As the Ukrainian armed and territorial defense forces fiercely resist Russian invasion, so do ordinary civilians across the country. The bravery of Ukrainian people takes different forms: mass protest rallies with blue and yellow flags in the cities where Russian forces have already entered, such as Kherson and Melitopol; unarmed civilians blocking the roads and lying on the ground in front of Russian tanks; girls throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian military vehicles from car windows; and even women hitting enemy drones with jars of pickled tomatoes. In still-safe parts of Ukraine civilians are uniting to help Ukrainian soldiers and their fellow countrymen affected by the war.
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In the Western Ukraine, the situation is relatively calm. Sirens alerting about possible airstrikes go off daily, urging people to head to the nearest bomb shelter, but the area has not yet been affected by fighting. Locals believe that Russians will have little appetite to invade the Western part of Ukraine, which has been traditionally opposed to any sort of Russian domination. Here, after World War Two, insurgency group who supported Ukraine’s independence fought the Soviet authorities well into the 1950s.
In Chernivtsi, some 600 km (372 miles) south-west from Kyiv and 40 km (25 miles) from the border with the E.U. and NATO member state Romania, the main impact of war is an influx of internally displaced people. Since the start of the invasion, at least 36,000 people arrived in the Chernivtsi region, which is the smallest in Ukraine, according to local authorities. Among them, 12,000 children.
“These are only those people who reached out to us asking for help with accommodation. But there are many more who arranged it on their own and who are not registered,” says Viktoriya Hatrych, director of communications department at the Chernivtsi regional military administration.
One of the internally displaced people unaccounted for is Maryna Makushchenko,…
Source : time
