader Yuri Samuilov, this compromise is based on an agreement between the oligarchs of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Before his election, he had declared war on the great godfathers of Ukraine, but Samuilov says
Russia's attack forced the oligarchs and the presidential office to enter into a ceasefire.
"You can't fight two wars at once." As a result, says the trade unionist, around 150,000 people in Kryvyi Rih are now on compulsory paid leave.
Tens of thousands more lost their jobs when the war began.
Smaller companies could not have afforded the expensive continued payment of wages.
The Kryvbass industrial zone with its iron mines was considered a main Russian target in the first weeks of the attack on Ukraine.
Since their tanks got stuck, the barriers have been cleared away.
If you want to go shopping in Kryvyi Rih, you will find everything you need in the shops.
But many lack the money since the war has stopped the wheels here.
Russian is spoken in Kryvyi Rih.
Still, there's nothing to suggest that people pine for Putin.
The benches are painted Ukrainian blue and yellow, and pro-Russian slogans are not to be found even on the most hidden fences.
Between the shafts and blast furnaces of Kryvyi Rih, the block quarters of the workers are lost...
...or the shanty towns where skinny cats roam the dusty streets.
Kryvyi Rih hasn't taken many hits in this war.
When the bomb alarm goes off, people shrug their shoulders and move on.
So this summer there is a kind of tense holiday mood in Kryvyi Rih.
The city hasn't taken many hits yet, and since the Russian advance stalled, so have the roadblocks.
The steel hedgehogs welded together are only left on the sidewalk at major intersections, just in case.
The beer kiosks are open until nine, police hour at ten.
Kryvyi Rih used to be considered one of the cities that could defect to Putin.
The workers in the mines and smelters come from all over the Soviet Union, from anywhere between the Baltic Sea and East Siberia.
To this day, people here speak more Russian than Ukrainian, and up until a few years ago pro-Russian candidates were still winning elections in this region.
But since 2014, after Putin's first raid on Ukraine, the mood seems to have changed.
The best example of this is President Zelenskyy.
He is from this city, as a boy he spoke Russian.
Today he embodies Ukraine's will to survive.
Others follow him.
Olexandr Wilkul for example.
Previously, as governor, he was one of the main representatives of the pro-Russian current in the country. Today he is the head of the military administration in Kryvyi Rih.
At the beginning of the war, one of his tweets became legendary.
One of his former friends had defected to Russia and invited him to do the same.
Wilkul's answer: "F*ck you, traitor, together with your masters!"
Authorities displayed burnt-out Russian military vehicles in the center of Kryvyi Rih.
Probably many think so today in this Russophone Ukrainian city.
In the center, grandparents show their grandchildren an exhibition of destroyed Russian tanks, while the boys press their noses against the fence.
The flower pots between the blocks are freshly painted in the national blue and yellow, and the Virgin Mary with a bazooka is emblazoned on T-shirts instead of the Infant Jesus.
And probably this dominance of patriotic images is more than just the result of pressure of opinion.
If there are hidden pro-Russian sentiments here somewhere, they certainly don't leave any traces.
The Ukrainian flags have not been damaged anywhere, and there are no pro-Russian scrawls even on the most remote factory fences.
“Bayraktar” is playing in the taxi, a rap about the drones that the Ukrainians use to destroy the “Orks” tanks.
The chorus of the song:
And people are alert.
Nina Pavlovna and Halyna Yehorovna, for example, two talkative pensioners on a bench in front of their block.
One was "Kadrowik", i.e. personnel manager in a combine, the other was an accountant.
You speak Russian, like everyone here, because how can you learn Ukrainian at eighty?
One of her friends, says Nina Pavlovna, switched languages anyway.
Since her son died in the war, she hasn't said a word in Russian.
In front of the blocks right next to the "Oktober" quarry pond, two old ladies talk about what it's like to speak Russian and feel Ukrainian.
Nina Pavlovna
Halyna Yehorovna
In fact, they really wanted to talk.
They wanted to tell how they are taking care of the tens of thousands of refugees who are pouring into Kryvyi Rih from the Russian-occupied territories and are now living in the homes of people who have gone to Poland or Germany.
They wanted to report how they collect clothes and how they organize music festivals for children.
Even when the bomb alarm went off, they kept chatting, screaming, because no one listened to the siren anymore.
But then the two ladies looked at each other and hesitated.
You could almost read her mind: Who are we actually talking to?
Why are these foreigners taking pictures all the time?
Strangers are suspicious.
Who knows whether after the next photo the next Russian rocket will come?
Nina and Halyna suddenly become taciturn.
Later,
Danilo, the boy in the hat, fled the Kherson region with his parents when the Russians came.
Now he is one of many tens of thousands of refugees in Kryvyi Rih and collects money for the Ukrainian army on his self-made “block post”.
Not just the grannies, the little boys too.
Bohdan, Danilo, Timofej and Vlad have built their own “block post” at the bend where the quarry pond goes: a real checkpoint, just like the big ones, only made of tires and branches.
A cardboard sign reads a slogan that equates Putin with organs in the middle of the body, and Danilo, who has just fled the occupied territory with his parents, explains that money is being collected for the army here.
As a test of attitude, the boys demand the performance of a notorious tongue twister with the unpronounceable Ukrainian words for wheat bread, train and strawberry, which every Russian spy is known to fail at.
If you don't manage the tongue twister, you have to pay.
We pay and reach the lake.
It used to be the October granite quarry, but it has been drowning since the end of Soviet power.
Now, on the ledges of the crater wall, everything that feels like sun is gathering in Kryvyi Rih.
The air is full of shish kebab smoke and children screaming, and someone has set up an electric boxing machine.
He sings "Off to the fight, torero" when a family man has shown his little son how a real guy hits him in such a way that no more grass grows.
The boys practice ass bombs from the rocks, the women pose kissing their lips.
The "October" granite quarry flooded when the Soviet Union went under.
Now everything meets here at the lake, because even if there is war, it is still summer.
Ruslan and Oleh are sitting on the edge of the rock.
They have Budweiser with them and their boombox plays Notorious BIG, which is American gangster rap from the 90s.
Ruslan and Oleg were still young then, the quarry hadn't flooded yet, and the bikers were partying on the crater floor.
Now both are fathers with a block apartment.
Both brought their wives and children to Poland when the war started.
One is a cleaning lady there now, the other has a factory job.
Oleh is worse off than Ruslan because Oleh lost his job.
When he showed up at his construction company on the first day of the war, they told him: Come back next week.
Next week they said: Come next month, and the next month it was: Over, get your papers.
He fetched her without resentment and went to the War Commissariat to enlist in the army.
But because he had never served, they sent him away again, and since then he has made a living from small jobs that get him friends.
"I'm fine," he says.
"The bad thing is that I can't send anything to my wife."
Ruslan has it better and worse again.
Its mine, the "Gwardyjska" pit, is still in operation.
It exports overland to Poland, so Ruslan goes underground every day, down to minus 1,300 meters.
Ruslan says there are already pictures of thirty colleagues who died in the war on the mine's plaque, but the company reported him as indispensable.
So he didn't have to go to the front, even though he served.
Oleg Pushkariow (42, right), unemployed, and Ruslan Panchenko (53), miner, at the Oktyabrsky quarry pond
Ruslan's sorrow is his older daughter.
She's married to a Ukrainian officer, and that's why she doesn't want to go to Poland at all.
Although she has a small child.
When Ruslan presses, she says, fleeing isn't an option.
Her husband is a tank officer at the Donbass front, so she can't just run away.
Instead, she tattooed the Ukrainian trident coat of arms on her arm and stayed there.
Her father can speak with angel and devil tongues, it doesn't help.
The curfew is coming.
A couple of boys in their early twenties are still jumping on the outcrop.
One with a disarming child's smile is called Denis and he has a Wolfsangel tattooed on his neck.
It was once the symbol of the SS division "Das Reich", today it is the symbol of the Ukrainian regiment "Azov", which has become a legend after the unsuccessful defense of the port city of Mariupol.
Denis is not part of this unit, but he is impressed by their fighting spirit, and so he now wears the Wolfsangel on his skin.
He is a soldier on leave, two of his comrades died before his eyes.
One tried to break through a tank with a bazooka, but those inside the tank could still shoot.
In the end, everyone was dead, the Russian tank crew and the Ukrainian.
Denis himself is a machine gunner.
In battle he has to keep the Russians under fire so that nobody raises their heads.
With this type of shooting, says Denis, there is not much aiming.
You just fill the air with lead.
Has he ever killed anyone?
– "I have no idea." And is it true that this Wolfsangel stands for racism?
"No," Denis says.
In his unit there are Jews, Muslims and Buryats, and everyone is equal at the front.
And immediately afterwards, with that childish radiance, he talks about Maxim Tesak, his role model.
This is a Russian Hitler fan who rose to fame with a gay-hunting campaign.
that this Wolfsangel stands for racism?
"No," Denis says.
In his unit there are Jews, Muslims and Buryats, and everyone is equal at the front.
And immediately afterwards, with that childish radiance, he talks about Maxim Tesak, his role model.
This is a Russian Hitler fan who rose to fame with a gay-hunting campaign.
that this Wolfsangel stands for racism?
"No," Denis says.
In his unit there are Jews, Muslims and Buryats, and everyone is equal at the front.
And immediately afterwards, with that childish radiance, he talks about Maxim Tesak, his role model.
This is a Russian Hitler fan who rose to fame with a gay-hunting campaign.
"Denis A" is a machine gunner in the army.
Now he has a few days of leave from the front.
He says the "Wolfsangel" on his neck has nothing to do with racism.
Even if it was the sign of an SS division.
"Denis B" and Elizaveta: She wants to be a Tiktok star, but nobody in Kryvyi Rih is interested in gothic punk.
On the path up to the rim of the crater, Denis overtakes a young man and a young woman.
Her name is Elizaveta, his name is also Denis.
And Denis B is the opposite of Denis A: instead of a bomber cut and wolfsangel, silky hair with women's sunglasses, instead of free chest muscles, a T-shirt with a delicate pink decoration.
The voice is soft and feminine.
Elizaveta, his girlfriend, wears a spiked collar.
Her dress is black, her eye shadow is even blacker, and her lips have steel piercings.
She's hoping for a career as a Tiktok star, but since no one in this whole Kryvyi Rih likes gothic punk but her, she works in a pizzeria first.
The wages are down since the war, but what can you do?
It is enough to live on and sometimes also for a donation to the army.
One click on the bank app and maybe Denis A will get
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