Inflation was already elevated in February 2022, as prices were pushed higher by snarls in supply chains and the enormous fiscal stimulus unleashed to temper the worst effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Interest rates across the globe are at their highest levels in years 12 months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as global central banks struggle to rein in inflation driven up by the boom in commodity prices. Most of the 100,000 residents have now fled. Nikopol has been battered by hundreds of rockets since our visit last summer. He showed us around his town: the compound where his charity hands out food parcels and medicine the Soviet-era housing blocks smashed by Russian missiles and the beach club, where locals bathed incongruously in the Dnipro’s dark green waters a short distance from Russian positions. Poperechnyuk is the embodiment of Ukraine’s energetic civic resilience: an entrepreneur, charity worker, local politician and territorial defence member with a muscular frame and permanent smile.
It was a way of terrorising and tiring out the rapidly diminishing local population, he said. But, Poperechnyuk promised, Russian rockets were only fired at Nikopol during the night. Russian forces were only 5km away across the river, where they had taken up positions within the perimeter of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and were using it to fire at Ukrainian positions without the threat of returning Ukrainian fire. An air raid siren blasted out from the roof of the nearby town hall. We were eating pizza in the central square of Nikopol last July, a down-at-heel industrial town on the banks of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine. Mykhailo Poperechnyuk assured us the guns were far enough away. A local resident clears debris from a house damaged by a Russian military strike hit on Nikopol © Reuters
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