Target of intense air attacks, strategic location on the road to Odessa, Mykolayiv proudly resists attacks from Moscow. Many of the inhabitants of this Russian-speaking port city in southern Ukraine are taking refuge in the shelters, remnants of the Second World War.
With our special correspondents in Mykolayiv, Clea Broadhurst and Jad El Khoury
In the streets of Mykolayiv, shelling echoes in the distance. Ivanka’s gestures stop when she hears them.
She lives in a building that was hit by a rocket a few days ago, in the south of the city.
I heard an explosion and was thrown against the hallway wall. It stunned me the tremor was so powerful. And now we have no more heating, no more electricity, no more water. These bastards always do that, attack us when we sleep
►Also listen: Mykolayiv, the last rampart on the southern coast of Ukraine
The inhabitants of the city unfortunately do not all have a shelter in which to take refuge. Svetlana, who lives a little further north, repeats her luck of having one nearby:
We go there twice a day, and for the last three nights we have slept there because the situation has gotten worse. When I hear shelling, it takes my breath away. And when I hear the alarm ringing, and I go to the bunker, my knees are shaking and I can’t breathe from the stress it’s causing me
At the same time, the alarm on his phone app goes off. She takes a bag, her elderly aunt by the hand, and guides us into the shelter.
Confined by the dozens in this damp space, 10-year-old Albina shows us the drawings she makes when she is locked up here.
I draw a family, a mother and her daughter. And then I draw Russian tanks in our city… and the moment when Ukrainian planes destroy them. I also drew the moment when Russia will be completely burned
Around her in the bunker, everyone nods in front of her drawings.
