Olga wipes away her tears, but no matter how fast she tries with her hands, she can't make them disappear from her face. She is leaning against a wall in the reception center set up by the Melitopol municipal administration, in the city of Zaporiya. While she waits for the time to be seen by one of the officials, she watches a series of videos that reflect the history of this city 126 kilometers south of where she is. “On February 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces invaded Melitopol”, reads the introduction of the short documentary that is being broadcast.
On the screen are images of Russian battleships entering the city en masse, always marked by the infamous letter Z, and of hundreds of people walking the streets with Ukrainian flags opposing the invasion. "Peaceful people stopped the military vehicles with their bare hands... Melitopol became the center of the partisan movement," the video continues, followed closely by about twenty people who, like Olga, have come to collect the humanitarian aid packages. that correspond to them each month.
"This is not a humanitarian aid center, it is the Melitopol embassy and people come here to solve any concern or problem they have with their personal or administrative affairs," says Caterine, 26, in charge of showing the multiple functions of this center that, in addition to caring for the 20,000 refugees who settled in the city, continues to care for the people who remain in Melitopol. She does it through her social networks, including her Telegram channel, which they can access thanks to the use of VPN, which allows them to bypass the censorship imposed by the Russian network.
Every day, dozens of them ask questions or tell their stories through these channels, despite the danger they face. If they are discovered, they are usually abducted by Russian forces and interrogated. Many times the disappearance can take hours, days or months. More than 500 people are missing. “We lived in terror”, confirms Olga. “They kidnap people, they steal as much as they can, they seize houses...”, this woman specifies when reconstructing what the life she left behind in Melitopol is like. She decided to flee in September, before the Russians held the illegal referendum with which they sought to justify the annexation of Melitopol, and the rest of the province of Zaporiya.
He says that everyone who was found with Ukrainian currency or spoke Ukrainian was taken for interrogation. In his case, he avoided going out, he only did it to do the shopping. She was terrified of being arrested, but above all she was frightened by the large number of armed vehicles that were often seen passing through the city. Tanks, rocket launchers, everything imaginable. "Helicopters and planes flew very low... Once they ordered us to go into the basement for three days waiting for them to come to our houses to review our documentation," she reconstructs.
As the months passed, the Russians became more nervous. They carried out constant raids in search of partisans. "Of course there are partisans, many, but each person keeps it as a great secret," he explains. In his case, he says that he was happy when he found out that there were explosions in the city. As we speak to her, the death of a local police chief who worked for the Russians was revealed by an explosive at the entrance to her residence. And, a day later, the death of 20 Russian soldiers after having suffered poisoning with an unknown substance.
These types of attacks are constantly heard. “We still have 70,000 trapped in the city; we can call Melitopol the largest prison in Europe, ”explains the city's deputy mayor, Serhii Pryima, meeting with his team discussing strategies for the coming weeks.
In these 14 months, more than 70% of the inhabitants left the city, but they are concerned about the future of those who remain there in the face of the announced counteroffensive with which Ukraine seeks to recover occupied territories.
In recent weeks they have warned that Russia has reinforced the city with troops and they have mined perimeters. "At the moment the city Melitopol is part of the Russian district of Azov and used as a military base," confirms Pryima.
In an interview with The Economist weekly, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian military forces, Valeriy Zaluzhny, specified days ago that to reach the borders of the Crimean island, Ukraine needs to cover a distance of 84 kilometers to Melitopol. “By the way, this is enough for us, because Melitopol would give us full control of the land corridor, from there we can already shoot at the Crimean isthmus,” the general explained.
The counter-offensive is also a challenge for the local administration, which has seen the number of Melitopol residents returning to Zaporiya from other parts of Ukraine double. Or from abroad. They want to be around on the day of liberation. “They are ready to catch the first train,” he says. Although they have everything ready to take control, it will not be easy. They have followed step by step what happened in Kherson. “With that experience, we created a reconstruction plan that specifies what the government has to do and what the citizens have to do on a day-to-day basis,” he says.
But they are equally disturbed by the repetition of the story of Jerson, which since its liberation has been systematically attacked by Russian forces from across the Dnieper River. They know that due to its strategic location there is a great chance that Melitopol will have the same fate. But, for the moment, everyone’s attention is on the much heralded counter-offensive.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Friday that everything was ready. Everything will depend, he assured him, on God's will, on the weather and on the generals giving the order.
