Strategic lock between southern and east, the city continues to have become one of the main economic pillars of the country: a large part of its mining and steel activities have been reoriented in favor of War effort.
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Kryvy Rih, the hometown of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not really a city. Located in the center of the country, it first takes the form of an endless road built to serve an important mining and metallurgical basin. The agglomeration of today – it has 615,000 inhabitants – has developed on both sides of this axis since the end of the XIX e century.
It is a horizon of large bars of buildings, workers’ cities, statues to the glory of the USSR, whose troops have released the city in 1944, but now adorned with Ukrainian flags. A Soviet architecture which, too rarely, lets arise some ocher buildings of Italian style.
In the streets, no cult of personality or portrait or slogan with the effigy of a Zelensky President, of which only the war seems to have recalled that he grew up here. Even Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the military administration of this buffer zone between the south and east of the country, named by the kyiv government, reacts when asked the question of the status of the city since the head of the State embodies in the eyes of the whole world Resistance to Russian aggression. “It’s not that his city is also mine, but it’s certain that the symbol of taking our city would be exploited by the Russians.”
No wrath in this reaction, just a question of legitimacy. In this region, in fact, the Vilkul reigns in masters. Father, Iuri, 72, was mayor from the city of 2010 to 2020, after having held a firm hand the mining industry, in the Trade Union Committee of the Minier Institute and the Regional Technical University. His son himself led a mining company, before becoming Vice-Prime Minister of Ukraine from December 2012 to February 2014, when Viktor Yanukovich was president. Finally, he has assumed the duties of Governor of Dnipro, whose Kryvy Rih is, and finished eighth in the 2019 presidential election.
Fortifications and trenches
Training Engineer, Oleksandr Vilkul nevertheless endorsed, as his president, the clothes of commander, the uniform, the small khaki hat and the bulletproof vest arranged at the foot of the office next to which dragged a ration of Russian soldier found, the same day, in a tank destroyed by the Ukrainian army.
Sitting in front of staff maps, as a true general, he likes to explain the situation on the ground. He traces the new front line since the recovery of several villages, April 2 and 3, thus pushing the Russians towards the banks of the dnipro. It also points to the village of Velyka Kostromka, where, the same day, a son and his father died because the child has brought home one of these hundred small bombs prohibited by international regulations, these weapons. -Munitions with which the Russians have watered the campaigns. Images taken from its laptop to support this unsustainable scene.
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