On the northeastern edge of Kharkiv, the streets are empty but the dumpsters are full. Andrey Taranenko is driving a white municipal garbage truck through Kharkiv’s Saltivka neighborhood. Rows of high-rise apartment buildings in Saltivka are in ruins. Some of the Soviet-era housing complexes have craters from Russian rockets. Others are streaked from fires. Some of the buildings have been so heavily pounded by Russian artillery that they’ve partially collapsed.
Yet some residents are returning to fix up their apartments, while some never left. And they produce more and more trash every week, says Taranenko. “When people started to come back, they’d left fridges here full of food,” he says of the residents who fled this neighborhood during the intense attacks on Saltivka in the early weeks of the war. “So they started to throw away things they didn’t need. So of course there was a lot of garbage here.”
Because of the shelling and debris in the streets, he says garbage trucks couldn’t get in to some areas for weeks. Trash was piling up on the sidewalks. Everything was rotting. Saltivka remains in range of Russian artillery though the shelling here now is intermittent. Taranenko and his three-man crew all have been issued bulletproof vests, but only one of the men is wearing his. The windscreen of their truck is cracked from an explosion.