To convert into a warlord when you are a doctor is not an easy task. Military prefect of Nikopol, the surgeon Evgueni Yevtuchenko knows this since the first day of the battle of the Dnieper, he who went from the scalpel to the machine gun in the blink of an eye. Next to him, his gas mask, which he never separates. “Look, there they are, right in front.” On the other side of the river, you can make out a tangled bank of buildings and factory chimneys. The left bank is occupied by the Russian army, supported by Chechen units.
“The people who stayed are very scared,” says the pop-looking surgeon, with his long beard, black outfit and Orthodox icons that seem to protect him as much as the sandbags. The Russians can attack at any time and they regularly bombard the surroundings.”
Surgeon Evgueni Yevtuchenko, military prefect of Nikopol.
Alexandre Gerfaut for L’Express
On the dike that protects this city of 100,000 inhabitants, a third of whom have already left, Ukrainian soldiers patrol with binoculars in hand, on the lookout for the slightest boat emerging from the opposing side, immersed in a light mist. For many, these men claim to be Dnieper Cossacks, the armed bands that had founded their sitch (bastion) on the banks of the river and in the Ukrainian steppe in the 16th century.
The front line here is a cruelly meandering river bed. Held back by a dam, the Dnieper is, in front of the city, four kilometers wide and Russian commandos have already tried to cross it, in vain. But what worries the prefect-surgeon above all are the high chimneys slightly to the left when you observe the river from his window: the Enerhodar nuclear power plant, in Russian hands. With six reactors, it is the largest in Europe. During its conquest in early March, Putin’s army did not hesitate to fire cannons on the surroundings of the site, with fires starting and damage to buildings.
Even the fish avoid the river
“For the moment, it is the modus vivendi, comments the military prefect. The Russians seem to be careful, but we cannot exclude any new slippage. And there, all of Europe could be concerned. On the spot, the teams of technicians, retained by the Russians, were not relayed, and to listen to the young mayor, Alexander Sayuk, computer engineer in civilian life, they are exhausted, subject to human failure. Ukrainian forces are reluctant to counterattack for the same reason, to avoid the risk of another Chernobyl.
Because of the dangers, the Nikopolitans stopped fishing in the waters of the river, even to survive. To believe that the Enerhodar plant and its 950 megawatt reactors have been taken hostage in order to fix this no man’s land that even fish seem to avoid.
The light mist reassures by veiling the banks, but also increases the anguish of the souls of the city, whose streets bear the scars of war: barricaded doors, abandoned gardens, porches sheltering refugees from the Donbass, waiting for new life paths, necessarily uncertain.
The Enerhodar nuclear power plant.
Alexandre Gerfaut for L’Express
“No city in Ukraine is safe from Putin’s strikes,” grumbles Alexander Sayuk. A few days ago, we still got hit by a missile. Dnieper is to prevent their dictatorship from advancing to Europe.” Strange confrontation, by interposed nuclear threat, not coming from a missile, but from a power plant which still turns and supplies electricity to both sides.
The lock of Nikopol
It is not excluded, however, that the Ukrainian army will launch a counter-offensive on the other side. “We have agents and saboteurs who inform us and prepare the ground for us,” a senior officer said on condition of anonymity. He fears that the Russians will attack again towards the north, in the direction of Kryvyi Rih, the birthplace of President Volodymyr Zelensky, which the army and volunteers were able to defend in March. “The enemy’s idea is to cut off our forces and prevent reinforcements from reaching the threatened Donbass.” Same fear on the part of the military prefect, who believes that Nikopol is the great lock preventing the Russians from going up north and moving west, in order to target Odessa.
In the neighboring town of Zaporijia, upstream from the great river, preparations are being made to welcome refugees, despite the Iskander missiles which rain down from time to time. The support center has become a gigantic beehive where young and old, engineers and the unemployed, students and workers are active. Between boxes and bags of pasta, Constantin Chernishov, a computer coder and brilliant inventor aged 25, has developed original software to adapt gifts and donations from the rear or from European countries to the needs of inhabitants or displaced persons, including the 7,200 arrived the day before.
“Point by point, the computer affects the boxes and packages in transit”, exclaims the computer specialist on the first floor of this house of solidarity, active from the first light of dawn. He too evokes the Cossack spirit in this city which was the stronghold of the Zaporogues, the peasant-soldiers sung by Apollinaire. “Whatever happens, we will resist until the end”, says Constantin behind his thick glasses, approved by two students busy filling medicine kits.
Drug distribution cell by an NGO in Zaporidjia.
Alexandre Gerfaut for L’Express
Abducted for six days
At the edge of Zaporijia, Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, one of the towns taken by the Russians, welcomes his constituents, those who were able to flee by smuggling routes. They are exhausted and their stories are appalling. “Many men have been kidnapped, relates Valentina, who managed to escape in time. We don’t know what happened to them.” Three days earlier, she adds, a column of 80 tanks and troop transports had set up on the outskirts, with soldiers of Chechen and Ossetian origin, an ethnic group from the Caucasus.
Aged 33, the mayor himself was kidnapped for six days, interrogated for several hours each night by agents of the FSB and the GRU, the Russian intelligence services, before being exchanged for nine prisoners. “I have no news from my deputies at the town hall, worries the city councilor, the first kidnapped elected official in the country, and Moscow has installed a mayor close to banditry in my place, a puppet under Putin’s orders, of course This is what occupied cities are going to look like!” The day before, the six buses planned for the evacuation of civilians were stolen by the Russians. “If Europe turns a blind eye, Russia will be even more of a threat in less than a year.” Then the private mayor of the town hall, who has become a national hero, goes deep into the night to take care of the displaced people whose faces are frozen with fear.
Peril Central
“It is now the whole of Ukraine which is rising up as one man against Russian aggression,” comments Serguei Bivlivnenko, historian and professor at the University of Zaporizhia. to rebel againstholodomor, the famine organized by Stalin in the 1930s, and there, suddenly, enough is enough. No more rule or barbarism will be tolerated. This too is the Cossack spirit. Even the majority of pro-Russians rallied to it!” He adds that the front line on the Dnieper, facing the nuclear power plant, corresponds to the border that the Cossacks have long defended against the Tatars.
At the edge of the river, twenty meters from the dike and its channel of uncertainty, an old lady with a sewn-up coat is digging her garden in front of a two-storey orange brick house. A former chief accountant at a nearby factory, Rimma Smirnova grows onions, tomatoes and peppers to supplement her retirement. She fears the faults of the Enerhodar power station less than the drunken soldiers opposite, those of her motherland. Because Rimma ends up admitting that she is Russian, from Samara, and that she could never have imagined that her country of origin would invade her host country, with so much savagery. In the evening, she draws the curtains so that the city is not targeted. Nikopol plunges into darkness as the peril plant shines brightly.