NEWS-FINANCE -QUOTE-EDUCATIONAL AND MOTIVATIONAL
In a branch of the Ukrainian coffee chain Lviv Croissants in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, there is a noticeboard where people leave coloured Post-it notes with simple hand-drawn messages. One just says “Kramatorsk”, with red hearts below and a yellow and blue semi-circular fan above, the colours of Ukraine.
Among those looking at the notes is Bohdan, a 26-year-old, who has been serving in the army for the past three years. The soldier, now in logistics, has chosen to spend his one day off in Kramatorsk with his dog Arnold to photograph for himself recent Russian bombing on a city where he was based for 18 months.
“I have a history with this place,” he says. “It is part of my destiny and my puzzle.”
Kramatorsk is the core of the 30% of Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast that its military still holds in the face of a grinding Russian advance. This week, the region was the subject of what appears to have been a failed negotiation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The Russian president demanded all of Donetsk – which together with Luhansk oblast makes up the Donbas region – as part of a peace deal, a proposal that Trump seemed to have briefly endorsed even though Ukraine rejected it.
Russia’s arguments change, but in Putin’s eyes, Donetsk, traditionally a Russian-speaking industrial region in Ukraine’s east, is culturally closer to Moscow than Kyiv. People who live there, however, have a very different view. They show no interest in seeing the land of Donetsk given up; it is their land after all.
A few minutes earlier, Bohdan had photographed the nearby site of a Russian bombing in the centre of the city on 31 July that had killed five, taking an image of a damaged tree in front of a ruined apartment block. His plan is to turn the image into a tattoo: “The tree is symbolic; like Ukraine, it holds on despite the strike.”
It is not his first body art. On the soldier’s left calf is a list of all Russian airstrikes that caused more than 15 civilian casualties anywhere in Ukraine. Bohdan had it done four months ago, while changing units. As the transition was taking place, he says, “I was having a civilian life, mostly. It was so easy to forget what’s going on.”
The frontline is about 12 miles away at the nearest point, but Kramatorsk remains relatively lively in the daytime August sun. Though the air raid alarm goes off regularly, that is for missiles p***ing over, locals say; when an attack on the city does come, they add ominously, there is no warning.
About a quarter of a million Ukrainian civilians live in Kramatorsk and the rest of Donetsk, about an eighth of pre-invasion levels. Many windows are boarded up, but the city is not significantly damaged. Some shops and cafes still open, such as Kateryna Seledtsova’s Sweet Coffee House Bakery, which has an array of fruit cakes, eclairs and other creamy-looking offerings behind the counter.
The change in Kramatorsk’s population – it has become increasingly male–dominated because of the arrival of soldiers into the area – means that Seledtsova has refined her menu. “Men like simpler food,” she says, explaining that she had switched out French-style pastries for layered Napoleon cake or trubochki, waffle tubes filled with condensed milk. Whatever she bakes, she adds, sells out daily, such is the demand.
Giving away the rest of Donetsk strikes Seledtsova “as idiocy. Men have been digging trenches here. All of those fortifications for nothing? I don’t believe it will happen, it is just stupid.” The baker’s life is here: Seledtsova is from Kramatorsk, the city also of her father and eight-year-old son, and the idea of being forced to move out is, she says, so hard to take seriously that it is best not thought about much.
Could there be a price worth paying, giving up land in Ukraine, including where she lives, in return perhaps for Nato membership? She just sees practical complications: “There are already a lot of problems with evacuation. For example, it’s impossible for us just to go somewhere and buy or rent an apartment elsewhere in Ukraine because we don’t have the money.”
Relocation programmes, she says, are not attractive because the housing offered is not comparable. “A lot of people who fled, as far as I know, are living in kindergartens. They don’t even have money to buy things like proper medicines,” and she wonders how the Ukrainian state with its limited resources would be able to make a programme work.
What about staying under Russia? “I would never work under those motherblockers. Of course no, no,” and giggles at the strength of her feeling.
In Sloviansk, north of Kramatorsk, Valentyna and Yelena are with their grandsons aged five and six in the city’s well-tended central park. The children play in small electric cars, but the babusyas (grandmothers) are frustrated. “You are a journalist, you could make some efforts for peace, we need to shout out for peace,” says Valentyna. Pressed on whether they believed giving up land could be acceptable, all Valentyna will say is that “we want the war to stop.”
If Ukraine is forced to give up Donetsk they would flee if they have to, Valentyna says, because “the children have problems with their mental health. They are shaking during the nights.” In-person cl***es, lasting four hours a day, have been halted again as the security situation has deteriorated. “We were in a playground and we saw a Shahed drone just above our heads, flying so low, three days ago – and there were 10, 12 children who were playing there, just watching.”
At Sloviansk market, local people sell surplus produce from their gardens, some of the best agricultural land in the world. A woman, also called Valentyna, offers grapes for 80 hryvnia (£1.44) a kilo. “They are talking about trading people, like ancient times, when there was a lord and his serfs,” she says as she sells 2kg from the piles of red and white grapes on her table. “We should keep going and fighting for our lands. These are Ukrainian lands; there are recognised borders.”
Donetsk province remains where the heaviest fighting is taking place along the long frontline, particularly around Pokrovsk, 35 miles south-west of Kramatorsk. Regional officials prove reluctant to give interviews, because of the political sensitivities of the moment, but Vadym Filashkin, the governor of Donestsk, reported on Thursday morning that three had been killed in Kostyantinivka, while on Friday settlements were attacked 26 times and 3,649 people were evacuated.
The consequences of the unceasing war can be seen in nearby Pavlohrad, to the west, in a neighbouring region. A refugee centre has been operating in the city for nearly a year, to receive people with nowhere to go. But as the Russian offensive has intensified, the number of refugees arriving has increased to “350 to 450 people a day for the past two weeks”, according to Kateryna Makarova, the team leader on the site. It compares with 200 a day two months ago, and 100 during the winter.
Conditions at the site, a former cultural centre, are cramped. In an auditorium, beds are placed next to each other on the stage for those who cannot immediately be rehoused. An emergency dormitory shelter is being built in a tent to increase the overnight capacity from 100 to more than 200, though that is not obviously a solution when the weather turns. Another reception centre is being opened in the city of Dnipro, further west, Makarova adds.
News reports indicate Trump’s peace efforts have gone nowhere. Few in and around Donetsk are surprised. Planning continues in Ukraine to deal with Russia’s gradual advance, attacks that show no sign of halting. Netting is being erected along the safest supply route into Kramatorsk before it can be targeted by Russia’s increasingly effective drone crews, though at the current rates of advance it will probably take years to conquer Donetsk, and at a cost of 30,000 Russian casualties a month.
Nevertheless, it is prudent to plan for the worst. “We are trying to figure out the algorithm for how we should work when there will be more evacuations,” says Makarova. “There are a large amount of people living in Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and other towns, and if there will be an evacuation there, there will be a huge amount of people coming. We need to understand how to act in that situation.”
Serhii and Nadiya, a couple who have been married 46 years, are sitting out in the early evening sun with their lives’ possessions in a dozen or so plastic bags by them. They are not even from Donetsk, but Mezhova, 10 miles into Dnipropetrovsk oblast, victims of a metastasisation of the war that, for all Russia’s stated interest in Donetsk, is spreading beyond its borders. Serhii admits “we never thought the war would come to our village” until drone strikes began two months ago.
The couple are surprisingly calm, in the cirblockstances, though Serhii admits to taking some Valium to help, and are hoping to join one of their daughters, whenever a volunteer can drive them from the refugee centre. Tonight, though, they are staying at the refugee centre and Nadiya comes over to say goodbye as we leave.
“They [the Russians] are saying we’re brothers, but if I would have such a brother, I would change my last name and my father’s name,” Serhii says. “I don’t need this kind of brother.”
