Ukraine is traumatised, but it is filled with a deep, burning anger and its people won’t surrender – ABC News

Wounded people, and wounded cities.

Ukraine today is a traumatised nation, but one with a deep, burning anger the sort of fury that comes from a person, or a country, knowing that an injustice is being inflicted upon them.

And it ismatched by a fierce determination that comes from knowing that you are fighting for your survival.

If the Russians lay down their weapons, their president Vladimir Putin will need only to manage his leadership elite, being unaccountable in real terms to the people of Russia.

If the Ukrainians lay down their arms, they lose their country.

Whatever is left of the military might that Russia has brought to bear when trying to push into the capital last year would be re-energised in yet another attempt to conquer Kyiv.

Since the invasion began, Russia has spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives, yet itshows no inclination that it hasgiven up.

Putin's family are not dying. Cannon fodder they are not. His children, his siblings, his nieces and nephews are nowhere near the human meat grinder that is the battle for Bakhmut and so many other parts of this 1300-kilometrefront line.

Hundreds of Russians lie dead in the place where they were shot, slowly becoming skeletons in this tragic reprise of the trenches of World Wars I and II.

Putin has not given up his ambition to claim Ukraine, to make it again part of aSoviet-era-type empire.

Driving around Ukraine for the past two weeks revealed to me the extent of devastation that Putin's war has wrought upon this country so rich in history, culture and potential.

Some cities have been both traumatised and hollowed out. Kharkiv, for example, which I visited over the last week, is a sad and battered city.

Once a thriving European university town, today street after street is destroyed. Entire neighbourhoods are now unliveable and abandoned.

In the centre of the city, many buildings have had their shattered windows boarded up, but many remain exactly as they were when Putin's army fired hundreds of missiles into the CBD and residential neighbourhoods.

What were once-thriving neighbourhoods are now ghost towns, with barely a person to be seen. High-rise residential buildings have had entire fronts torn off them by missiles.

I never thought I would feel sorry for a city, but this one certainly evokes that response. Vast numbers of the residents fled last year when the city came under attack, and in some neighbourhoods you barely see a person.

In one street earlyone evening, the only person I saw was a man taking his chihuahua for a walk before the nightly curfew came in at 11pm. One man, one dogand a city that was once one of the glories of Ukraine, now reduced to a shell of itself.

Putin has not just killed people, he's wounded the souls of cities and neighbourhoods, but he has not killed these cities.

There are large apartment buildingsabandoned after being hit by missiles and one can only imagine the horror for the people who had been living there when the missiles hit.

While in Kharkiv, I was shown the video of the explosion when a missile hit a large office building in the centre of the city. The missile tore off the corner of the building in a huge fireball.

In the video you can see a car preparing to turn the corner, then the massive explosion. The people in the car would have been instantly incinerated.

Russia rained missiles down upon the city. What you see when driving around Kharkiv conclusively puts a lie to the claim by Vladimir Putin and his apologists such as Sergei Lavrov and Dmitry Medvedev that Russia has been targeting infrastructure facilities and not residential premises.

Many of the residential buildings being destroyed at the moment in Ukraine and many of the civilians being killed are being killed by Russian guided aerial bombs.

These are called guided bombs for a reason. It is, of course, possible that every so often in a war a missile will be misdirected and hit a target for which it was not intended.

However, the thousands of Russian bombs that have hit and killed civilians and civilian targets are not accidental. They are deliberate attempts. They are the deliberate,guided killing of civilians.

And why should the targeting of electricity, power plants, and other infrastructure be seen as any less serious? The reason these are targeted is to try to cause maximum misery and problems for the people who rely on them.

Scores of large apartment buildings have had much of their fronts or sides ripped off from missile hits.

In Kharkiv, air-raid sirens go off frequently through the day andnight.

After 15 months of war, locals are so fatigued that most do not even bother to go to shelters.

When the curfew takes hold in Kharkiv,it takes on an eerie silence.What was one of the most vibrant cities in Europe goes into a foreboding hibernation.

Part of Putin's psychological war clearly relies on the fact that each night, when Ukrainians go to sleep, they cannot know whether missiles will be fired during the night.

While many Ukrainians do not bother anymore to go to bomb shelters, the sirens wreak havoc on institutions such as aged care facilities where staff are required to wake the elderly through the night and try to move them within 10 or 15 minutes into a bomb shelter.

Psychological fear. People never feeling completely comfortable. This is all part of Putin's war.

However, if Putin thinks that the trauma he's imposed on Ukrainians will translate into a military victory, he appears to have badly misread Ukrainians, again.

Over the past two weeks, I've driven from Warsaw to Lviv then Kyiv, to eastern Ukraine, close to the front line at the Donbas, and north to the border between Ukraine and Belarus.

The same determination seems to arise wherever you go and to whomever you speak: Afierce belief, here, is that Ukraine is preparing for the military battle of its life.

All around, you see the reinforcement of both resources and positions and large numbers of soldiers prepared for a looming battle.

So many parts of this country are now in ruin. The World Bank has estimated that, if the war were to stop now, it would cost more than $600 billion to rebuild the country.

Apart from killing Ukrainians, the war has also smashed the economy.

It's depressing in Kharkiv to see shops either with wooden coverings where the windows have been smashed or businesses which have not been shelled but which have closed: Who wants to go out for a coffee when there's a chance missiles will be fired into that cafe?

While the war has smashed much of the regular economy, it hasseen a boost in other less-desirable economic pursuits.

There are now an estimated 80 companies around Ukraine manufacturing drones, which are being used by the Ukrainian army, either for surveillance of Russian soldiers or to drop explosives on Russian positions.

There is also a tragic boom in demand for prosthetics. Ukraine cannot import enough prosthetic arms and legs to meet its current demand.

It's now trying to manufacture its own to try to make the lives of those who have had limbs blown off as manageable as possible.

There's a symmetrical increase in this lamentable new economy on the Russian side.

Putin has announced the need for Russia to build more drones, and the Kremlin has announced that it will allocate about $6 billion towards this.

Until now Russia has been primarily using the so-called Shahid drones made in Iran.

However,Iran complicit in this killing of Ukrainians cannot provide as many of these sinister birds of death as Russia wants. Russia wants these death drones all because of one man.

However, just as there are damaged and hollowed-out cities, so are there wounded and traumatised people.

You'll often see people on crutches, in wheelchairs or wearing prosthetics.

A doctor I spoke to said there had been a 400 per centincrease in the number of Ukrainians needing rehabilitation.

The damage isphysical and psychological:spinal cords, brain injuries, limbs blown off and the less-visible psychological injuries that go with exposure to trauma and the onset of PTSD.

It's hard not to conclude that, even if this war stopped now, that it could take many years, if not generations, to recover.

Just as there are traumatised people, so, too, are there wonderful and inspirational people.

I met one when preparing a story for the ABC's 7.30 program:Nine-year-old Yegor Kravstov, who was trapped for 96 days in Mariupol as the Russian and Ukrainian armies engaged in one of the bloodiest battles so far.

A Russian missile hit his house and the wall collapsed, injuring himselfand his sister, Veronika, 15.

It also injured his grandfather so badly that he was bleeding, and it could not be stopped.

Because of the war going on in the streets around their home, they could not get the grandfather any medical treatment. He died in slow motion.

How does a boy process watching his grandfather bleed to death over three days, an excruciating and undignified death? How does he process the fact that his two dogs were killed? How does he process the fact that, when the family could finally escape, they could not find his only pet that was still alive, his cat.

Remarkably, his uncle, who had stayed in Mariupol longer, found the cat and eventually brought it to Yegor and his family in their new home in western Ukraine.

So many people have been killed here that the media can barely keep up with their stories, but there are many remarkable cases: for example, two women who were killed this week.

What had they been doing that led to their deaths?

They'd been visiting the Museum of Local History in Kupiansk when one of Putin and Lavrov's missiles blew them up.

The responsibility for traumatising this nation lies with Vladimir Putin and those around him and around the world who enable thiscommission of mass misery and war crimes.

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Ukraine is traumatised, but it is filled with a deep, burning anger and its people won't surrender - ABC News