Odessa, a safe haven for displaced persons

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Intense activity on Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts sends thousands of civilians fleeing in search of a safe place to await Russian defeat before returning home

Ukraine’s eastern and southern front lines are on the move, fighting intensifies and civilians are able to escape to places deemed safe, such as Odessa. The organization Hostina Khata runs the largest shelter, a point where displaced persons register and receive assistance. They served 12,000 families in August, 16,000 in September and the forecast for October and November is over 60,000 due to the frenetic activity of the fronts and the arrival of winter.

Marina is one of those responsible, explaining that “every time there are offensives, people flee and we have to add that many will also come because the cold arrives and their houses are damaged or there is no gas supply in their cities.” His colleague Diana adds that “we give them clothes, medicine and some food here, but we need a lot of help and donations to cope with what lies ahead, please don’t let Europe forget Ukraine.”

The traffic of people is constant. Some have been in town for months, others just a few days. From this shelter they will be given the opportunity to stay in transit hostels, where they normally only have to pay a symbolic amount for the room thanks to the coverage of organizations such as ‘Stop in Odessa’. The hostel they have in the center of the city is almost complete, families from the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine live there, share a roof and experiences of terror.

Gallina, 38, escaped the fighting in Donetsk with her five children in August and now lives in a room with three bunk beds. He can’t contain his emotion as he remembers an escape of “walking five miles under the crossfire.” We have lost everything, even the cemetery where my parents’ remains rested no longer exists. We know what awaits us when we return, but all we think about is that, going back to our city and starting over. Once our army has liberated the area, we will return.

In the next room there is also another mother, also called Gallina, 33, recently arrived from the southern part of Kherson, occupied by Russia since the beginning of the invasion. “It is true, although we can hardly believe it, that the Russians are losing ground, they are concentrating their forces south of the Dnieper River because they cannot stop our army,” he says, holding his little girl in his arms. Her husband stayed in the village to protect the house, she decided to flee when «Kadirov’s men entered the house to search and found a poem written in Ukrainian. They put a gun to my son’s head and forced him to write it in Russian and ‘Glory to Russia! Ahmed (name of the Chechen leader who is a friend of Putin) is the force!’ Later they tried to capture him, but they did not do so when they saw that he was a minor. Gallina headed for Odessa and has no plans to return until the Russians have left. According to the latest data from the Kiev authorities, 400 square kilometers have already become vacant in this region in the south of the country.

There is no television here. The news comes “through President Zelensky’s official channel on Telegram. We are tired of the lies and manipulation, we only believe the official version coming from the presidency,” said the hostel manager Miroslava, who was also expelled from Kherson because of the war. “The idea is that people stay for one or two days, but there are some who spend a month here. What is most striking is that very few people decide to emigrate to Europe. Most seek a place in areas of Ukraine, far from the fighting, and wait for the weapons to die out before returning. If we Ukrainians leave, everything will be easier for Putin, so it is important to resist, stay and come back,” Miroslava said.

All eyes are on Zaporizhzhya, a city that the Russians have hit in recent days with missiles that hit civilian areas. While talking to this special envoy, their phones receive images of the seven missiles that destroyed two multi-storey buildings in the heart of that city they all passed through in order to flee the Russian-occupied territories. The response of the Moscow troops to the daily loss of ground captured since February has been firing rockets into civilian areas.

Until now, Odessa has kept intact that historic center that makes it “the pearl of the Black Sea”, but for security reasons, the population has lost access to the sea and the entire port is a military zone. The bombs and destruction did not reach major arteries such as Deribásovskaya Ulitsa, named after the city’s founder in 1794, the Spanish sailor José de Ribas. Despite Putin’s desire to include it in his annexed territory, Odessa is resisting and is one of those safe havens where Ukrainians take refuge.

Source: La Verdad

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