“I put my whole life into it,” Viktor Yarovoi (78) says of the Southern Machine Building Factory in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, where he has worked for more than 50 years.
“But now so much has been destroyed. Half of one building has been standing without a roof for 1½ years since it was hit. People say, ‘Why rebuild when [the Russians] will just bomb it again?’”
The plant – known by the abbreviations Pivdenmash in Ukrainian and Yuzhmash in Russian – is renowned in both warring countries for having been one of the Soviet Union’s main builders of intercontinental ballistic missiles and space rockets.
Last year the factory was the first target for Russia’s new Oreshnik ballistic missile, but the choice was probably symbolic – it is the only Ukrainian defence plant that ordinary Russians would know – rather than for any vital role that it
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