The Donetsk residents tried to stay at their home, but now they are gone

Kostiannibka, Ukraine (AP) – For many residents of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, evacuation begins with deciding on an explosion. For 69-year-old Tetiana Zaichikova, the strike came when her house reduced to tile rub.

The area has been the epicenter of many years of intense fighting, with Russian invasions and evacuation for over three years. Regional towns larger than Slovenia and the size of Massachusetts are empty during battle as Russian forces currently control about 70% of the region.

Some stay in crushed cities and are stubbornly keen on the hope that the war will always end. This is hope supported by the ongoing peace efforts led primarily by US President Donald Trump, and has so far produced no breakthroughs. They keep holding on until it becomes dangerous for the military and police to rush into the city.

“We kept expecting, waiting for every round of negotiations. For some reason, we thought they would reach a good agreement with us, and we thought we could stay home,” said Zaichkova, who had bruises and hematomas on her face.

Define the moment of escape

I’m sure if Zaichkova had taken a step into the kitchen that night, she wouldn’t have survived.

In kostiantynivka, a city that once had a population of about 67,000, the situation has become apocalyptic for the past few months. There is no reliable electricity, water or gas, and the barrage of every hour is bigger. While the Russians were firing all sorts of weapons, the Ukrainian army reacted, and the former industrial hub became a proven ground crowded with overhead drones.

Zaichkova knew that the city was mostly livable, but she wanted her to lose the place she had lived for the rest of her life and not teach music in kindergarten.

On the night of August 28th, she rarely left the house, and then she wanted to make tea before going to bed. She turned on the night lamp and walked towards the kitchen. She reached for the light switch and an explosion hit.

Wooden beams and shelves collapsed on her. When she came, the tile ble rose as high as she was standing there. The entrance to her building was blocked.

Emergency services were no longer operated within the city, and were too dangerous for soldiers. “If we were on fire, we would have only been on fire,” she said.

Her neighbors waved a sledgehammer all night until midday, eventually breaking the hole for her to be cra. Outside, she saw what she believed was a glide bomb crater.

A few days later, she left town.

“I didn’t want to leave until the last moment, but that was the last straw. As I drove around town, I saw what it turned out to be. It was destroyed in black,” she said.

The last call

Police officer Yevhen Mosiichuk has been driving Kostiantynivka almost every day to evacuate people for the past year. He sees things get worse.

The city is now located on a reduced territory of Ukraine, sandwiched just west of Russia’s Bakhmut, and is surrounded by three flanks by Moscow troops.

“The difficulty of evacuation is that cities are under constant attack,” he said, listing not only drones but artillery, rockets and glide bombs.

The drone detector beeped, as he spoke. “Yeah, I caught a drone,” he said.

They drove across the river, one flew over it and then towards the bridge before choking it with equipment. Their vans are equipped with anti-drone nets and pass through mesh corridors that Ukrainians installed to force their drones to force early or malfunctions.

“The situation is getting worse, every day, not a month, not every minute, not every minute,” Mosiichuk said. “It’s obvious because they use all sorts of weapons.”

For civilians, that means their cities could soon be wiped out of the map. Other formerly large cities in the Donetsk region, Avdivka and Bahmut are now haunted towns stripped of their industrial and historical past.

Like Zaichikova, most of the people still in the city are elderly, often disabled and poor. For them, losing their home means departing for the unknown without any support. Some evacuees said it’s easier to die at home than to leave.

Wearing helmets and body armor, Moshichuk approached the apartment buildings of those who had requested evacuation. Explosions rang out at various distances. He and his colleagues worked quickly and knew that every minute of the city would be life-threatening.

The entrance was littered with crushed glass, and all floors had broken windows. Faded notifications on the walls promoted electricians and plumbers who never came.

They climbed to the seventh floor. After hearing the commotion, several residents peered in. Police yelled at them to leave as soon as possible, warning them that it would not be possible to enter the city immediately.

I’ll leave it all

When police began evacuating 67-year-old Mykhailo Maistruk, it was his first time in two years that he had stepped outside. With his amputated legs, he was trapped in his apartment ever since the elevator stopped working and the city became too dangerous.

Along with his wife, Larisa Naumenko, he packed a bit of what they had. Naumenko lived in an apartment even before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They handed the keys to one of the two neighbors who were left in the building and remained under the lightning of the artillery.

“We wanted… we’ve lived here for 40 years. Do you think it’s easy to leave all of this behind? At our age, there’s nothing left for us,” Naumenko said.

Maistruk said he could no longer withstand an endless blast and ultimately decided to leave. Many of their neighbors and friends fled in the first few months of the invasion. Later I came back and left again. It was not only the obstacles of Mastork that kept them, but also their small pensions, it became almost impossible to start from scratch elsewhere.

“No one will ever come back here. It feels like the city is being wiped out from the surface of the earth,” Naumenko said, saying she was relegated to a shelter. “Who’s going to rebuild this all? It was such a cutting-edge city with so many factories. It’s gone now.”