“It barely exists anymore,” mentioned the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial city razed by a Russian onslaught stunning even for the killing fields of jap Ukraine.
Vovchansk has no nice historical past however its geography couldn’t be extra tragic. Simply 5 kilometres (three miles) from the Russian border, drone footage from the Ukrainian army this summer time reveals a lunar panorama of ruins stretching for miles.
And it’s got worse since.
“Ninety percent of the centre is flattened,” mentioned mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, a towering man in uniform, who runs what’s left of Vovchansk from the regional capital of Kharkiv, an hour and a half’s drive away.
“The enemy continues its massive shelling,” he added.
Six out of 10 of Vovchansk’s buildings have been completely destroyed, with 18 % partially ruined, in line with evaluation of satellite tv for pc photographs by the impartial open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat. However the destruction is way worse within the metropolis centre, which has been levelled north of the Vovcha River.
AFP journalists in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Paris labored with Bellingcat to inform how, constructing by constructing, a complete metropolis was wiped off the map in only a few weeks — and to point out the human toll it has taken.
The sheer tempo of the destruction dwarfed that of even Bakhmut, the “meatgrinder” Donbas area metropolis the place a few of the most brutal killing of the struggle has been carried out, a Ukrainian officer who fought in each cities advised AFP.
“I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles unfolded there,” Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky insisted.
“What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk.”
Invaded, then freed
Vovchansk had a inhabitants of about 20,000 earlier than the struggle. It now lives solely within the reminiscences of the survivors who managed to flee.
Past its factories, the town had a “medical school, a technical college, seven schools and numerous kindergartens,” Nelia Stryzhakova, the pinnacle of its library, advised AFP in Kharkiv.
It even had a workshop that made “carriages for period films. We were even interesting, in our own way,” insisted Stryzhakova, 61.
Add to {that a} regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with almost 10 million euros ($10.8 million) of German support, a church packed for spiritual feasts, and an enormous hydraulic equipment plant. As soon as the city’s financial lifeblood, its ruins at the moment are being fought over by each armies.
Vovchansk was rapidly occupied by the Russian military after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, however was then retaken by Kyiv in a lightning counter assault that autumn.
Regardless of enduring common Russian bombardment, it was comparatively calm. Then one thing very completely different occurred on Might 10.
Badly defended
Exhausted after weeks of arduous combating 100 kilometres to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping close to Vovchansk when one in all its reconnaissance models observed one thing unusual.
“We spotted two Russian armoured troop carriers that had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who was main the unit.
They had been the advance guard of one of the crucial intense Russian offensives because the starting of the struggle, with Moscow throwing a number of thousand troopers on the metropolis.
“There were no fortifications, no mines” to decelerate their advance, Yaroslavsky mentioned, nonetheless livid on the “negligence or corruption” that allowed this to occur.
Some “17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because someone didn’t build fortifications,” fumed the 42-year-old officer.
“We control the city today, but what we control is a pile of rubble,” he added bitterly.
President Volodymyr Zelensky cancelled an abroad journey to hurry to Kharkiv, admitting that the Russian military had pushed between 5 and 10 kilometres into Ukraine.
The folks of Vovchansk, in the meantime, had been residing a nightmare.
Drones like mosquitoes
“The Russians started bombing,” mentioned Galyna Zharova, who lived at 16A Stepova Avenue — an house constructing now diminished to ruins, as photographs analysed by Bellingcat and AFP confirmed.
“We were right on the front line. No one could come and get us out,” added the 50-year-old, who now lives along with her household in a college dormitory in Kharkiv.
“We went down to the cellar. All the buildings were burning. We were crammed into basements (for nearly four weeks) until June 3,” her husband Viktor, 65, added.
Finally, the couple determined to flee on foot. “Drones were flying around us like wasps, like mosquitoes,” Galyna remembered. They walked for a number of kilometres earlier than being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.
“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything,” sighed librarian Stryzhakova. “No one could have imagined that in just five days, we would be wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The 125,000 books within the library she had run at 8 Tokhova Avenue went up in smoke.
Greater than half of the households in jap Ukraine have kinfolk in Russia. In Vovchansk, earlier than the struggle within the Donbas area started in 2014, folks crossed the border every day to buy, with Russians flocking to the town’s markets.
“There are many mixed families,” mentioned Stryzhakova. “Parents, children, we’re all connected. And now we’ve become enemies. There’s no other way to put it.”
The Russian defence ministry didn’t reply to AFP’s questions asking for its account of what occurred within the metropolis.
Mayor Gambarashvili, who was hit within the leg by shrapnel as he oversaw the town’s evacuation, shook his head when requested to estimate the variety of civilian casualties.
Dozens, little doubt. Maybe extra. There have been nonetheless round 4,000 folks in Vovchansk on Might 10, principally older folks, since most households with youngsters had been evacuated months earlier.
Households divided by struggle
Kira Dzhafarova, 57, believes her mom, Valentina Radionova, who had lived at 40 Dukhovna Avenue in a small home with an enthralling backyard, is probably going useless.
Their final cellphone dialog was on Might 17. “At 85, I’m not going anywhere,” her mom insisted. Satellite tv for pc photographs and witnesses have since confirmed that the home was utterly destroyed.
“Since then I know it’s over,” sighed Kira, who supplied DNA for identification, if and when the combating ends.
In a very merciless irony, her mom, a Russian nationwide, had moved to Vovchansk so she could possibly be equidistant between her two youngsters, who had fallen out.
Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and have become formally Ukrainian two years in the past. Her older brother, who she believes helps Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the household’s hometown and the primary huge Russian metropolis on the opposite facet of the border.
Kira, a psychiatrist, now solely refers to him as her “former brother”.
AFP was unable to contact him immediately.
Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70, can also be lacking. On Might 16, he determined to flee the bombardment in a automobile along with his 83-year-old mom, his spouse Raisa, and a neighbour. Zymovsky and his mom had been each shot useless, “most likely by a Russian sniper”, Raisa mentioned.
Amid the hail of bullets, the 59-year-old paediatric nurse had barely obtained out of the automobile when she was grabbed by Russian troopers and held for 2 days. She managed to flee, hid in a neighbour’s cellar for an evening, and finally fled by means of the forest.
She recounted her harrowing odyssey in a relaxed, measured voice. One factor alone appears to matter to her now: discovering the our bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a correct burial.
They took my son
A hearsay has circulated among the many survivors that the our bodies that littered the streets of Vovchansk for days had been thrown right into a mass grave. The place and by whom, nobody is aware of.
A handful of civilians nonetheless stay in Vovchansk. Oleksandre Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at the very least three when he returned to his former house on a bicycle in mid-September to retrieve belongings.
Garlychev lived at 10A Rubezhanskaya Avenue, in a southern a part of the town that was comparatively spared. He solely left on August 10.
Vovchansk’s survivors — and even a number of of its officers — quietly wonder if it can ever be rebuilt given its proximity to the border, no matter how the struggle ends.
Requested whether or not she may ever forgive her husband’s killer, Raisa Zymovska fell silent for a very long time. Then, in a whisper, she replied: “I don’t know, I really don’t. As a Christian, yes, but as a human being… What can I say?”
As for the librarian Stryzhakova, she will not convey herself to open a Russian e-book, even the classics, since her solely son Pavlo was killed within the Battle of Bakhmut.
“I know that literature is not to blame, but Russia, all of it disgusts me. They took my son, it’s personal.”
