About 1am on Friday, Yuliia Verbytska woke to the sound of an air raid siren. She grabbed her teenage children – Dmitry, 17, and Olexiy, 12 – and sat in the corridor, checking her phone. In the sky above came an ominous whine. Minutes later, a Russian drone crashed into the disused soap factory down the road in Polyova Street. There was an enormous explosion.
“We don’t have a shelter in our building, so we hide behind two concrete walls. All the neighbours sit together. You wonder if this is your last moment,” she said. Friday’s raid followed a massive attack on Thursday on Verbytska’s home, Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, and on the capital, Kyiv, where 12 people were killed. “I haven’t slept for two days,” she said wearily.
Exhausted residents sweeping up glass and fixing broken panels pointed out that the latest attack came hours after a post from Donald Trump on social media. It said: “Vladimir, STOP.” Russia’s president, it seemed, had decided to ignore Trump’s rare rebuke. Despite peace negotiations and an appeal by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a month-long ceasefire, the Russians were bombing as usual.
One of the damaged buildings belongs to a charity, Heart of Kharkiv, where Verbytska works as a volunteer. Bits of concrete fell amid clothes and donated shoes. Children’s drawings were blown from a noticeboard. The charity’s wheelchairs and pushchairs survived unscathed. “I don’t believe in promises or words. Not from Trump or anybody else. I don’t really have much faith in anything any more,” Verbytska said gloomily.
By late morning, emergency service workers were still extinguishing small blazes in the now-ruined factory. Built in 1918, it once made soap for the Soviet Union. It went bankrupt last year. The Kremlin’s drones narrowly missed an old acacia tree by its entrance gate. They flattened a brick administration building. Firefighters doused charred beams and splashed among puddles and piles of twisted metal.
“They are fascists. Inhuman people. Barbarians. Cruel,” the complex’s security guard, Anton, said, when asked what he thought about Russians. “They want to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. That’s their plan.” He was sceptical that the peace process – Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks on Friday with Putin in Moscow – would lead to a settlement that might end the fighting.
The security guard said Zelenskyy would be unwise to accept the US’s latest leaked proposal. It envisages handing Crimea and four other Ukrainian regions to Russia. Ukraine gets back a sliver of territory in the Kharkiv region. “Today it’s five oblasts. Tomorrow, the Russians will demand another five. Zelenskyy should not sign,” he said. He dismissed Trump as a “Russian agent recruited long ago”, and said: “I’m disappointed that the Americans elected him.”
Russia says its devastating attacks are against Ukrainian military objects. Its latest murderous barrage follows a double strike this month on the north-eastern city of Sumy, in which 35 people were killed. Most were travelling on a bus when an Iskander missile exploded next to them. Overwhelmingly, the victims of Russia’s air raids are civilians. They include two children killed on Thursday and dug from the rubble of their Kyiv apartment block.
Liudmyla Hanzii, a pensioner, was at her home in Kharkiv’s Slobidsky district when the soap factory was hit. Her son, Andriy, showed off the bed where she had been sleeping. It was decorated with icons and a black-and-white photograph of Liudmyla as a young woman. “Mum heard a bang. All the glass came flying in. A teenage boy living next door dragged her out,” he said, adding she was being treated in hospital for minor injuries.
According to Anatoliy Yaskovets, the deputy head of Kharkiv fire station No 6, Russia has stepped up its air attacks. The frequency increased in January, he said, when Trump came back as US president. Apart from a brief pause last weekend, when Putin announced an Easter ceasefire, bombing was continuous. “It’s terror against the civilian population. There’s no time to react. It takes 50 seconds for a missile fired from Belgorod in Russia to arrive,” he said.
The Russians had recently changed tactics, he added. They now send a swarm of drones, one after another, at the same target. Three of his colleagues were killed last summer when they went to the scene of a drone strike. Twenty minutes later, a second drone incinerated their vehicle. Moscow was using drones to drop CS gas and delayed-action grenades, which detonate up to an hour after impact. They go off if touched, he explained.
Asked if he thought the war might end soon, Yaskovets answered: “Probably not.” He continued: “People are tired. There are air raid sirens all the time. It’s a psychological burden. Russia has been destroying our power stations and industrial infrastructure. The aim is to make people unhappy so they turn on Ukraine’s government.” His mobile phone rang with a popular song, Moscow Burns. “It’s my mother. She worries about me,” he said.
In February 2022, Russian armoured columns tried to seize Kharkiv. There was fierce fighting. Ukrainian units pushed the enemy back to the city’s edge. For the next six months, Kharkiv was repeatedly shelled. That autumn, a Ukrainian counteroffensive liberated most of the surrounding province. In recent months, though, the Russians have been advancing again, reoccupying the border town of Vovchansk last year, and swallowing villages.
How far could they go? Yaskovets said it was clear the Russians would try again to encircle and occupy Kharkiv. “Putin doesn’t intend to stop. He wants to take the south of Ukraine and go as far as the Dnipro River. He doesn’t have a big enough army to do that,” he suggested. In the meantime, there would be more drone attacks, and more casualties. “We’ve had four years of full-scale war. Somehow, people have got used to it,” he noted.
A group of soldiers from the Kraken regiment – breaking off for coffee at a Kharkiv petrol station – said Putin’s behaviour this week was not surprising. “By bombing us, he shows his true nature,” one of them, Saifula, said. He added: “My feeling is that Trump is not really a president at all. He’s a parody or a clone of a president. The whole world is laughing at him. Our only option now is to have a strong army and to carrying on fighting.”
