The story of ANSA correspondent Lorenzo Attianese in Rivne, Ukraine, from a trench on the border with Belarus On the Belarusian border, ‘only 5 minutes to escape’
The inhabitants of those villages do not say it openly, but they make it clear with their turns of phrase. They are located between a rock and a hard place. The last major outpost before Belarus is called Rivne and surrounds a nuclear power plant. Until last Monday, Russian missiles, launched from the other side, near Brest, reached and destroyed the antennas of television stations, two fuel depots and some population centers, killing people. “We were isolated, now we have already rebuilt contacts. We are ready”, says Vitaliy Koval, the governor of the region, flaunting propaganda words that hide more than one fear. And if missiles still arrive, the hope of getting away lasts just as long as a handful of kilometers of trajectory of the rockets sent from Belarus. ”
“Russian drones continue to fly over the plant, we shoot down one a day”, continues satisfied Koval, who has taken off his jacket and tie and dressed in military clothes since the war began: “Now you have to be like them, otherwise I wouldn’t be understood”. After all, the governorate palace has become a barracks, with a coming and going of soldiers from the inseparable Kalashnikovs. They all go around with duct tape covering their battalion crest on one arm. The intent is not to provide any information to the enemy, who observes everything with his spies. And the terror of spies borders on a paranoia that has not been seen since the days of the GDR. A few weeks ago the last ‘traitor’ of the resistance was identified as a violinist from the Lutsk Philharmonic, a city a few kilometers away.
In the villages, however, the defense from the enemy is less cerebral, the meters of barbed wire trenches remain scattered, the bags piled up and the tires stacked at the intersections crossed by the state road that connects the large centers and often traveled by military trucks of the Ukrainian army , with exhaust pipes leaking black smoke emanating from the tails of cars, which follow slowly and the trees of the surrounding forests. Now that Russia has been attacked on its borders in Belgorod, an attack is feared at the Rivne border. Also for this reason a defense strategy was studied at the nuclear power plant. “We reflected on what happened weeks ago in that of Zaporizhia, in the south,” said the governor, taking care to keep military tactics secret. Here the battle mantra sounds a bit like a warning: “
