Russia has been conducting military maneuvers since February 10 in Belarus. They must end this Sunday. While waiting for the Russian soldiers to leave the area, as the Belarusian authorities have promised, on the other side of the border, the Ukrainians are worried. This is the case in Slavoutich, a town located 12 km from Belarus.
From our special envoys in Slavutich,
Erected in the middle of a forest, Slavoutich, the last city built during the time of the Soviet Union, is now on the front line.
Built after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 to rehouse residents evacuated from the contaminated exclusion zone, the city continues to prepare for the worst, while keeping its cool.
Timour Gismatoulin is the head of the youth center in Slavoutich. ” The risk of aggression he said, it has always existed, we have always lived with this very close danger. It’s just that before, we paid less attention to it and now everyone is interested in it. »
” Last year, we found ourselves in a similar situation, when there were maneuvers between the Russians and the Belarusians, but it was much calmer “, says Timour, in the room which serves as a meeting room for local youth, a high-ceilinged room, with ocher stone walls and Soviet futuristic stained glass windows.
Slavoutich in full preparation
” Today, it looks like there is an escalation and intelligence tells us that there are preparations for an attack. But there are differences between what our intelligence services say and what foreign intelligence says. Western media say they are going to attack such a day, while our services say no, there will be no attack because there are not enough of them to be able to seize the territory says the young man who is about to enroll as a volunteer in the Chernihiv territorial defense force, a reserve intended to support the regular army in the event of a Russian invasion.
Slavoutich is preparing for any eventuality. The emergency will be to provide the bare necessities, water and electricity to the population. The heat production plant, which runs on gas, has three days of reserves, says the mayor of the city. Built after the Chernobyl disaster, it has shelters against chemical attacks and radiation, but these would not be of much help in the event of bombardments, recognizes the local elected official, Yuri Fomichev.
The local authorities are also developing an alternative plan to continue to transport the approximately 2,000 workers from the plant, if relations with the neighboring country were to deteriorate. Today, the special train that daily takes a thousand employees from Slavoutich to Chernobyl passes through Belarusian territory.
Fear of another uprooting
But for Yuri Fomichev, the trickiest thing to manage is not the logistical issues:
The most difficult thing is to avoid falling into collective hysteria, as the opposing party would like by massing troops along our borders. Most of the inhabitants arrived from Prypiat, near the nuclear power station: they were evacuated after the accident. And today they are again worried about whether they will be evacuated. On the one hand, we must prepare as best we can, but we must not allow militarization to become the norm in our lives.
Tatiana Kuznetsova was four years old when reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Like the approximately 20,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, the city of the plant’s employees, she was evacuated with her family. Direction Kiev, then Poltava, at the grandmother’s and finally Moldova, which Tatiana was then forced to leave, with the fall of the USSR.
The specter of a new conflict awakens in her the bad memories of these uprootings: The last days, she confides, I went through various scenarios in my head. But what to do ? You cannot run away from your destiny. Come what may. Besides, I buried my parents last year and I can’t take their graves with me. »
Alexandra Bondarenko left Donetsk with her two-month-old baby when war broke out there in 2014. She has rebuilt her life in Slavoutich, but will not hesitate to leave and rebuild a new one elsewhere, if necessary.
I’ve been through it once before, it didn’t kill me. I think I’m ready, inside, to make the decision to leave if necessary. But my friends here make the atmosphere very heavy, they are very worried and they call me asking for advice because I have already been through this
Report: In Slavoutych, residents do not want to be displaced again
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