A Ukrainian refugee holds his sleeping child in a bus after landing at Zurich Airport from Krakow in a plane chartered by a Swiss millionaire at Zurich Airport, on March 22, 2022.An air raid siren blares and tears fill Vasiliy Kravchuk’s eyes as he surveys the wreckage of the school his six-year-old son was meant to start next year.
Zhytomyr has been spared the devastation of cities like Mariupol in the south, but it remains in Russia’s sights as its troops attempt to encircle Kyiv from the west. “This is indeed genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Svitlana Kovalchuk, a 50-year-old chemistry teacher at the school, says during a visit arranged by the Ukrainian government.
“They want to rip us off of our future,” says Nadia Skutelnyk, 29, showing off her four-day-old daughter Stephania’s tiny fingers. Children and parents stroll in the sun and skateboarders rattle down the pavements until the air raid sirens ring, but Zhytomyr is partly an army town.