IT IS POSSIBLE to pinpoint exactly where the two-pronged Russian assault on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, came to a flaming halt at the end of February. To the south, the hulk of a blasted tank remains on the road where it was destroyed, just before it reached the airport. In the north, the shell of an armoured personnel carrier lies opposite a home-improvements superstore. Look at the locations on the map and Russia’s military logic becomes clear. Both lie diametrically opposite one another on the ring road around the city.

Just as in Kyiv, the Russian assault on Kharkiv, which is less than an hour’s drive south of the Russian border, has been thwarted. Just as in Kyiv the Russians remain to the north of the city and in an arc around the north-east. But there the similarity ends. Kharkiv has been subjected to massive and indiscriminate missile and artillery strikes which have hit the town centre and destroyed both obvious targets and random buildings across the entire city. Unlike Ukraine’s capital, Kharkiv has also been attacked by Russian planes.

At the central morgue around a hundred bodies lie in the courtyard. Some are in body bags; many are not. The pressure of war means that death certificates cannot be issued fast enough, explains Yuriy Kravchenko, the morgue’s director, as three officials with clipboards stand in front of a line of unbagged bodies, trying to determine their exact cause of death.

Day and night the sound of artillery and missiles rumbles across the city. Fighting is concentrated in the north-eastern district of North Saltivka. Here, whole blocks of residential homes have been laid to waste. Smoke billows above them. According to soldiers in what is now an otherwise ghostly and deserted area, the Russians are only 1.5km away. Having failed to advance since their initial disastrous attempt to take the city, they are now digging defensive positions. To the south, however, Ukrainian soldiers say that the Russians have been pushed back 40km.

In full military gear and protected by armed guards, Oleh Synyehubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region, sits on a park bench to give an interview. His office, Kharkiv’s now-gutted administrative building, is just across the city’s Freedom Square, one of the largest in Europe. On March 1st it was hit by a Russian missile strike, 15 minutes after he would normally have begun his morning meeting with his staff. That day he was late. The number known to have died is 24, but workers are still digging in the rubble and may find more.

No one knows how many have died in Kharkiv since the beginning of the war, but Nataliya Zubar, a political activist now collecting evidence of possible war crimes, thinks that a realistic figure for civilian deaths is about 1,000.

Also unclear is the number of people who remain. Mr Synyehubov says that of a pre-war population of around 1.5m he believes 1m are still there. That seems optimistic. Maria Avdeeva, a think-tanker turned wartime videographer charting the fate of her city, thinks the true number could be as few as 300,000. Nothing, except for a few supermarkets and chemists, is working. Wherever humanitarian aid is being distributed, there are queues of hundreds of people.

In front of a branch of Nova Poshta, a courier company, a van that would usually carry parcels pulls up with potatoes. Since March 5th, says Oleksandr, a Nova Poshta employee, this branch alone has been distributing aid to 1,200 people a day. It includes bread, cheese, frozen chicken, toothpaste, shampoo and nappies.

Typical of those queuing is Jana, aged 56. She was a saleswoman in a food shop but lost her job when the war began. She has not even been paid for February, her last month of work, she says. Her flat is normally home to just her and her husband, but now there are seven people crammed into it as relatives who have fled dangerous outlying areas have come to stay.

Although Kharkiv’s centre was subjected to heavy attacks earlier in the war, it is now mostly quiet. But the risk is that, at any time, a missile can strike. On March 27th one gouged a massive crater in front of a 19th-century fire-brigade building, gutting the school opposite it as well. On March 24th at least six people died when a missile struck while hundreds were queuing for aid at a distribution point in the north-east of the city.

Yevgeniy Selichev, aged 40, is one of the survivors of that attack and is now recovering from surgery in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. Yuriy Babalyan, head of the neurosurgery team there, says that if victims survive the initial impact of a missile, “then they have a good chance” of living. The hospital is coping well. Enough medical staff have stayed, he says, and supplies continue to arrive. The real problem is the constant fear that the hospital could be hit. Igor Terekhov, Kharkiv’s mayor, says that 15 hospitals or medical centres have been.

Kharkiv is largely Russian-speaking and used to be instinctively Russophile. Most of its residents are shocked by the Russian attack. Ms Avdeeva is convinced that there is an element of revenge in the shelling because the Russians actually believed they would be welcomed as liberators. Now, she says, their strategy is to terrorise the city to make all normal life impossible and to pin down Ukrainian troops while Russian forces try to seize other parts of the country.

Mr Synyehubov, however, believes that the Russians are now regrouping on the city’s outskirts and preparing for another “massive” attack. But, he adds confidently, “We are preparing for that.” ■

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