A Russian missile slammed into Valentina’s garden on a residential street in Kramatorsk at about 6pm on a warm August evening, landing among the squash and cabbages to the rear of the pensioner’s house, smashing windows, destroying the roof, scattering glass, tiles, bricks and rubble everywhere.
Valentina, 75, was sitting outside under a grapevine, just about far enough from the blast to escape only with cuts and bruises, some all too visible on a visit to her ruined home five days later. But while the wounds will heal, the trauma will linger.
“All my life I worked hard. Why? Why? What did I do?” Valentina cried as she surveyed the wreckage, with no apparent prospect of help with the necessary clear-up, too shocked to know what to do next. Perhaps it was time to relocate to relative safety elsewhere in Ukraine? “How can I go? I have nothing to go with,” she asked.
As the war comes up to the six-month mark, attention has shifted to the southern front, and hopes for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. But in the east the Russian onslaught continues, forcing the remaining residents to either flee to an unfamiliar setting or risk death by staying at home.
For now, the new Ukrainian line in Donbas is holding, following last month’s retreat from Lysychansk. But Russian missiles strike repeatedly, into military positions and towns and cities such as Kramatorsk, up to 20 miles behind the front, part of a merciless bombing campaign that frequently and pointlessly strikes residential areas. Most days several civilians are killed and homes are destroyed.
In Druzhkivka, to the south of Kramatorsk, a missile had crashed into Lubov’s back garden at about 6am that morning, leaving a 5-metre-deep crater in the soil. The 75-year-old’s carefully cultivated red and yellow tomato plants were utterly destroyed – “If you had come before, I would have treated you,” Lubov lamented.
Yet both her and her son Gennady, 53, were unhurt because they were at the front of the house. At the time Lubov was feeding her cats. “It happened so fast. If we were standing in our kitchen we would have been hit by the smashing glass,” she said. So what does she think of the war now? Her answer is ambivalent: “I don’t know what to think. The leaders should resolve this, what can we do?”
The August sun is deceptive. Local authorities are acutely conscious that winter is around the corner, where night-time temperatures can drop to -10C (14F). Officials want the remaining population to leave now, and announced a mandatory evacuation at the end of July, not just because of the risk to life but because there is no gas heating for apartment blocks, where many people live.
Every even-numbered day, a free evacuation train leaves Pokrovsk at 4.30pm for the cities of Dnipro and Lviv. Six hundred and one people crammed on last Thursday, local authorities said. Notably, many had been bused in from towns and cities right on the frontline, where they said conditions had become unendurable.
Volodymyr, 70, clutches his anxious blue breed cat, Caesar, as he waits to embark. He is from Soledar, north-east of Bakhmut, where Russian forces are trying to drive a wedge in the Ukrainian defences. He, his wife and pet will move in with their son in Dnipro, knowing they may never see their home again. “My wife can’t take it, they are firing all the time,” he said. “My life is more important than my home.”
But while some have a clear plan, others are uncertain. Olenna, 42, from a village between Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk to the south, was leaving with her four young children, but while she has been promised a house farther west she said she would see what happened when she arrived to find out if the commitment had been met. Four other large families in her village have so far refused to move.
Some who have made the journey report finding the change tough. It is hard to get work and accommodation can be basic. Olga Ishenko, 49, is from Sloviansk, close to the frontline north of Kramatorsk, but had evacuated to Bucha, north of Kyiv. She said she knew people who had gone back to the city despite the danger. “They ran out of money, or they were living in schools and kindergartens and couldn’t carry on.”
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the youthful governor of Donetsk oblast, said there were 370,000 residents remaining on the Ukrainian side of the frontline in his province, out of 1.6 million. Evacuation and preparing for the cold season were his top priorities, he said, but progress was slow. Official figures say 9,795 have been evacuated by the state since the war began, although many more have fled privately.
Preparations have also begun to ensure key public services continue, because many civilians will insist on staying. In Kostyantynivka, south-east of Kramatorsk, about 15 miles from the frontines, work is ongoing to ensure the small community hospital, one of the last operating, has its own electricity and water supply in case local services fail under Russian attack.
Anastasia Yaremchuk, the hospital’s 33-year-old medical director, says the goal is to become “as autonomous as possible”. Germany has donated a generator – although a complaint is that there is too much bureaucracy involved in getting help from abroad – while staff from Doctors Without Borders support the local medics. Despite the war, she is still hopeful for the future. “We can learn to build a new house,” she said. “And with this skill we can learn to build others.”
Patient numbers at the hospital, which deals with civilian casualties, are up two or three times – “five, six, eight a day,” says the chief surgeon, Yuri Myshasty – with medics forced to become expert in blast wounds and trauma. One of those is Oleanna, 73, who was being treated for a hip wound. She is from the frontline town of Bakhmut, but she and her family have so far declined to depart.
Oleanna said she did not leave because she felt rooted in Bakhmut, even though there was no gas, electricity or mains water that close to the fighting. “We were thinking it’s going be over soon. We were born there. We had children there, we were there all our lives,” she said from her hospital bed. “But looking back I think we should have left” – showing that, for some, evacuating is very much a last resort.
Alexei Roslov, the mayor of Kostyantynivka, wishes the remaining residents saw it differently. “This is why we need evacuation,” he said, as he stood in front of a wrecked five-storey building hit by a missile at about 2am on 6 August. This time only one person was wounded, but the mayor said he feared there could be heavy casualties if a similar apartment block was struck again.
I asked what he thought of the Russians who did this. “Bastards,” he replied.
