Kharkiv:
“It almost doesn’t exist anymore,” said the mayor of the industrial city of Vovtyansk, where even the killing fields in eastern Ukraine were destroyed by the shocking Russian onslaught.
Vovtyansk does not have a great history, but its geography could not be more tragic. Just five kilometers (three miles) from the Russian border, footage taken by Ukrainian military drones this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.
And it has gotten even worse since then.
“Ninety percent of the center is flattened,” said Tamaz Gambarashvili, the tall, uniformed mayor who runs the remaining district of Vovtyansk from the regional capital Kharkiv, an hour and a half away by car. spoke.
“The enemy continues to carry out heavy artillery fire,” he added.
Six out of 10 buildings in Bovtyansk have been completely destroyed, and 18% are partially in ruins, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by the independent open-source intelligence group Bellingcat. But the destruction in the city center, which has been leveled north of the Bobuca River, is even worse.
AFP and Bellingcat have joined forces to tell the story of how an entire city was wiped off the map, building by building, in just a few weeks, and to reveal the human toll it took.
The pace of destruction dwarfed even that of Bakhmut, the Donbas region’s “meat-grinder city” where some of the war’s bloodiest slaughter took place, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP.
“I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battle unfolded there,” insisted Lieutenant Denis Yaroslavsky.
“What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk.”
invaded and then liberated
Before the war, the population of Vovtyansk was approximately 20,000. It now remains only in the memories of the survivors who escaped.
Nelia Stryzhakova, the city’s librarian, told AFP in Kharkiv that in addition to factories, the city had a “medical school, a technical college, seven schools and a number of kindergartens.”
“There was also a workshop that made horse carriages for historical dramas.We found it interesting in our own way,” Strizhakova, 61, claimed.
Added to this is the local hospital, which was rebuilt in 2017 with nearly 10 million euros ($10.8 million) in German aid, a church that hosts religious festivals, and a vast hydraulic machinery factory. Once the source of the town’s economic vitality, its ruins are now contested by both sides.
Vovtyansk was captured shortly after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but was recaptured by Kiev’s blitzkrieg counterattack in the fall of the same year.
Despite enduring regular Russian shelling, it was relatively peaceful. Then, on May 10th, something completely different happened.
poor defense
The Ukrainian 57th Brigade, exhausted after weeks of heavy fighting 100 kilometers to the south, was regrouping near Vovtyansk when one of its scouts noticed something unusual.
“We discovered two Russian armored personnel carriers that had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who was leading the unit.
They were the vanguard of one of the heaviest Russian offensives since the start of the war, in which Moscow poured thousands of soldiers into the city.
Yaroslavsky said there were “no fortifications or mines” to slow their advance, and remains furious at the “neglect or corruption” that led to the incident.
“17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because someone didn’t build fortifications,” the 42-year-old police officer fumed.
“We control this city today, but what we control is a pile of rubble,” he added bitterly.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy canceled a foreign trip to rush to Kharkov and admitted that Russian troops had advanced 5-10 kilometers into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the people of Vovtyansk were living a nightmarish life.
“Drones are like mosquitoes”
“The Russians started bombing,” said Galina Zharova, who lived in Stepova Street 16A, an apartment complex now in ruins, as seen in images analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP.
“We were right on the front lines. No one could come to our aid,” added the 50-year-old, who now lives with her family in a university dormitory in Kharkiv.
“We went to the basement. All the buildings were on fire. We were crammed in the basement until June 3rd (nearly four weeks),” added her husband Victor, 65. .
Eventually, the couple decided to flee on foot. “Drones were flying around us like wasps and mosquitoes,” Galina recalled. After walking several kilometers, they were rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.
“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. Everything was there,” librarian Strizhakova said with a sigh. “No one could have imagined that we would disappear from the face of the earth in just five days.”
The 125,000 books in the library she ran at 8 Tochoba Street went up in smoke.
More than half of families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. Before the war began in the Donbas region in 2014, people in Vovtyansk crossed the border to shop every day, and the city’s markets were crowded with Russians.
“There are a lot of blended families,” Ms. Strizhakova said. “We are all connected, parents and children. And now we have become enemies. There is no other way to express it.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to AFP’s requests for an explanation of what happened in the city.
Mayor Gambarashvili, who was hit in the leg by shrapnel while overseeing the city’s evacuation, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.
Dozens, no doubt. Probably more. There were still about 4,000 people in Vovtyansk as of May 10, most of them elderly, as most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.
family torn apart by war
Kira Dzhafarova, 57, believes that her mother, Valentina Radionova, who lived in a small house with an attractive garden at 40 Dukhovna Street, is most likely dead.
Our last phone conversation was May 17th. “When I’m 85, I’m not going anywhere,” her mother insisted. Satellite images and witnesses later confirmed that the house was completely destroyed.
“Ever since then, I know it’s over,” sighs Kira, who provided DNA for identification in case the fighting ends.
In a particularly cruel irony, her Russian mother had moved to Vovtyansk to be equidistant from her two estranged children.
Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and officially became a Ukrainian citizen two years ago. Her brother, who she believes supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family’s hometown and Russia’s first metropolis on the other side of the border.
Psychiatrist Kira now only calls him “ex-brother.”
AFP was unable to contact him directly.
Volodymyr Zhimovsky, 70, is also missing. On May 16, he decided to flee the shelling by car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raisa, and a neighbor. Both Zimovsky and his mother were shot dead “probably by a Russian sniper,” Raisa said.
The 59-year-old pediatric nurse had just barely gotten out of her car when a hail of bullets rained down on her, before she was grabbed by Russian soldiers and held captive for two days. She manages to escape and hides in a neighbor’s basement for the night, eventually escaping through the woods.
She spoke of her harrowing journey in a calm, measured voice. It seems like only one thing matters to her right now. That is to find the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and give them a proper burial.
“They took my son.”
Rumors spread among survivors that bodies littered the streets of Vovtyansk for days and were thrown into mass graves. Where, by whom, no one knows.
A small number of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandr Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at least three people when he returned to his old apartment on his bicycle to collect his belongings in mid-September.
Garlychev lived at 10A Lubezhanskaya Street in the southern part of the city, which was relatively unscathed. He just left on August 10th.
The survivors of Vovchansk, and even some of its personnel, doubt that regardless of how the war ends, given its proximity to the border, Vovchansk will ever be rebuilt. I’m quietly wondering.
Asked if she could forgive her husband’s killer, Raisa Zimowska paused for a long time. Then she answered in a whisper: “I don’t know, I really don’t know. As a Christian, yes, but as a human…what can I say?”
Ever since her only son, Pavlo, was killed in the Battle of Bakhmut, librarian Strizhakova has had no desire to open a Russian book, even if it’s a classic.
“I know there’s nothing wrong with literature, but Russia, everything about it disgusts me. They took my son away. This is personal.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
