DAVID PRATT IN UKRAINE: Inside Mykolaiv - the defiant city where Russian bombardment never stops

“Close, very close,” observed my Ukrainian driver, rather stating the obvious. These were not the first explosions that I had heard since arriving in the city. In fact, from the very first moment of entering Mykolaiv explosions had become a familiar and disquieting sound.

But my driver was right – these were by far the closest yet, reminders that Ukraine’s frontline here with Russian troops is at its shortest point only 12 miles away.

While part of the city itself might be too far for Russian shells, most of it sits well within range of the rockets and cruise missiles that continue to rain down here almost daily.

In fact, at the time of writing, Mykolaiv has only escaped daily bombardment in 25 out of 186 days of this war.

Once a centre of shipbuilding for the Russian empire, Mykolaiv, which had a pre-war population of nearly 500,000, was among the first places attacked after Russian president Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine on February 24.

To say that Mykolaiv matters in military terms would be huge understatement. Bordering as it does the Kherson region, the key city of which still largely remains under occupation by Russian forces, the battle between the two cities is viewed by many as holding the key to the future shape of the war in southern Ukraine.

Put in simple terms, Mykolaiv and its defenders are the only thing that prevents Russian troops from advancing on the grand strategic and economic prize that is the port city of Odesa. Likewise, at the moment, Mykolaiv is seen as the jumping-off point for a Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at pushing Russian troops eastwards back over the Dnieper River. Only last Friday, Ukrainian rocket fire hit an important bridge used by Russian occupying forces in southern Kherson putting it out of action, according to Ukraine’s southern military command. With Russian troops having been under threat of being cut off around Kherson, Moscow has pulled out all the stops to dig in and reinforce its hold on the city.

Terror from the skies

IT was on Friday while downtown in Mykolaiv, outside the shattered hotel that takes its own name from the city, that we heard the barrage of rockets. Residents in the area, like most people across Mykolaiv, have long been subjected to such terror coming down from the skies. Sveta, who worked at the Mykolaiv Hotel, recalls the day earlier this month when the building was shattered by a Russian cruise missile.

“Look here at this mess,” she says when we come across her standing outside the rear of the gutted multi-storey building. Brush in hand she is sweeping the street in what could only be described as a habit of work, given the massive piles of crushed concrete, twisted metal and slithers of glass piled up outside the hotel’s back entrance behind her.

“I don’t pay much attention to the sirens,” she tells us, before explaining that she lives nearby and still comes to the hotel even though it will be a long time, if ever, before it is functioning again.

Old habits die hard, they say and, like Sveta, many of Mykolaiv’s citizens continue to go about their business irrespective of the daily dangers on the streets. Russian rocket attacks now set the rhythm of life in Mykolaiv.

Often, they intensify in the early hours of the morning leaving locals sleepless and exhausted after more than six months of such terrifying nightly interruptions. No sooner do people drop off to sleep than the sirens go off again.

This daily rhythm also determines movement across the city. In my own efforts to get into the city, local police and officials advised on a very specific time window when it would be best to move around even if nothing here can ever be entirely predictable.

Almost every street is a reminder of the defensive posture Mykolaiv exists in. At junctions and street corners, piles of tyres sit ready to be set alight should Russian forces come back to the city as they did to Mykolaiv’s outskirts in March. Back then, Russian forces attacked with tanks, artillery and fighter jets, pummelling the city on three sides.

Now, just about everywhere, the ubiquitous “hedgehog” steel tank traps sit in readiness to be dragged into place or already they block off key intersections.

Despite such obstacles, citizens here have no choice but to take to the streets every day if they want the fresh drinking water that is shipped in via trucks from the giant port city of Odesa.

Among the countries of Europe, Ukraine is one of the least endowed with water resource. It was around the fiftieth day of war that Mykolaiv was left without water. Some believe that the fact it was so far into the war was because the Russians thought, as elsewhere in Ukraine, that it was only a matter of time of before they occupied the city. Not wanting to add to their problems once the city was in their hands, the Russians declined to blow up the water supply system.

But when stiff Ukrainian resistance foiled their plans to capture the city, the Russian bombardment became more intense and their troops began to destroy residential areas and the port infrastructure along with the water supply.

Polluted water

SINCE shelling took out the Mykolaiv-Dnipro pipeline in April, the water that comes out of the taps is now tainted a dark yellow, sulfuric-smelling and salty to taste. From early in the war two districts in the city suffered immediately from shelling.

These are the Ship District and the Ingulsky District, the southern and eastern areas of the city. Even now people here can be seen making the journey to pipe stands for fresh drinking water every day. At one stand in the city, I watched as residents carrying a cluster of plastic bottles queued to fill up with a daily supply.

“It’s been like this for months, we’re so tired of it, and who knows if it will be fixed before the winter,” one woman told me, adding that it was her family’s second trip of the day to the stand.

Some stand in line with large 10-litre water bottles, loading them onto shopping trolleys and children’s pushchairs or the back of bicycles. For the elderly and infirm it’s a gruelling task and I watched as one elderly woman hunched over and struggled to push a trolley laden with five huge bottles along the street.

Difficult as such tasks are, it’s the threat of a day rarely going by without incoming missiles hitting buildings, universities, council offices, factories and apartments that troubles people most. It is estimated that nearly 10,000 civilian buildings in Mykolaiv have been destroyed by the war.

Just over a week ago, a missile crashed into the side of a university building. Standing on the street on Friday, I watched as workmen struggled to repair the communications lines and pipes at ground level while above them the innards of the ripped-out building dangled dangerously overhead. Nowhere, though, has the power of Russian weaponry been more obviously unleashed on the city than the deadly strike that targeted Mykolaiv’s regional military administration a few months ago. It was shortly after little after 8.30am on March 29, a day when the clocks here in Ukraine changed, that a cruise missile fired from the Black Sea punched a seven-storey hole through the Soviet- era style block as people arrived for work – killing 37 and wounding 34.

Some say it was only the time change that day, which the Russians didn’t seem to take account of, that allowed certain senior officials to escape unharmed.

“Be careful and quick,” insisted Dmytro, the Ukrainian soldier who showed me around the skeleton of the building last Friday as I took photographs. “You don’t want to be killed by falling masonry or an air-conditioning system,” he only half-joked as we crunched over broken glass and rubble up and across what remains of the stairs and floors of the huge building.

Destruction overhead, chunks of concrete and other parts of the structure swung precariously on wires in the strong breeze. Only a single strip of wall panel spanning the eighth and ninth floors now holds the crumbling building together.

It was the small details, however, that struck me most, like the smeared bloody handprint on a wall or the key to a safe box lying on the floor. One can only imagine the terror among the workers that morning as flying glass and masonry flew around after the missile came thought the roof causing catastrophic destruction and mayhem.

At the top of the building, Dmytro pointed out the neighbouring shipyard which sits a few miles away and is now at a standstill because of the war and Russian blockade.

“That’s where the Russian cruiser Moskva was built,” he tells me, pointing at the giant cranes and derricks a few miles away. “That red building there is where for centuries the Black Fleet admiralty were based,” he says, again swinging his arm to the right.

It was, of course, the sinking of the Moskva by Ukrainian forces in April that provided a huge morale boost for Ukrainians and an embarrassment for the Kremlin in much the same way recent attacks on Crimea have had a similar effect.

Despite being so close to the frontline, the Ukrainian military presence on the face of it is very guarded and discreet in Mykolaiv. However, soldiers do come and go constantly from the frontlines.

Among them is a 39-year-old Donbas war veteran whose first name is Valentyn and who goes by the nom de guerre “bourgeois”. As part of a small volunteer unit that carries out reconnaissance, mobile, quick-strike operations, he has seen combat round the Mykolaiv- Kherson front.

A few days ago, he described to me how he and his infantrymen comrades were engaged in a firefight involving both Ukrainian and Russian tanks in the village of Lubyanivka on the frontline which they liberated from Russian occupation. “Mainly it’s an artillery war interspersed with quick but brief advances,” he explained, going on to tell how, in the battle, a Ukrainian tank accompanying their unit fired on a Russian tank and missed before the Russian tank likewise fired and fortunately missed.

“I was sure myself and the guys with me taking cover alongside a wall were dead, but the shell flew overhead, smashing into a building behind us,” Valentyn said.

“In the end we took the village and pushed the Russians out, but it’s mainly the kind of warfare where we come, shoot and leave before their artillery barrage comes in.”

Such an existence is all a far cry from his life before the frontline when he ran his own company Zgraya Digital in Kyiv which specialises in websites, apps and branding.

For now, Valentyn is back in Mykolaiv but will be returning to the trenches in the coming days. Likewise, there is no respite for those civilians whose days, weeks and now months in Mykolaiv have been one unending fight for survival.

This is a city that though fiercely proud to be Ukrainian remains a place inextricably connected to Russian history. The reminders are never far away, be they monuments in and around the city itself or the Russian language that is primarily spoken here.

Not far outside Mykolaiv, in the neighbouring community of Nova Odesa, sits a huge, monumental

Soviet-era sculpture depicting a Russian soldier, gun in hand and charging forward against the enemy during the fight against Nazi Germany.

It’s a powerful if rather iconic image these days given that the tables of history have been turned and the authoritarian aggressor today is Russia itself as Ukraine engages in an existential struggle for its own survival. Few places across Ukraine typify that struggle more than the determination of those defending Mykolaiv and the citizens of the city who live every day with the war quite literally coming down on top of them.

Russia’s grip around Mykolaiv might have loosened a little since those days back in March when the city’s back was to the wall, but still the bombardment never stops. What happens in and around Mykolaiv in the weeks and months ahead could well contribute decisively to the outcome of this war.

But now it remains a war of attrition – one of dicing daily with death and one of defiance.