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"March 5. (Text updated after liberation). The city streets resemble the post-Soviet 90s with 30-meter lines for bread. Downtown is flooded with people, rallying for a free Ukraine. Nobody cares about COVID anymore, it has been replaced by a far worse infection. It happened on March 1. The past few days had been hectic. I kept my phone in my hands, following the situation, which was changing more rapidly than you could imagine. When I woke up in the morning, first of all I checked the Telegram channel, where the latest events were published, based on reports from subscribers. The photos of Russian soldiers walking past the windows of our neighborhood were widespread. In a few minutes I saw them under my own window. I felt hurt and couldn't understand why they were walking the streets of my city without any resistance from our side. My wife joined me. We stood together on the balcony and filmed them through the blinds, trying to count them and see what weapons they had. We hoped that our video sent to the Telegram chatbot would enable our military to do something, so that they did not leave us here alone with the enemy. Unfortunately, my hopes were not in vain. When the Russian soldiers had almost finished their round of our neighborhood and were turning towards the village of Komyshany where armored vehicles were waiting, the fighters of the territorial defense appeared. The fight began under our balcony window, perhaps to be remembered for the rest of our lives (and captured on video). One despair was quickly followed by another, as a group of a dozen people with AK-74s wearing down jackets and knitted hats, arrived in a retro car to oppose a Russian horde that was armed to the teeth with machine guns, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles. The absurdity of the situation was heightened by an old man with a white shopping bag in his hands, who, as if nothing was amiss, was walking, utterly deaf to the shots, along the street mere meters away from the firing positions. Luckily, the fighters caught his attention before the Russians started to fire their automatic grenade launchers and large caliber machine guns. Fortunately, most of these people were able to escape the firing, although many fighters died that same day in Buzkovy Park and the fire station on Naftovykiv Street. But under our window, they managed to delay the advance of Russian vehicles into the city for five hours. We watched them from that same window, our hopes lost, as armored personnel carriers, moving at 5-10 meters per minute, carefully stepped into the "bright future". The Storyteller said that the "special operation" to destroy the sovereignty of the country would continue until its goals were achieved. He did not say whether sanctions would continue until their goals were achieved."

Photography, digital art, mixed technique.