The 39 people sleeping in the rehab centre have nowhere else to go. In early September, a Ukrainian counteroffensive swept through the Kharkiv region, sending the Russians into a disorganised retreat from Izium and other towns.īut their departure did little to lessen the deprivation in Izium. Those who didn't have the means to flee the city quickly enough cowered in its basements, surviving - but only just - without electricity, gas or running water.

Within a matter of weeks, airstrikes, artillery and fires had left their mark on nearly every building. When the war started a month later, Russian forces quickly engulfed the town. When his father is gone, I won't know if there is someone with him and where they will send him.” The small compound in the eastern town opened in January as a rehabilitation centre for people recovering from surgeries or injury.

“He runs to me and says, Papa, I love you.' I tell him, Who else could you love?'' said Svyryd, cheeks sunken and skin pale, in a bedside interview only a few days before his death at 70. During every dwindling waking moment at the end of his life, Mykola Svyryd worried about his son. Now he has no one.īohdan's father wasted away for weeks in the corridor room of a shelter for the injured and homeless before stomach cancer finally claimed him on October 3. Until a few days ago, 13-year-old Bohdan had a father. Now an orphan wanders the cold hallways among the elderly and infirm, his eyes firmly upon the phone in his hand. It reeks of unwashed sheets and unbathed skin and needs more heat to fend off the approaching winter.ĭespair weighs on its occupants like a blanket and the sound of weeping echoes in its rooms. One building in the recaptured but devastated Ukrainian town of Izium is filled with those at the end of their lives.

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