The weight of war grows heavier in Ukrainian sanctuary city

For one jaded, ragged Ukrainian woman driven out of her home by Russian bombs, her soldier husband is in danger in the war front lines Safe haven seemed close at hand when, a few days ago, her morning train screeched into the stately but chilly Art Nouveau station in Lvov, the country’s westernmost major city.

It shouldn’t have been. The middle-aged teacher was kindly but firmly told that there were no vacancies in any of the IDP shelters and that she had to keep moving west, out of the Ukraine.

“When we said we couldn’t find a place for her here, she cried and cried and cried,” said Anna Bystritskaya, a 27-year-old volunteer who greeted arrivals at the station. “She said that she could not leave Ukraine while her husband was serving at the front. But in the end, that was what she had to do.”

A woman hugs her boyfriend on a train platform while there is snow on the ground.

In Lviv, Karina Gudova says goodbye to her boyfriend Vitaly Lomnitsky, who was drafted into the army.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

As the weather turns harsher, Ukrainians escaping bombardment, cold and hardship in the country’s war zones are finding that areas once considered prime havens – those closest to the Polish border and NATO territory – are also suffering. reeling under the weight of caring for displaced people and power outages caused by an extended Russian air offensive.

“We want to help everyone,” Bystritskaya said. “But we are sinking too.

During the nine months of the war, Lviv, an architectural gem with a pre-war population of about 750,000, served as an important humanitarian center for those who are forced to leave their homes
where. From war-torn villages, towns, and cities along the jagged southeast-northeast arc of the front line, the exodus has grown to biblical proportions.

By United Nations estimatesabout 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, in addition to nearly 8 million who have left Ukraine altogether.

The latest wave of displacement has come from areas in and around Kherson, the strategic provincial capital to the south, which was recaptured by Ukraine from Russian forces two weeks ago. A few days after changing hands, he came under fierce fire from across the Dnieper. The river where the Moscow troops sought to establish a new front line.

More than 30 civilians were killed in Kherson last week and dozens more were injured in attacks that Ukrainian officials called revenge. Even before the shelling began, the humanitarian situation in the city was desperate, in large part because the retreating Russians had destroyed as much of the energy infrastructure as possible.

Ukrainian officials said on Saturday they had begun supplying Kherson with electricity, but the situation was deemed so dire that city residents were urged to leave the city voluntarily if they could, and hospital patients were being transferred to safer areas.

Many of the displaced want to stay in or around Lviv as a last chance to stay in their homeland rather than go into unknown exile.

Relatives are waiting for the train.

A mother holds her daughter in her arms while waiting for a train in Lvov.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

But as temperatures drop below freezing and snow blankets the city’s picturesque streets and squares, some newcomers are having to reconsider those hopes. Last week, after one of the most brutal Russian shellings of the war led to power outages in virtually every corner of the country, Lviv too was plunged into darkness.

“The whole city without light” Mayor Andrei Sadovy posted on Twitter on Wednesday.

Emergency repairs quickly restored more than half of generating capacity, although electricity, heat and plumbing remained severely limited due to controlled power outages designed to protect the badly damaged nationwide grid. Provincial government Maxim Kozitsky said during a briefing on Thursday that less than a third of consumers in the Lviv region could have access to electricity at the same time.

Ukrainian authorities say that Russia strategy for attacking civilian infrastructure — which he has been doing since February. 24 invasions, but with brutal laser focusing over the past six weeks, is a deliberate attempt to demoralize the people of the country, exacerbating deprivation, especially in places like capital, Kyivwhere some semblance of normality returned in late summer and autumn.

A breathtaking composite nighttime satellite image of Europe taken by NASA this month showed Ukraine as a largely darkened space with only small points of light coming from a few major cities, including Kyiv and Lvov.

In his late-night address to compatriots on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the deadly Russian strikes that have killed a newborn boy in recent days. Attempts to destroy the energy infrastructure, he said, were a futile attempt to assert dominance that Moscow’s forces failed to achieve on the battlefield.

People wait for a train to depart and arrive at a darkened station.

Station in Lvov. Many displaced people are on the move as the country faces power outages due to Russian shelling.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

“They don’t know how to fight” Zelensky said. “The only thing they can do is terrorize. Either energy terror, or artillery, or rocket terror – that’s all Russia has degraded to under the current leadership.

The Kremlin simultaneously denies targeting civilian energy facilities and insists they are legitimate military targets.

As the fighting drags on, city and regional authorities in the Lviv region are working hard to accommodate hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, opening up permanent housing in addition to makeshift facilities hastily put into operation at the start of the war, such as schools and gyms. stadiums.

Priority is given to women traveling with young children or pregnant women or both. Those who arrive alone, like the teacher from Kherson in her 40s, are usually told that a safe and warm space is too much appreciated.

Yaroslav Gorniy, the owner, said he has room for about 15 more displaced people in the hotel-turned-hospice, about 10 miles from Lvov, in addition to the two dozen already living in the house. But the power supply was too unreliable to take on anyone else, he said, even with many hours of planned outages designed to dampen demand.

“We can’t heat all these rooms,” Gorny said.

Together with their eight children, Yelena Chhwan, 30, and her husband Alexander, 36, fled their home in the heavily bombed southern city of Nikopol in mid-summer. The family now shares two state-paid rooms at the Gorny Hotel.

A mother with eight children sits on a bed in a room.

Chhwan with children at the Helikon Hotel.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

When they first came to Lviv, they lived for a month in a fenced-off sports arena, where children aged from 3-year-old twins to a 14-year-old boy slept on the floor.

“The hotel is much better,” Elena said. “Now the kids have beds.”

Lvov shows some signs of social trouble caused by by the crowd of arrivals and the stress of war. In relief tents, drunken men sometimes join the soup lines along with mothers and children. Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska wrote on social media over the weekend that current issues like domestic violence still need to be addressed, even as the nation’s attention is focused on existential struggles.

However, Lviv exudes solidarity amid hardships and hardships. One evening last week it was freezing rain and then turned to snow, covering the dark streets in slippery slush. On the broad embankment in front of the ornate nineteenth-century Lvov Opera House—usually a beacon of light, now visible only as a dim mass—a grey-haired man in a long coat slipped and fell heavily on his elbow.

Bystanders rushed to the rescue, including a young couple whose own legs nearly slipped out from under their feet before they managed to get the man to his feet and yank his glasses out of the slush.

A woman cooks by candlelight.

Natalya Bautina from Donetsk cooks by candlelight at the Helikon Hotel after the power outage on Saturday.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

On Saturday, when the settlers sat down to dine in the basement of another converted hotel, the lights went out. In the kitchen, lit by flickering candles, volunteer cook Natalya Bautina, who had fled Donetsk with her husband and parents, continued to serve plates of steaming borscht.

“We feel safe here, and people are kind to us — the times require everyone to help,” said Bautina, 42. “We are all Ukrainians.”