After months of terror and death, residents pick up the pieces of their former life in recaptured Saltivka
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Kateryna Sabadosh gazed up at what was once a nine-storey building. Its apartments were blackened shells. An explosion had ripped out the ground floor, turning it into a macabre doll’s house, with someone’s dressing table visible. Windows were broken. Debris littered the front yard. A courgette plant grew in the deep crater where a Grad missile landed.
“It’s psychologically difficult. The area was once so beautiful,” said Sabadosh, a 63-year-old pensioner. She moved to north Saltivka, an ensemble of high-rise buildings in the city of Kharkiv, back in 1989, when Ukraine was part of the USSR. “There’s a certain nostalgia for the more equal society we had then, but not for communism,” she said.
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