Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, has decided the time has come to dig deep — literally.
With the nearest Russian rocket batteries just 40 seconds flight time away and still targeting his city 20 months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion, this grizzled politician has ordered workers to build an underground school for up to 1,000 children by the end of the year.
As part of a shift to a subterranean parallel order for Ukraine’s second city, he has also pledged to build Kharkiv’s first underground depot for metro trains next year; metro stations are already hosting five primary schools.
On the mayor’s mind is not just security, but a longer-term conundrum: how to entice back the hundreds of thousands of people who fled last year and how to keep those who stayed?
“We cannot wait until the end of the war” before starting rebuilding, Terekhov said in an interview in his basement office. “If we stop and do nothing we will lose the city. We will not lose territory but we’ll lose our residents.”
At a first glance the old Soviet industrial city known for its Art Nouveau architecture is a testament to resilience and regeneration. Its communist tower blocks, cathedrals and grand central squares faced a horrendous bombardment after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in February 2022. The occupiers came close, taking control of villages around Kharkiv, but the city never fell and a Ukrainian counteroffensive last autumn pushed the invaders back over the border 20 miles away.
Now cafés and restaurants are abuzz. The architect Norman Foster is working with the mayor on a plan to revive the city. On a recent sunny afternoon the zoo was a popular draw. When the city’s air-raid siren sounded, no one seemed to blink, let alone head to a shelter as instructed by the zoo’s PA system.
Natalka Marynchak, a poet who stayed through the assault, is savouring a flowering of underground concerts and plays. “A year ago you could go to every cultural event there was. Now there is a choice!”
But Kharkiv is a city of two realities: it is so close to Russia that even Patriot missiles — which guard the capital Kyiv — would not have enough time to intercept the Russian rockets. Schools and universities operate online. Public meetings are held in basements. The siren sounds several times a day. On October 6 two Russian missiles demolished a housing block in the city centre, killing a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother and wounding 30 more.
Before the war the city’s population was 1.5mn. The authorities now estimate it to be about 1.1mn including 500,000 people displaced from areas occupied by the Russians or near the frontline. Most of the 300,000 students here before the war have left the city.
An added concern is that if the war drags on, many of the city’s businesses may shift their headquarters to the west of the country which is less at risk — and Kharkiv’s economic lifeblood will drain away. “We do worry about it,” the mayor said. He is convinced businesses want to come back but that security and services are essential to persuade them.
There is one bright spot. Known in the Soviet era for its heavy industry, in the decade before the full-scale invasion Kharkiv developed a thriving tech sector; nationally this grew by 10 per cent last year, partly via a shift to defence tech.
The Kharkiv “IT Cluster”, a swanky hub for start-ups, is open for business. Olga Shapoval, the chief executive, said while most of the city’s estimated 50,000 software engineers had dispersed last year all but one of the city’s nearly 500 tech companies were still thriving.
This year though “is not so optimistic” because of the war and also fears of recession in the US where most of their clients are based. Also Kharkiv has lost the economic boost via the discretionary spending of the engineers, among the best paid workers in the country.
In the village of Staryi Saltiv, east of Kharkiv, Konstyantyn Hordienko, a 48-year-old councillor, embodies the can-do spirit underpinning local morale. He is overseeing repairs from his base in the local music school; the only habitable official building, it is pockmarked with shrapnel scars and bullet holes.
The village was occupied by Russian forces for two months, and then for five months after they were pushed back, was a no-man’s land. “It was ping pong,” Hordienko said. Now about half its population of a few thousand have returned. But there is no gas in the main part of the village and little water, he said, “and winter is coming”.
“There is one big issue: we are 20 kilometres from the border. That’s what stops people coming back — and let’s be honest people will only return where they have a place to live.”
Many international non-governmental organisations have come to look. The German branch of the charity Caritas has funded a supply of wood to heat houses. “But only one in 10 NGOs wants to invest yet because we are so close to Russia,” the councillor said. “They don’t want to see it all destroyed again.
“We have a vision but we don’t have money. It costs a lot to build infrastructure and I understand: the government has to fight the war.”
In the capital, Kyiv, the government is all too aware that until the war is over it will be difficult both to persuade investors to support reconstruction and also to entice back the more than 4mn Ukrainians who have sought sanctuary in the EU.
“We have to provide basic services for people to stay here. Competition for them in the EU will grow,” infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov told the FT. He cited the “growing economy in Poland” and “several attractive programmes for Ukrainians in Germany” as attractions for refugees to remain in their host countries.
To tempt internal and external exiles home, Kubrakov has launched a project to kick-start rebuilding: using the national all-purpose app, DIIA, Ukrainians can apply for up to $5,000 to pay for building materials and construction work for repairs.
Of 50,000 people to apply, 18,000 have already been paid, he said; more requests have come from Kharkiv than any other city. To fund it, he added, the government is dipping into the $450mn confiscated last year from Russia’s Sberbank’s branch in Ukraine.
From November the government will also offer up to about $40,000 — the price of a modest home on the market — to people whose homes were badly damaged or destroyed. But this will be a limited offer, given the scale of the destruction. Kharkiv’s mayor puts the cost of his city’s damages alone at over $9bn.
Amid fears of a repeat of last winter’s Russian attacks on the city’s electricity system, Kharkivers are doing their best to adopt an air of business as usual. A few days after the latest strike, two city workers were erecting new fences across the road from the devastated building.
Svitlana, a city planner, watched them approvingly. She has recently returned to her old home in a tower block. Life is so much better than it was, she said, there are even traffic jams and kids in playgrounds.
“But we don’t sleep. Everyone is nervous.”
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