Sarajevo’s agony echoes as Ukraine braces for a dark winter

SARAJEVO, 30 December 2022, (TON): Vildana Mutevelic huddled in her apartment with her two young children and elderly cousins. They had no heat, electricity or running water as artillery shells tore the roof off their building and almost took their lives. To survive, she improvised.

Mutevelic made a lamp out of used engine oil, water and a shoelace for a wick. She cooked on a fire fueled by books, furniture, shoes or clothes. A plastic spoon, she discovered, when lit, worked well as a temporary flashlight if she ventured outside. Plastic sheets covered the blown-out windows, a flimsy buffer against the bitter cold.

Her news of the world came from a neighbor who powered a radio with a car battery. “The electricity failed right away,” Mutevelic, 70, said through a translator. “And everything we had in our freezers, it melted. Those were our stocks, basically. That’s all.”

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