Inside Kharkiv: the city paying ‘hideous cost’ of Ukraine war
Ukraine’s second city has so far ‘borne the brunt’ of Russia’s bombardment

A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
Images and testimony from inside Ukraine’s second-largest city have revealed the extent of the destruction left behind by Russia’s aerial assault on civilian areas.
The northeastern city of Kharkiv, home to 1.4m people, has “borne the brunt of Moscow’s firepower” since Vladimir Putin gave the order for a full-scale invasion, Al Jazeera reported. “Streets after streets have been destroyed” by heavy Russian shelling, with footage from broadcaster’s team on the ground showing “rubble, bomb craters and twisted steel”.
The Times’ war correspondent Anthony Loyd reported that “in Kharkiv’s hospitals, the faces of war are sculpted by flying glass and burning shrapnel”, with women “adorned in stitches, their skin coloured in bruises”, as “wounded children stare up from their beds, listless with pain and trauma”.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“Better than any military map, it is their mutilated skin and ripped flesh that best charts the progress of the Russian campaign” to occupy the city, he continued. “Under attack from air strikes, surface-to-surface missiles and artillery fire”, the push to seize Kharkiv has “spiralled from military thrust into a punitive bombardment”.
A city destroyed
Writing for the London Evening Standard from within the besieged city, Glib Mazepa, a former special correspondent at the now closed Kyiv Post newspaper, said Kharkiv “has experienced one of the harshest attacks during this war among the Ukrainian cities”.
Russian troops have entered the city only once and “were smashed by our army within a couple of hours”, he continued. But they have been using “weaponry firing from a distance”, resulting in “merciless destruction of the residential areas on the city’s north side”.
Mazepa added: “Enemy aircraft drop bombs and rockets on to the parts that are not reachable by other means. The central Svobody (Freedom) square, one of the largest in Europe, resembles WWII footage after being targeted by a rocket attack.”
Al Jazeera correspondent Charles Stratford said: “It’s an absolutely shocking scene of destruction and misery. I am struggling to find words.
“This street in central Kharkiv shows just how devastating the effect of Russian bombing of this city has been. An entire street totally destroyed. Many of these buildings have people’s homes in them. Some of them are still smoking.
“One of the main things that people here tell you is that they can in no way understand how a leader of a country like Russia could do something like this to a city like Kharkiv.”
The New York Times said that Russian bombing has also “devastated the city’s downtown core”, gutting Kharkiv National University, the second-oldest university in Ukraine. According to The Times, “regional administration buildings in Freedom Square have taken the brunt of Putin’s offensive”.
Speaking to The Washington Post, Kharkiv’s Mayor Igor Terekhov warned invading Russian forces that “there is no question over whether the city will give up”.
Terekhov has seen his city turned from a “thriving metropolis” to “a dystopian war zone” in less than two weeks, the paper said. Russia’s military “has unleashed aircraft, artillery and missile attacks on Kharkiv’s residential districts and civilian infrastructure, wantonly escalating a campaign of random death and destruction”.
Terekhov said: “They are destroying entire districts, where lots of people live. They just want to destroy and demolish the city.
“This is a pure example of a genocide, the genocide of the Ukrainian nation.”
‘Come and check on us Putin’
The bombs and shells have continued to fall on Kharkiv, despite widespread claims that civilians there are being killed indiscriminately.
On Sunday night, during a city-wide blackout, “Russian jets roared low overhead, bombing targets that lit the darkness in fireballs, as buildings shook with repeated explosions”, said The Times’ Loyd. The following morning, he saw “two victims of the jets’ bombs, a teenage boy and a 44-year-old woman, in a resuscitation unit”.
Irena Sydorenko, 35, who suffered shrapnel wounds and a dislocated pelvis after “a Russian rocket detonated under her fifth-floor apartment”, told Loyd that those in the city are “just waiting for Putin to come to Kharkiv’s streets to discuss how much his army is making an effort to avoid killing civilians”.
“Come and check on us here, Vladimir Putin. See how accurate your artillery is,” she said.
Al Jazeera reported that “many people have been hiding in underground metro stations, where the young and old stand patiently in line for soup, salad and bread served by volunteers”. Others are trying to leave on trains “heading towards the western cities of Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk”, Mazepa said in the London Evening Standard.
The trains “are leaving constantly”, with people “packed in them as densely as sardines in a can”, he wrote. But there is not space for everybody trapped inside the city.
“The Ukrainian army will fight to the end,” Mayor Terekhov told The Washington Post. “They are our heroes. They are fighting with their own weapons on their own land. They will not give up.”
And “even among the pain and fear”, there is “still a place for stoicism and dark humour”, said Loyd in The Times.
A married couple, Oleg and Victoria Ilchinskyi, told him that their “balcony disappeared in an instant” and “windows blew in upon us in a storm of blast and heat” when a Russian rocket hit their apartment.
Minutes later, their daughter called from Brussels to check that they were safe.
“So I took the call covered in blood in the street,” Victoria said, “our home obliterated behind us, dust and smoke everywhere, glass sticking out of my skin, barely able to stand.”
But she “took a deep breath, gathered myself and said: ‘Don’t worry darling, everything is just fine here.’”
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
-
'A teetering democracy of gerontocrats?'
Instant opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass Published
-
Every 'Saw' film, ranked
The Explainer The highs and lows of the gory horror soap opera
By Brendan Morrow Published
-
Why did the Hadrian’s Wall tree mean so much to us?
Talking Point Teenager arrested after Sycamore Gap tree felled overnight
By Felicity Capon Published
-
Is Ukraine losing the support of Eastern Europe?
Today's big question Grain dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv could lead to other dominos falling
By Chas Newkey-Burden Published
-
Russian pilot 'tried to shoot down RAF plane'
Speed Read 'Ambiguous' communications triggered the potentially deadly incident in 2022, defence sources say
By Julia O'Driscoll Published
-
Inside the luxury bulletproof train taking Kim Jong Un to Russia
The Explainer The North Korean leader has continued the tradition of train travel established by his father
By Rebekah Evans Published
-
Yevgeny Prigozhin: will ‘predictable’ death of Wagner chief backfire on Putin?
Today's Big Question Analysts say Russian president faces growing danger from advisers and risk of revenge from Wagner fighters
By Chas Newkey-Burden Published
-
How much is the Russia-Ukraine war costing?
In Depth Kyiv faces $400 billion rebuilding bill and military spending could soon catch up with Russia’s economy
By Richard Windsor Published
-
Why Putin is weaponising grain in the war with Ukraine
Under the Radar Russian president’s use of food as a strategic weapon could prove brutally effective
By The Week Staff Published
-
Ukraine war: who is winning?
feature Kyiv reports some counter-offensive success but progress remains slow
By Sorcha Bradley Published
-
Two dead in Crimea bridge attack as Russia halts Ukraine grain deal
Speed Read Moscow pulls out of landmark UN agreement in response to ‘terrorist’ incident
By The Week Staff Published