Ukrainian police evacuate villages bordering Russia – Technologist

Amid all the chaos, there’s something absurd about the smiling, bespectacled giraffe painted on the wall of the bookshop in Velyka Pysarivka, a small Ukrainian town just 7 kilometers from the Russian border, in the Sumy region. The shop had been hit by a Russian bombing in mid-March. Windows and doors were shattered, and all the furniture was strewn about in fragments. The giraffe mural had only just been completed. “Until very recently, there were dance activities for the little ones in the basement,” lamented soldier Igor Demiantchuk, head of civilian-military cooperation.

“Our lives completely changed in the space of ten days,” said Artur Kryazh, 40, the police station commander of Velyka Pysarivka – whose pre-war population of 4,000 has now been partially evacuated – on Thursday, March 21. “We’ve gone from a prosperous town to ruins,” continued the policeman, whose main task until recently had been to organize surveillance patrols.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin’s forces had indeed passed through the center of the municipality, before being halted at the neighboring town of Okhtyrka, 40 kilometers to the west. After their departure a month later, however, a semblance of peaceful life had gradually returned to the town, despite its close proximity to the border and the sporadic bombings that continued to strike the territory.

‘Up to 500 strikes a day’

That all changed again on March 12, following limited incursions into neighboring Russian territory by Ukraine-aligned Russian partisan fighters, operated by the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR). These fighters, who have been trained in Ukraine, have been attempting to step up their raids across the border, with the stated aim of disrupting Russia’s presidential election on March 17 and relieving Ukrainian soldiers struggling on the Donbas front to the east. In retaliation, missiles, drones and guided aerial bombs have rained down relentlessly on the region.

Although local residents have preferred to be discreet on the subject, they all quietly acknowledged that since then, incessant strikes have been carried out, indiscriminately targeting homes, administrative buildings and civilian infrastructure. On March 15, Ukrainian authorities called for the evacuation of residents in the region. “There may be up to 500 strikes a day,” warned the local military administration on Telegram two days later. “Some villages now resemble Marinka and Bakhmut [two Donbas towns captured by the Russian army in 2023, at the cost of terrible destruction].”

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