At night, when she’s sitting alone watching the explosions light up the night in her hometown, Nina Shustova sometimes imagines that the battle for Pokrovsk has already been lost.
“When I see these flames in the sky, I feel as if I can see them, like the Russians are already here in the city,” said the 80-year-old, who lives alone in a city centre apartment that has been without water and electricity since last week. The tap in her bathroom has been swung over the bathtub to catch any drops that might come through the pipes. Her refrigerator reeks of rotting food.
The future Ms. Shustova fears may not be far off. From the rooftop of her nine-storey building, multiple pillars of black smoke are usually visible on the horizon to the southeast. The front line is now just some eight kilometres from the outskirts of Pokrovsk. That’s 35 kilometres closer than it was six months ago.
This is the other side of Ukraine’s stunning incursion into the Kursk region of Russia, which President Volodymyr Zelensky says has “turned the tables” in the conflict by taking the war into the enemy’s territory. But creating a new front has further stretched Ukraine’s outnumbered and outgunned military, making it harder to hold the line against the main Russian offensive here in the coal-producing Donbas region, which comprises the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, once the country’s industrial heartland.
For the first 2½ years of the Russian invasion, Pokrovsk – which sits astride both a key railroad juncture and the highway to Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, Dnipro – has served as a rear base and logistics hub for the Ukrainian army. If it falls to the Russians, it opens the road for a further offensive toward Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, the last major cities in Donbas still under Ukrainian control, and potentially even to Dnipro.
“During the war, Pokrovsk has become the administrative, political and logistical centre of the Donetsk region. Whoever controls Pokrovsk also controls the roads to the north and south,” said Major Serhiy Tsehotsky, the press officer for Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade, which is responsible for holding part of the front line east of the city. He said Ukrainian defenders “will do everything possible to prevent the Russians from getting closer to Pokrovsk,” but they are outnumbered four or five to one along much of the front.
Maj. Tsehotsky said Ukraine had been able to stall the Russian westward advance toward Pokrovsk in recent days, though Russia claimed Sunday to have captured the village of Novohrodivka, just north of Selydove, the small industrial city at the epicentre of the current fighting. On Monday, Russia claimed to have entered Memryk, a hamlet just south of Selydove.
Until now, Pokrovsk’s position on the rail network meant the city was a place to which Ukrainians fleeing other parts of Donbas were evacuated. Now, it’s Pokrovsk residents’ turn to flee. Maj. Tsehotsky said about 20,000 people remained in the city – around a third of its pre-war population.
On Monday morning, a police cruiser rolled down the city’s main Centralna Street warning residents that it was time to go. “In connection with the aggravated combat situation, we emphasize that a mandatory evacuation of the population is being carried out,” a voice shouted over a loudspeaker before listing off an 800 number residents could call if they needed assistance leaving.
The city is under curfew for all but the hours between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day, leaving residents a small window to evacuate or prepare to hunker down through what could be a prolonged battle for the city.
Pokrovsk was once a haven for Ukrainians leaving other parts of Donbas, but now its buildings are heavily damaged. Those who are left are under curfew for all but four hours a day.
Valentyna Turchanina, 71, has come to the local train station to find a way out.
Outside the main train station, Valentina Turchanina was in a near panic Monday afternoon after being told there were no more trains departing from the city – the station was being closed down.
“I’ve been here since this morning. If I had a weapon, I would attack these people!” the 71-year-old said, brandishing a pink ticket to the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil that station staff had told her was now useless. Her fears of being stranded dissipated a few minutes later when a replacement bus arrived to take evacuees to the nearest functioning train station, 113 kilometres to the west in the city of Pavlohrad.
Residents said Sunday night and Monday morning were among the loudest to date, with a pair of rockets crashing into a residential area at the end of Centralna Street late Sunday, destroying four stone bungalows. Monday morning began with another large explosion, and the sound of artillery in the city centre was noticeably louder than when The Globe and Mail visited just 24 hours earlier.
“These were just ordinary civilian homes,” said Serhiy, a 47-year-old who helped pull his 68-year-old neighbour, Volodymyr Altukhov, from the rubble of his shattered home on Centralna Street.
Asked why Russia might target such a nondescript place, Serhiy pointed toward a green Ukrainian military jeep parked under a tree two doors down from the heap of broken cement and wood that was Mr. Altukhov’s home. “Sometimes there are military vehicles here,” he said.
(Serhiy refused to give his last name because, like a large number of residents of Pokrovsk, he is pro-Russian, even refusing to use the city’s Ukrainian name – preferring to call it by its Soviet-era name, Krasnoarmeysk, which means Red Army. Such sentiments could draw scrutiny from Ukrainian security services.)
Volodymyr Altukhov lost his home to an airstrike that trapped him beneath the rubble until his neighbour helped pull him out.
The truth is that all of Pokrovsk is now a war zone. A fighter jet streaked low over the city Monday afternoon, sending a group of elderly residents scrambling to find cover in the parking lot outside the city’s main humanitarian relief centre. “You can see how I’m still shaking,” 68-year-old Tatiana Vasilyevna said afterward. She was in the middle of filling four plastic jugs with desperately needed clean water when the jet boomed overhead. Despite the shock, she said she would stay in the city as long as her son – who works at the now-shuttered railway station – needed to stay for his job.
“I tell people they should go, that they shouldn’t worry about what will happen to their homes, that they should save their lives,” Maj. Tsehovsky said. “The city is already under constant shelling.”
Ms. Shustova believes she's too old to start over elsewhere, so she stays in Pokrovsk.
But it has proven difficult to convince older residents in particular to leave Pokrovsk and the homes they have lived in for decades and head into the uncertainty of refugee life. Ms. Shustova is among those who plan to stay, come what may, in the Soviet-era apartment she has lived in since she worked as an inspector at the city’s coal mine. She says she’s too old to go somewhere else and start over.
She passes her days sweeping the empty stairwell of her apartment block and trying to maintain contact with her scattered family. Her beloved teenage granddaughter fled Pokrovsk last week, headed for Germany – a departure that broke Ms. Shustova’s heart. Her two daughters, meanwhile, now live on the other side of the front line, in Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas region.
Phone calls to her daughters rarely get through, and when they do connect, mother and daughters avoid discussing the war that continues to tear their family apart. “I just call to hear their voices. We don’t talk about politics. I just cry, and they cry.”
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