Just a short post today because I’m still doing interviews and planning.
I went back to the Kubyk camouflage-net weaving centre one quiet day. It’s still working day in, day out. And having home-cooked lunch almost as a family. This time it was provided by Lena.
As usual there were a couple of air alerts during the four hours I was there. There continue to be half a dozen or so alerts daily in Zaporizhzhia, though I haven’t actually heard any explosions this week. The missiles have mostly been whistling over us towards Dnipro.
Married couple Nina and Sasha, featured in one of the posts linked above and seen below refreshed by a recent holiday in Bulgaria, have a ritual every time the siren sounds. They’ve been doing it every time they hear one, since the very start of the war. They say this prayer, Nina sometimes making arm motions to indicate the dome:
Heavenly lord, create a dome over Ukraine. Protect us from rockets and missiles. May the dome deflect them to Russia. Fly away to Russia, fly away to Russia, fly!
Brief Encounter
Here’s a Russian-language conversation overheard on a packed marshrutka (minibus-taxi) as we paused at a traffic light:
Woman who looks around 50: Can you stop here?
Driver: No.
Woman: This woman is going to the dentist. [She points at a granny who looks like she can’t walk very far.]
Driver: I can only stop at bus stops. Cameras. [He points up through the windscreen, presumably at a traffic camera.]
Woman: Tsk! That’s the European Union for you.
The driver grunts neutrally.
Woman: How well we lived in Soviet times!
The marshrutka then proceeded on a fifteen-minute detour due to the closure of the city’s main bridge, which is under repair after being hit by a Russian missile in an attempt to destroy the hydroelectric power station.
How touching, the dome prayer. I may begin saying it too a few times a day...