By Yury Osmakovsky | Vice-Coordinator
The second year of the full-scale Russian invasion and the second spring under the howl of air raids. More than 450 days of great war are behind. The city, along with the entire country, is expecting a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. Everyone is talking about it, but no one knows exactly when it will begin and whether it will happen at all.
The distribution of humanitarian aid in the city has almost ceased, and in the region it has significantly decreased - most of those involved in this believe that the economy has already revived and the population has enough work. Officially, Kharkiv now has 1.1 million inhabitants out of about 2 million as of 2021. Job propositions are indeed increasing by 20-25% per month compared to the previous one, but those who offer this want the applicant to work for three, receiving less than one before the big war. However, even such employment is not for those liable for military service - the shortage of manpower in the army is so acute that men of mobilization age try not to go out at all.
The public sector is barely afloat. Work on the restoration of Kharkiv high-rise buildings, wounded by last year's carpet rocket shelling, has almost stopped since February: the municipality has stopped transferring money to developers. Although the combatants on the front line still receive monthly payments of 100,000 hryvnias, the military serving further from the front have been deprived of 30,000 hryvnia payments since February 1st. This month, the government allowed banks to freeze accounts of citizens for any amount of debt. Next month, it is going to double electricity tariffs for households. The end of free public transport in Kharkov is being considered. This list can be continued again and again...
Such intensification of the daily struggle for survival coupled with growing fatigue from nationalist pumping could not but be reflected in the social atmosphere. The mood of apathy, hopelessness and indifference to everything that happens around is spreading. Some local urban initiatives appeared last year, whose presentation we covered exclusively in January, show no signs of life. Our own traffic also dropped from 98,000 visits on New Year's Eve to about 75,000 this month.
As you can see from the screenshots below, the core local audience of Assembly mostly stays with us. To attract new readers in the city, we are preparing new formats of media activity, for example, a series of materials on how the counteroffensive affects the social life of Kharkov (when it starts).
A much bigger problem is that the interest in foreign information space concerning Ukrainian news this year is not at all the same as in 2022. If some things are still being discussed, then either the new Verdun meat grinder in Bakhmut, or the same expected Ukrainian advancement in the South, but not our places despite positional hostilities in the borderland are still going on. Even media from other cities of Ukraine quite rare write about Kharkov. It started back last summer, when 7 missiles flew here overnight - and silence, while a couple of it flew in Mykolaiv/Nikolaev - and all the country's journalists broadcast what horror this city experienced and what an iron man their governor is. It seems this is not accidentally, but to prepare public opinion for the next elections through the PR of certain officials.
That's why we count on the support of those who read this report. Your donations, your views on our pages, your translations of our stories into your languages are the guarantee of our sustainable existence and development. And please do not forget that we continue to work on the English-language international rubric on Libcom, to share with the whole world what is about the revolutionary and anti-militarist struggle from the other side of the front line!
Many-many thanks for your contribution! We are really proud that you stand together with us in these dramatic times!
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