Inside war-ravaged Donetsk where Russia's advance is robbing Ukrainians of a future

Independent

22-02-2025

Yulia Checheta was at her elderly mother's house when she popped out to check on her shop. Moments later she had a call to say the family's home had been hit by two Russian missiles.
Her brother Volodymyr Radko and his 13-year-old son Mykola had been playing on the swings in the garden when the bombs hit. They had died instantly, buried beneath the rubble. It would be months before the remains could be identified.
Ms Checheta's 74-year-old mother, Nina, somehow survived, but she was hospitalised for several weeks with severe bruising on her neck and face.
Half an hour before the strike, all four had been having breakfast in the kitchen.
The family's tragedy took place in the small city of Selydove in eastern Ukraine 's Donetsk region, through which Russian forces have been steadily advancing for a year. Russia has captured hundreds of square miles of land since seizing the city of Avdiivka last February, swallowing up town after town, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians in their path to flee or risk a similar fate to Ms Checheta's family.
Selydove was home to a tightly-knit, small community. Many of the 20,000 prewar population had declined to leave despite the intermittent Russian missile and drone attacks. Others, like teenager Mykola and his mother, had left at the outset of the war but returned the following year.
'Everyone who I cared about was all the same in the vicinity,' Ms Checheta says. 'And we didn't have anywhere to go.'
But that changed the day Volodmyr and Mykola were killed. It was 28 May 2024, the day Vladimir Putin 's army, which he says he sent there to protect Russian speakers, killed her Russian-speaking family.
A few months later, in October, with Ms Checheta and her mother having fled 150 miles to the 'alien' town of Kamianse in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian forces captured Selydove.
'I cannot possibly convey to you the amount of grief Russia has caused my family,' she says.
Ms Checheta and her mother are desperate to go home. There are few jobs around in Kamianse and the 45-year-old is 'struggling to make a living'. There is little recourse to financial support. She is away from all her friends. She is finding it difficult to look after her mother, too.
'If Ukraine were to regain control, we would go back,' she says. 'Even if there was no electricity or water, we would go back in an instant because we miss our home.'
But Ukraine is unlikely to achieve this. It has been on the back foot for a year in Donetsk, outnumbered and often outgunned. A Ukrainian attack on the Russian border region of Kursk last August dealt a blow to Mr Putin but it did not force his army to divert its advancing troops in Donetsk up to the border, as had been hoped.
Now, Selydove faces the stark possibility of being trapped behind a more permanently frozen frontline.
Against the backdrop of US president Donald Trump reopening communication with Mr Putin in the name of stopping the war, Russia's forces are continuing to advance the frontline deeper into Ukraine in the knowledge that Kyiv will be forced to cede at least some of the territory the Kremlin's troops have captured.
The jewel of this attack is Pokrovsk, some 10 miles beyond Selydove. It is a linchpin of the region's defences, sitting on key logistics lines supplying the wider area, and its loss could open up Donetsk to further Russian attacks.
Between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians, most of whom are elderly or disabled, remain in Pokrovsk from a prewar population of 60,000. They survive in freezing, unlit basements with no electricity, living off humanitarian aid, at the mercy of relentless Russian glide bomb and drone attacks.
Like Ms Checheta, they do not want to leave because their whole lives are in Pokrovsk.
Nonetheless, a mass exodus began last summer when in one month the population dropped from 48,000 to just 16,000, according to local officials. It was the same month Russia advanced at its quickest pace since the start of the full-scale invasion. When The Independent visited the city during that period, the sound of explosions was constant.
Last month, the Russians began marching up the city's left flank, taking the town of Kotlyne just a few miles away. It is the last stop on the railway line connecting the city to the safety of the unoccupied regions to the west. Its capture amounted to the loss of a key supply line.
The Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS), a Ukrainian security think tank, says the Russians have begun attempting to 'advance along the railway line'.
The capture of Kotlyne also brought the Russians closer to one of the last remaining highways into Pokrovsk, the E50 a couple of miles to the north, significantly complicating Ukrainian logistics.
Pokrovsk's encirclement is a mirror image of what happened to Selydove five months ago, which was surrounded from east to west before being run over.
Any vehicles coming into the Pokrovsk, whether military or civilian, are being targeted by Russian drones. A 28-year-old British medic, Edward Scott, recently lost his left arm and leg after a drone hit his van while he was driving into the city.
He told The Independent that entering the city became more dangerous with each rescue mission before he was eventually wounded.
'As long as I was working in Pokrovsk, I was saying someone's going to die,' he said. 'And it should have been me. But I got lucky.'
Only a Ukrainian police unit called the White Angels, a specialist evacuation unit, is still entering the city to rescue the remaining citizens.
Photos of their latest visit showed desperate attempts to convince the remaining residents to leave. Every other house appears damaged, blackened by the explosion of a Russian missile.
Yevyhen Bondarenko, an aid worker for the International Rescue Committee, says the house they had been operating out of in Pokrovsk 'no longer exists'.
His team are now working from Dobropillia, around 12 miles back from Pokrovsk, providing financial aid to hundreds of civilians in the wider area.
It is the closest they are allowed to go. Their headquarters in Dnipro is a three-hour drive away.
When he asks civilians why they do not leave the towns and villages around Pokrovsk, their answer is often the same: home is home, even if it's bombed. Some have even come back after initially fleeing.
'Those are my spoons and cutlery and I am not going anywhere,' one elderly civilian recently told him.
But he says there is a growing sense of doom spreading across the area with each day of Russian advances. 'You can feel it in the air,' he says. 'You can feel the fear.'
Every second person they see breaks down when they receive their financial aid, Mr Bondarenko says, and they have to be calmed down and given water. 'I'm used to seeing crying women,' he says. 'But now I'm seeing more and more crying men.'
As the Russians inch closer to Pokrovsk, civilians well behind the frontline are now evacuating in greater numbers. It may be too late for those still in the city.
'If we were discussing this topic a few months ago, most internally displaced people (IDP) would have been coming from the Donetsk region, from Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad (the neighbouring city),' he says. 'Now, we are even talking about IDPs from Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, the areas bordering the combat zones.'
Even local aid agencies as far back as Dnipro have started preparing to move, should the Russian advance quicken, he says.
The likelihood of a major Russian advance beyond Donetsk seems dim - a takeover of Pokrovsk would be significant but the pace of Russia's attack is poor for such a well-equipped military - but for many Ukrainian civilians in the face of these marching troops, the risk is not worth it.
Their lives have already been irreparably upended.
For many others, like Ms Checheta, their lives have also been irreparably destroyed.