Dangerous new Portals have suddenly opened up all across the land. The heroes thought their job done, but the newfound peace was never meant to last. Ten years have passed since the Lightbringers drove back the hordes of the Darkness and sealed the Portal from whence they came. “I hope we’ll have electricity soon, so we can live through this winter somehow,” he said.įollow all AP stories on the war in Ukraine at. It’s almost too much to even think about the deprivation that could lie ahead. Sevrukov said he’d asked a friend from Kharkiv, the regional capital, to buy him an electric heater - just in case the power is restored. If it weren’t for my son, I would freeze,” she said. Zoya Sevrukova said she’d been bedridden for seven years, and that she spends most of her time seated, playing solitaire with a worn pack of cards. In the darkness of his cramped, musty apartment, Sevrukov’s mother sat under a blanket on a sofa piled with plates of spoiled food. “I’m making tea for my mother on the fire but she only drinks a little bit to warm up for a short time.” Another resident joked that his home had become a five-room apartment after one of its exterior walls collapsed.Īnton Sevrukov, 47, toasted bread and heated a kettle of water over a fire to bring up tea to his disabled mother. One woman collected scraps of wood from a ground-floor apartment that was caved in by a Russian rocket strike. Makeshift lean-to structures dot the overgrown courtyards of their apartment complex where residents gather to cook over fires. It’s hard to cook, it’s hard to run between the apartment and where we cook. After the second explosion, all the other windows were destroyed,” she said. “After the first explosion wave, we lost one window and two were damaged. With no utilities, homes have become like rudimentary shelters from a medieval age where residents live by candlelight, gather water from wells and bundle up to fend off the cold.Īrtem’s grandmother, Iryna Panchenko, said she and her grandson have been sleeping in an abandoned apartment next door since all their windows were blown out by a Russian strike. With so much of the area’s towns destroyed and modern comforts all but disappeared, the drive for survival trumps any concerns about the preservation of what was before. As they worked, they warned an Associated Press reporter about the Russian land mines still hidden in the surrounding grass. In the center of Kurylivka, a group of men used a chainsaw to bring down a tree near a bus stop. Monday’s strikes hit Kyiv, Sumy in the northeast and Vinnytsia in western Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered and embarrassed by a Ukrainian strike on a key bridge to annexed Crimea, has intensified Russia’s bombing campaign, targeting civilian energy infrastructure around Ukraine and leaving many cities and towns without electricity. The threat of a winter without heating has even spread to other areas of Ukraine far from the front lines. Like in the Kharkiv region, ordinary Ukrainians are still living in thousands of homes that have been wrecked by Russian strikes, with leaky or damaged roofs and blown-out windows that are unable to provide protection against cold or wet weather. So I’m not scared of the cold, because I can find wood and heat the stove,” he said.Īuthorities in the Ukrainian-controlled areas of the neighboring, hotly contested Donetsk region have urged all remaining residents to evacuate, and warned that gas and water services in many areas will likely not be restored by winter. I’m sleeping in my clothes in our apartment.” “It’s cold and there are bombings,” Artem said Sunday as he helped his grandmother with the cooking. For them and the few other residents that remain in the complex in Kivsharivka, bundling up at night and cooking outdoors is the only way to survive. And like hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians, they are facing a season that promises to be brutal.Īrtem and his grandmother have been living without gas, water or electricity for around three weeks, ever since Russian missile strikes cut off the utilities in their town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. They can feel it in their bones as temperatures drop below freezing. The light is falling fast and they need to eat before the setting sun plunges their home into cold and darkness. KIVSHARIVKA, Ukraine (AP) - Nine-year-old Artem Panchenko helps his grandmother stoke a smoky fire in a makeshift outdoor kitchen beside their nearly abandoned apartment block.
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