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Ukraine: After three months of use as a shelter, the Kharkov metro reopens – The city returns to normal

After nearly a three-month shutdown due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s second largest city, the Kharkiv metro, which has long served as a bomb shelter for residents, has resumed operations today.

“It’s strange. People have been living here for three months and now it looks like a normal day, where you go to work as usual,” said Artyom Zelensky, 28, who is one of thousands of Kharkiv residents who took the subway in the early hours. its reopening.

“It’s hard to stay home. You have to go to work, rebuild the city, work to earn money to live. We do not know what tomorrow will bring,” he said.

The siege around the city has eased, with Russian forces now appearing to have given up trying to occupy Kharkiv to mobilize more troops to the south and east, where fighting continues.

The Kharkiv metro, a city of 1.4 million people before the war, served 158 million people a year on its three lines with almost 30 stations. Three stations in the northeast of the city remain closed and are still under artillery control.

Authorities had asked people who had taken the subway to leave before Sunday, offering them temporary shelters while many buildings in the city have been destroyed or are in dangerous areas. One hundred people are still living in closed stations.

Trains pass through the stations only every 20 or 30 minutes at the moment, but the pace will increase in the coming days.

“We have decided not to disturb the people who are still on the subway,” Mayor Igor Terekhov, who symbolically took the subway today, told the media.

“We have decided to reopen the metro because we have to restart the economy. There are many people who did not work and have no other money,” he said, stressing that transport would be free for the next 15 days.

Retired Tetiana Volkova, 64, says she is “happy that life has returned to normal.” “We were hiding in the basement and we can go out again,” he says, referring to “a friend he has not met in a long time.”

But when it comes to the military situation, her face darkens and she seems to be holding back her tears. He admits that he is “afraid”.

“Everything is God’s will. I do not understand, it is bad and it can not last. I prefer not to talk about it.”

Source: AMPE

Source: Capital

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