A customer in the Winston Churchill Cafe and cigar shop – the unlikely refuge on Dobropillia’s leafy Shevchenka Avenue – describes the mood with a sobering clarity: “Everyone respects Churchill here; he is a symbol of resistance. If he were alive now, the war probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Two weeks of Russian military escalation have hollowed out this frontline town, and Dobropillia’s mayor has issued a mandatory evacuation order as indiscriminate attacks intensify.
