The Kremlin wants to make Ukraine’s second city unliveable

IT HAS BEEN a few days since a 250kg Russian glide bomb landed in Iryna Tymokhyna’s courtyard on 23rd August Street, and it is fair to say she is not happy. Sitting on the park bench that has since become her living room, the 60-year-old curses Vladimir Putin and the minority of Kharkiv residents she believes are still helping him. Her apartment is covered in dust and broken glass, she says; her neighbours were put in hospital, and a passing bicycle courier was killed. “If it was up to me, I would shoot the bastards…and I’d wipe Belgorod [the closest Russian city] off the face of the Earth while I was at it.”

Ms Tymokhyna’s sharp language is striking for the fact she was born in Russia, and most of her relatives still live there. But her outrage is far from unique in a 1.3m-person city now living through an airborne terror mostly originating from the region just across the border.