Library books are piled in the street, waiting to be removed in a truck. Two men across the road take down a supermarket sign. The modern grocery store shut a couple of weeks ago. Half a mile away an evacuation train waits to depart. People crowd on to the platform and outside the station, preparing to flee.
Pokrovsk, a mining city in eastern Ukraine, is packing up fast. The Russians are 7 miles (11km) away, already close enough for the city to be struck, after a remorseless advance that has taken the invaders close to a place that had been considered safe. Fearing the worst, Ukrainian officials have given people two weeks to leave.
Maryna, 33, waits outside the station with her three children, Angelina, Maria and Oleksandra, packed bags around them. Their destination is Rivne, far off in western Ukraine, and she says she has little choice but to abandon the place where she and her family grew up. “Our neighbours’ house was hit – and that’s when I realised how dangerous it is. We just had to move,” she says.
Though Maryna is sure she is doing the right thing, it is not easy to give up what you know – “I just feel pain,” she says – and she worries that many other local people have not decided to quit. “Still a lot of people are staying, and they do not understand they could die. It is too dangerous, especially if you have children.” It is not clear what life awaits them in Rivne, where they will be received as displaced people.
It is hard to count, but there are perhaps a few hundred people waiting or embarking on a 35C (95F) summer day. All have been forced here because of a gradual collapse at the centre of the eastern front, starting with the fall of Avdivvka in February, a time when US military aid was blocked by Congress.
Though aid resumed in April, Russian forces have been able to maintain momentum. Success has largely come through sheer numbers, waves of infantry attacks supported by heavy shelling, while Ukraine has struggled to create deep defensive lines like the Russians have, prompting accusations it has been disorganised in retreat.
Inside the train it is hot and packed, with people sharing compartments as they wait to depart. Lives are bundled into suitcases and bags, some too heavy to be carried without help. Many are bringing pet cats, a last connection to a home left behind. People are thrown together, embarking on a 21-hour journey to part of the country they do not know, unclear if they will ever be able to return.
Tetiana, who says she felt her third-floor apartment in Pokrovsk was too high up to be safe, sits next to a vulnerable-looking 73-year-old woman called Nina, who was forcibly evacuated by Ukrainian soldiers from Kurakhove, a town 20 miles to the south. Opposite her is Vera, from Novopavlivka, a village closer to the frontline, who says she left because it was “insufferable. We had hoped they wouldn’t make it here, but over the last few weeks the Russians have got very close. The explosions are constant now.”
Fortunately, the sounds of war are occasional and distant in Pokrovsk itself on the day the Guardian visits, and the city is busy, with many people on the streets, whether staying or going. Serhii Dobryak, the head of its military administration, says 4,300 people, including 1,000 children, have left since 10 August, but for the moment the bulk of the population remains, about 58,000, reflecting the fact the Russian advance has caught the city by surprise.
Rescuers paint a more desperate picture in the villages to the east, closer to the front. Oleksander Gamanyuk, from a volunteer group called Rose on the Arm, previously met the Guardian in Kupiansk a year ago. Today, he too is at the station, having brought people from their homes to the evacuation train.
Earlier that day he had been in Novohrodivka, right on the frontline: “Russian soldiers were shooting at cars as we left,” he says, shaking his head and smiling with nervous relief at having got back to the train station alive. On his guess, the invading forces could be close to Pokrovsk in a fortnight.
The train leaves at 2.10pm. It is a special extended train that runs every eight days, with 600 evacuees, Dobryak says, heading for Rivne this time. Displaced adults are eligible for 2,000 hryvnia (£37) a month to help with resettlement and a further 3,000 for each child, though they will end up in dormitories or other shared accommodation of uncertain quality. “People have ended up in cowsheds and come back,” one person says, but Dobryak says it will be a chance for “people to get something together and move on”.
Pokrovsk was once considered the safest place in the Donbas: a road and rail hub where journalists would overnight in the first year or so of the war, the frontline of which was then 30 miles away. Its main hotel, the Druzhba, was bombed in a missile strike last August and the reporters moved on, but civilian and military logistics heading east and ambulances going west are among the many vehicles running through.
Cutting it off complicates the supply route from Dnipro to the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in the east, though alternative roads are being built after discussions with the military, according to Vadym Filashkin, the governor of the Donetsk region.
A little further west is another Russian target – the coalmine. Pokrovsk is the only place in Ukraine that produces high-quality coking coal, essential for steelmaking and critical for the war effort. The strategic location and industry are at the heart of why the Kremlin wants to capture the city, so much so that strategists in Kyiv note that no Russian forces have been diverted from the advance to deal with the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk. “I hope we can hang on,” says one.
Back in Pokrovsk, after the train has departed, Katya, 33, a security guard at the mine, and her friend Olya, 40, describe how life in the city is already deteriorating. Olya is originally from Myrnohrad, 4 miles to the east, which is already being heavily shelled. She has relocated to Pokrovsk and is desperate to leave there too, but is waiting for her car to be repaired. Katya was forced to relocate her mother, who has diabetes, because the last pharmacy that supplies insulin is shutting, but she wants to stay put, even though a reduced number of employees means she works 24-hour shifts.
Prices have shot up, because the city’s two supermarkets are shut. “You could buy a kilo of potatoes for 16 hryvnia in the supermarket and now in a small shop it is 35, 40,” Katya says. Olya says some in Pokrovsk have fallen victim to scams, with people purporting to offer places to rent at tempting prices online elsewhere in Ukraine, only to steal the deposit. People offering a rescue taxi service for a price do not always arrive, or have the room in the car that was promised, Katya adds.
Others say they are determined to stay. Valentina, 71, stands in the street, looking on. She will not leave her house, she says: “Whatever happens, happens. I’ve lived my life. My parents are buried, how can I leave their graves?” But what if the Russians take over? “I hope they are not going to shoot me. If my fate is to die here now, I’ll die here now.” But as we talk more she becomes less certain. “Maybe I would go if they would place me in another house. I can’t live in a dormitory,” she adds, though that possibility is remote.
An obvious question to ask those staying or going is whether they believe Pokrovsk has been properly defended, given that perhaps 10,000 troops have been diverted north to the Kursk incursion. Answers vary. “If they were standing here, then perhaps the Russians wouldn’t have advanced,” says Katya. Earlier at the station, Maryna says the incursion was justified. “The Russians had to feel the pain, what every Ukrainian family feels,” she says. Hopefully it will destabilise the Kremlin, she adds.
Meanwhile, the evacuation has to continue. Dobryak says the city’s administration has a week’s more packing up to do, and though the public warnings are getting through, he thinks perhaps 6,000 residents will risk remaining. He warns that if the Russians capture elevated positions to the east near Myrnohrad they will be able to shell Pokrovsk at will, repeating a pattern of urban destruction seen elsewhere in the east.
“The Russians don’t change. They’ve destroyed Bakhmut and Avdiivka, So what can happen to Pokrovsk?” he says. The conclusion is bleak: “They openly say this is a buffer zone, which is cleared from people.”
