KHARKIV | After a nearly three-month hiatus due to Russia’s offensive on Ukraine’s second-largest city, the Kharkiv metro, which has long served as a bomb shelter for residents, resumed operation on Tuesday.
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“It’s weird. People lived here for three months and now it looks like a normal day, where you go to work as usual,” sums up Artyom Zelensky, 28, a bodybuilder in a garage, who is one of thousands of Kharkiv residents who took the metro from the first hours of its opening.
“It’s hard to stay at home. You have to go to work, rebuild the city, earn money to live. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” he said.
The noose around the city is loosened, with Russian forces appearing for the moment to have given up trying to take Kharkiv to concentrate more troops in the south and east, where fighting continues.
The Kharkiv metro, a city of 1.4 million inhabitants before the war, welcomed 158 million people a year on its three lines with around thirty stations. Three stations located in the northeast of the city and still plagued by artillery fire remain closed.
The authorities had asked people who had taken refuge in the metro to leave before Sunday, offering them temporary relocations while many buildings in the city have been destroyed or are in dangerous areas. A hundred people still live in closed stations.
Trains only pass every 20 or 30 minutes at the moment, but the pace should increase in the coming days.
“We have decided not to disturb the people who still live in the metro,” assured the press the mayor Igor Terekhov, who symbolically took the metro on Tuesday.
“We decided to relaunch the metro because we have to revive the economy. There are many people who were not working and who had no more money,” he said, stressing that transport would be free for the next 15 days.
Retired, Tetyana Volkova, 64, says she is “glad that life is returning to normal”. “We were in the cellars and we can go out again,” she explains, going to “a friend she hasn’t seen for a long time.”
But, when the military situation is mentioned, her face darkens and she seems to suppress tears. She admits to “being scared”. “Everything is in the hands of God. I don’t understand, it’s evil and it can’t last. I’d rather not talk about it”.
