This week, far to the east of Kyiv, the trains that evacuated hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in February and March 2022 are still taking people out of harm’s way. The Russia military moves at a glacial pace, but in the key battleground of Donetsk in the east it is grinding forward, chewing up lives, the landscape, and whole villages and towns. Ukraine still holds around a fifth of Donetsk oblast, or region. It is the most intensely fought-over part of Ukraine.
One after another, a series of battles over four years have turned towns and villages into rubble, from Bakhmut earlier in the war to Pokrovsk now.
Every day buses cross the regional border from Donetsk to Lozova in the Kharkiv oblast, carrying civilian evacuees. A school has been turned into a warm and clean relief coordination centre – packed with families surrounded with a few bags of possessions, dogs on leads, cats in baskets and most of all tormented by loss.
Serhii and Viktoria had arrived from Druzhkivka, a town that has been sucked into the kill zone. Their teenage daughter Diana sat silently next to them, with her cat Mika on her lap. Like millions of others displaced by war, here and in other turbulent stretches of the world, they were leaving to save themselves, knowing too well that also meant not just losing the remains of their old lives, but also personal independence.
Now they had to sit and wait while the paperwork was done and someone else told them what to do. Viktoria explained why they had left their home.
“We are on the brink. We didn’t have any gas, water or power. No heating. We were staying there till the very last moment, freezing for three days.”
Back at the end of 2022, their town, Druzhkivka, was seen as a relatively safe haven when we used it as a base to report the Russian attack on Bakhmut. But no one goes there now, Viktoria says. Druzhkivka is too dangerous.
“The drones destroy everything alive – the cars, the people, their homes. I can’t tell you without tears.”
Serhii looked prematurely old.
“It is very difficult. We have abandoned everything we worked for our whole lives. Everything we worked for, for our families, all we were building. And we had to abandon all that in one moment…everything… We could only pack some small things. We could not have taken more.”
Standing near them was Tamara, with her nine-year-old twin granddaughters, Mila and Tina.
“The kids. We left because of the kids. We live near the forest… There are lots of tanks… drones are flying everywhere… there is no peace …the children are running to me and crying… it is very loud…. Everything is shaking…”
