'I'm not scared of anything': Death and defiance in a besieged Ukrainian city

MYKOLAIV, Ukraine (NYTIMES) - Ms Alla Ryabko stood in the courtyard of the city morgue, trembling with grief and rage. Her son, Captain Roman Ryabko, had been killed in fighting on the first day of the war in Ukraine, but two weeks had passed, and his body had not yet been prepared for burial.

"He's there lying in a bag," she said, gesturing to the covered bodies on the ground. "They're not even giving him to me so that I can wash him. I have to take him away in a bag, a garbage bag."

The morgue is overflowing. Bodies are being released to families in the state they arrived, half-dressed in shredded military uniforms, spackled with blood and blackened by fire. Bodies are in the corridor, in the administrative offices, in the courtyard, in a storage shed nearby. They are soldiers and civilians, wrapped in sheets or carpets or nothing at all.

Even as Ms Ryabko cried out her anguish, artillery strikes shook the ground beneath her feet. There were already 132 bodies in the morgue that day. More would be on the way.

There is shelling every day in Mykolaiv. It usually starts before dawn as a rumble or a thud or a thwack. It electrifies the air and sends a jolt through the gut, and those who choose to stay in bed, rather than flee to a basement, can shut their eyes and let their ears paint a picture of the battle raging in the dark.

Russian forces want to take Mykolaiv because it stands in their way. The Varvarivsky Bridge in the city is the only passage for miles across the wide mouth of the Southern Buh River.

By seizing the bridge, Russian fighters can push along the Black Sea coast west to Odesa, the headquarters of the Ukrainian navy and the country's largest civilian port.

To get to the bridge, they have to go through the Ukrainian fighters who, so far, have not budged. And so the Russian troops bomb, randomly and indiscriminately, striking neighbourhoods, hospitals and supermarkets, opting for terror in the absence of military gain. At least a dozen civilians were killed by air strikes over the weekend, according to local authorities.

Yet there is also a refusal to succumb. Trash is still being collected, and city workers have embarked on an aggressive tree-pruning campaign, though the shelling is knocking down some of those trees.

There is the family who closed down a high-end interior design business and now drives around the city all day delivering food to needy residents, pausing only on occasion to dash into a basement for cover.

There is the group of local guys who banded together to try to fix a Russian tank damaged in the fighting so that Ukraine's military might use it.

A few blocks from the morgue, the Coffee Go cafe is doing a brisk business, even as artillery fire rattles the plate-glass windows. When the owners tried to close down, their teenage employees rebelled, said Ms Viktoria Kuplevskaya, an 18-year-old barista with a streak of orange in her hair.

"We wanted to work," she said. "I'm not scared of anything."

Once a centre of shipbuilding for the Russian Empire, Mykolaiv was among the first places attacked after Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade on Feb 24. The Russian troops have pressed deep into the city limits, only to be pushed out, leaving behind the burned-out carcasses of armoured vehicles.

No one knows how long Ukrainian defenders can hold. Russian forces have attacked with tanks, artillery and fighter jets, pummelling the city on three sides. Every day brings more death. But also defiance.

"Good morning. We're from Ukraine." So begins the typical morning video message from Mr Vitaliy Kim, the regional governor.

The joke among city residents is that nobody will leave their homes unless Mr Kim says it is safe, and no one can sleep soundly until Mr Kim wishes them good night. It is only a slight exaggeration.

His upbeat videos on Facebook and Telegram, which he invariably opens by flashing a peace sign and toothy smile, typically garner 500,000 views, roughly equal to the city's population.

"When he smiles, we can go to bed," said Ms Natalya Stanislavchuk, who has been volunteering to deliver food to the needy. "If Kim says we can sleep calmly, then we can sleep calmly."

Mr Kim posts videos throughout the day, a mix of reassurance and withering denigration of Russian forces, whom he refers to alternatively as idiots, bastards and orcs, the evil snaggle-toothed army of the east in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings.

The messages are meant to bolster the spirits of city residents, even if the booms they are hearing sound terrifyingly close.

"What can I say - the 17th day of war, all is well, the mood is excellent," Mr Kim said in a message over the weekend that began with news of an air strike on a residential neighbourhood.

"We have freedom, and we're fighting for it. And all they have is slavery. We want all of our dreams to come true, and we're moving in that direction. Together to victory."

The fireball lit up the night sky like an early sunrise. Another day of Russian shelling had begun.

It was Monday, March 7, and Russian forces had launched an early morning attack that jolted residents from their beds. They fled into makeshift bomb shelters, basements that many residents have outfitted with mattresses and shipping pallets for sleeping because they now spend so much time there.

"They attacked our city dishonourably, cynically, while people were sleeping," Mr Kim said in one of his messages.

A cruise missile had hit a barracks filled with sleeping soldiers from the 79th Ukrainian Air Assault Brigade. Eight were killed and another eight were missing, their bodies buried in the pile of rubble.

The strike opened the barracks like a dollhouse, revealing an eerie glimpse into a soldier's daily life: gray steel bunk beds, regulations posted on the wall.

It could have been worse had the missile not first slammed into a line of poplar trees, sending it slightly off target.

"We were very lucky that these poplar trees were here because if it were a direct strike, we would have all been screwed," said a soldier named Vova, who was helping to search for bodies. "The poplars bent the rocket's trajectory."

It was the same across Mykolaiv that day. In one neighbourhood of densely packed apartment blocks, residents alternated between clearing out their shattered homes and dashing to basement bomb shelters amid continuing strikes.

One woman, when approached by a reporter, unleashed such a torrent of profanity directed at Russia's Mr Putin that she felt the need to apologise, and then burst into tears.

The missile strikes had blown out windows and sprayed shrapnel through furniture, walls and appliances.

"Look at how the Russian world is saving us," said Ms Marina Babenko, a mother of two, referring sarcastically to Mr Putin's claim that Russia was waging a war of liberation.

"We were living fine and had everything we needed. Now they're bombing residential neighbourhoods, women and children. We have no weapons. All we can do is hide in the basement. We have no strength for anything else."

Two older women were sitting on a bench in a city park, watching three young children play, when their conversation was interrupted by an ominous droning sound: an air raid siren. The women kept talking. After a few minutes, they slowly rose, bundled the youngest child into a stroller and walked away in no great hurry.

Russian rocket attacks may now set the rhythm of life in Mykolaiv, but many residents are determined to play the song in a key of their own choosing.

"There is no panic," said Ms Stanislavchuk, who spoke admiringly of Mr Kim, the governor. "Our people coolly evaluate the situation and help one another."

There has been an exodus from Mykolaiv during the past two weeks. On some mornings, large convoys of cars and buses, some with homemade cardboard signs saying, "Children," have snarled traffic at the Varvarivsky Bridge.

The bridge is the escape route. It is also a prize that Russian forces covet.

But should they enter the city, in addition to Ukrainian military forces, the Russian troops will have to face people like Mr Dmitry Dmitriev, a local journalist who has put down his pen in favour of a submachine gun. On a recent visit to the offices of his online news outlet, there were more guns than journalists, and boxes of ammunition littered the floor.

"All of us are participating in the resistance," Mr Dmitriev said.

At City Hospital No. 3, Ms Anna Smetana sat up in a cot, sobbing. A 40-year-old mother, she was wearing a peach dress with black polka dots, her shoulder and leg covered by large bandages soaked through with blood.

Two days earlier, Ms Smetana and six of her colleagues from a local orphanage were driving to a small village where the children had been evacuated at the start of the war.

About 15 miles outside of the city, she said, an armored Russian fighting vehicle, emblazoned with a white Z, opened fire on the van.

"First they shot at us with automatic weapons," Ms Smetana said. "Then the car caught on fire and filled with smoke.

"Get out, get out," she said the soldiers had told her. "They put us on our knees, pointed their weapons at us and took our telephones.

"We asked them to give them back," she said. Their reply: "No, not possible. We have orders." Three of Ms Smetana's colleagues were incinerated by the fire that engulfed the van, she said. Ms Smetana was shot twice in the shoulder and once in the leg.

"There were rockets everywhere, bombs," she added. "All we heard were the sounds of explosions."

On just one day, Ms Smetana was one of 25 patients being treated for wounds from shelling and gunfire, according to the hospital's medical director, Dr Dmitri Kolosov. Earlier in the week, shells had landed in the hospital courtyard, spraying shrapnel in all directions, he added.

"We thought coronavirus was a nightmare," Dr Kolosov said. "But this is hell."

Black strafe marks pock a prop plane that sits on the runway of Mykolaiv's small international airport. Inside, the security screening area has been gutted, and in a second-floor lounge are the remains of a soldier's dinner of canned sardines in tomato sauce.

Early in the war, Russian troops held the airport briefly, only to be quickly expelled by Ukrainian fighters. Since then, the Russian forces have kept trying to gain control so that their transport planes can bring in troops and equipment to feed their fight and continue their push west.

But for now, the Ukrainians keep stopping them. Video taken by Ukrainian troops show them firing shoulder-mounted rockets from the roof of the airport at Russian fighters below.

On a recent visit, the Ukrainian flag was flying.

"We have a very strong position, and we're waiting for them," said Sgt. Ruslan Khoda, who insisted on practising his English with a reporter. "There is nothing unexpected. We know they are arriving and from where they're arriving. And we're ready to say, 'Hello, Russian stupid boys.'"

On Monday, Mr Kim was sombre in his evening video message. He acknowledged that the situation had grown more serious, while denigrating the Russian troops as "idiots" for attacking civilian areas with rockets.

"There's no logical sense to it," he said. "But the initiative is on our side, and we're moving." With that, on the 18th day of the war, he sent the people of Mykolaiv to bed.

"I wish everyone a boring night."