KHARKIV UNDER FIRE ‘WE HAVEN'T HAD A DAY OFF IN A MONTH'

The rubbish collectors in Kharkiv wear flak jackets. Several of their trucks are peppered with shrapnel holes from shells that landed during their rounds. The bins they empty are packed with the shattered, twisted remains of homes destroyed by explosions.

- Isobel Koshiw and Emma Graham-Harrison

Every morning they go out to keep Kharkiv clean. Ukraine’s second city is perhaps the most shelled after besieged Mariupol. Every day brings a hail of Grad rockets, cluster bombs, shells and missiles.

Hundreds are dead. The morgues cannot cope with the daily toll inflicted by Russia. At one city-centre facility, dozens of bodies, wrapped in plastic bags or blankets, are stacked in a courtyard. Yet Kharkiv’s people are determined that life must continue among the ruins, even if for now it is a terrifying half-existence in the shadow of sudden death. And that means keeping the city clean.

“They can bomb us for as long as they want: we will withstand it,” said Ihor Aponchuk, a driver whose collection round takes in ghostly neighbourhoods of empty playgrounds and a shelled school just sh y of the front line.

A few hours after Aponchuk emptied bins near the Heroes of Labour metro station in eastern Kharkiv, a rocket hit people queuing for aid about 500 metres away, killing six and leaving the pavement smeared with blood. The next day the city’s main Barabashovo market was set alight, and four died when a shell landed outside a clinic.

In Ukrainian cities less ravaged by the war, there is a cheery defiance. In Kharkiv, death is too close and too frequent for that. Men and women, drawing on extraordinary reserves of courage to go about their lives, openly admit that the situation is terrifying.

Yet in their hundreds of thousands, people have chosen to stay in their “hero city” – a title first awarded to Kharkiv for its resistance to Nazi troops in the second world war, and bestowed again by the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for its courage standing up to Russia’s invasion.