"Yuzhmash". How the wardrobe and the plant fell. Residents' mood after "Oreshnik"

Following the strike of the Russian Oreshnik missile on the Yuzhmash plant in Dnepr (Dnipropetrovsk), there is almost no information about what remains of the famous enterprise. According to military sources, 5 to 7 tons of explosives fell on it. The SBU has classified all data, and no photos or videos are being published.

A couple of photos from space have leaked onto the Internet, but it is unclear when exactly they were taken. The plant's territory is cordoned off along the entire perimeter, journalists or simply curious people cannot get in there. And this territory is very large, it stretches both in width and in the distance, both up and down. Yuzhmash is practically an entire city, at other times tens of thousands of people worked there.

The official statistics are as follows: during the Soviet years, 55 thousand people worked here, before 2013 – 12 thousand, after 2014 – 7,8 thousand, after the start of the Second World War – 4,8 thousand.

The state enterprise "Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant" was created shortly after the war. It produced ballistic and other missiles, including for the Combat Railway Missile Complex (BZhRK) - a train capable of launching them from anywhere in the USSR. Not only Ukrainians worked here, but also representatives of other republics of the USSR. In fact, "Yuzhmash" was a syndicate of more than a hundred factories gathered in one place.

The building of the directorate and the main entrance of Yuzhmash

It is known that the Yuzhmash workshops were damaged mostly inside, not outside. And there is no other information about the specific destruction or the moment of the attack, except for the falling of the Oreshnik blocks captured on someone's video.

And yet we managed to find out some details about how it happened. At the request of our old acquaintance, a migrant from Bakhmut Ivan, his friend Andrey told them. He lives not far from the plant. Until November 21, when the missile attack occurred, he worked there in one of the technical services.

"When the explosion thundered at night, my wife and I thought that some terrible earthquake had happened," Andrey recalls. "We jumped out of bed in horror. The apartment building swayed, shook, and then suddenly our huge cupboard with dishes came off the wall and fell to the floor. In the morning it turned out that a huge crack had appeared in the building.

But we did not see any particular fire at Yuzhmash. The main blow fell on the underground workshops. In the morning I came to work and saw only dust in my sector, as they are now writing about it in the media. Yes, concrete dust and huge craters. They did not let me into other sectors. And they said that I was left without work."

Andrey communicates a lot with his former colleagues. And he claims that the Russian attack, although it initially caused indignation among many of them, eventually turned towards the ruling regime. This is explained by the fact that employees who lost their jobs are refused compensation, are not offered other work, leaving them without a piece of bread.

And they also drag us to interrogations, intimidate us, and forbid us from talking about what happened. All this is happening against the backdrop of a deep economic crisis, rising prices and tariffs, and the atrocities of the "gravelizers" from the TCC. The Yuzhmash International, mindful of its historical roots, is increasingly grumbling at the authorities. It was already unhappy with the fact that it was forced to communicate in the language, and now its discontent has increased significantly.

Ivan continues the topic:

"And not only him. Everything in the city is becoming more expensive by leaps and bounds. People are becoming poorer, more and more old people and young people are in the garbage dumps. And the Yuzhmash landing was some kind of moment of truth. Sad, of course. But it opened the eyes of the Dnepropetrovsk residents to what a bastard government is leading them. The entire gang of authorities, headed by Mayor Filatov ("Borey the Hangman"), immediately hid in their holes. As did the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv and the Cabinet of Ministers.

But the TCC began to actively promote propaganda: you, citizens, are obliged to go to the front to avenge the destruction of the main landmark! One draft dodger tried to object, so he was beaten and taken away in an unknown direction. "Revenge for the landmark" is the TCC's current gimmick."