Kharkiv Factory produces tanks for Ukraine as fighting continues

Aljazeera America has published an interesting article about the famous Malyshev tank factory in Karkiv Ukraine and the ongoing fighting there.  With the conflict’s front line about 150 miles south of Kharkiv, Malyshev workers find themselves in a challenging position. For decades, the massive factory has been a source of pride for Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine. At its height during the Soviet era, the factory employed as many as 60,000 people out of a population of 1.5 million. Now some 5,000 people work at the factory.   Today the factory’s main focus is to supply new and rehabilitated tanks to the Ukrainian army, which has been engaged in a brutal war with Russian-backed rebels in the east since April. To even the most hardened veterans of this 120-year-old factory, a war in which Ukrainians fight each other on Ukrainian soil is difficult to fully come to terms with.  Vladislav Grigorovych, 74, who still works in the factory’s tank engine department despite being well past retirement age, noted that “I can’t understand this war. We were all one country once. We were all like brothers. Now we are fighting each other.”