“It barely exists now,” said the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial city devastated by the Russian attack, shocking even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.
Vovchansk doesn’t have a great history but its geography couldn’t be more tragic. Just five kilometers (three miles) from the Russian border, Ukrainian military drone footage this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.
And it has gotten worse since then.
“Ninety percent of the center has been flattened,” said Mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, a towering uniformed man who runs what’s left of Vovchansk, an hour-and-a-half drive from the regional capital of Kharkiv.
“The enemy has continued heavy shelling,” he said.
According to an analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat, six out of 10 buildings in Vovchansk have been completely destroyed, while 18 percent are partially ruined. But the destruction is worse in the city centre, which has been leveled north of the Vovcha River.
AFP and Bellingcat teamed up to reveal how, building by building, an entire city was wiped off the map in a matter of weeks – and to show the huge human toll it took.
A Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP the sheer pace of destruction dwarfed that of Bakhmut, the city in the “meatgrinder” Donbass region where some of the war’s most brutal killings have been carried out.
Lieutenant Denis Yaroslavsky stressed, “I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the fighting went there.”
“What took two or three months in Bakhmut was done in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk.”
Attacked, then freed
Before the war the population of Vovchansk was approximately 20,000. It now survives only in the memories of those survivors who managed to escape.
In addition to its factories, the city had a “medical school, a technical college, seven schools and several kindergartens,” Nelia Strijakova, head of its library, told AFP in Kharkiv.
It even had a workshop that “made carriages for period films. We were even more interesting in our own way,” 61-year-old Strijkova insisted.
Add to this a regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with about 10 million euros ($10.8 million) of German aid, a packed church for religious feasts, and a huge hydraulic machinery plant. Now a fight is taking place between the two armies over the ruins of what was once the economic lifeline of the city.
Vovchansk was quickly captured by Russian forces following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but Kiev recaptured it in a lightning counter-offensive that same autumn.
Despite enduring regular Russian bombardment, it was relatively peaceful. Then on May 10, something very different happened.
defended badly
Exhausted after weeks of hard fighting 100 kilometers to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.
“We saw two Russian armored troop carriers that had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who was leading the unit.
They were the advance guard of one of the most intense Russian offensives since the beginning of the war, in which Moscow threw several thousand troops into the city.
“There were no fortifications, no mines to slow their advance,” Yaroslavsky said, adding that he is still angry at the “negligence or corruption” that allowed it to happen.
“About 17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because no one had built fortifications,” the 42-year-old officer said angrily.
He said bitterly, “Today we control the city, but what we control is a pile of rubble.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled a trip abroad to visit Kharkiv after acknowledging that Russian forces had advanced five to 10 kilometers into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the people of Vovchansk were living a nightmare.
‘Drones are like mosquitoes’
“The Russians started the bombing – an apartment building is now in ruins, as confirmed by images analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP,” said Galina Zharova, who lives at 16A Stepova Street.
“We were absolutely on the front line. No one could come and get us out,” said the 50-year-old woman, who now lives in a university dormitory in Kharkiv with her family.
Her husband Victor, 65, said, “We went into the basement. All the buildings were burning. We were locked in the basement until June 3 (about four weeks).”
Eventually, the couple decided to flee on foot. “The drones were flying around us like wasps, like mosquitoes,” Galina remembered. They walked for several kilometers before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.
Librarian Stryjakova sighs, “The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything.” “No one could have imagined that in just five days we would be wiped off the face of the earth.”
The library he ran at 8 Tokhova Street contained 125,000 books that went up in smoke.
More than half of the families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. In Vovchansk, before the start of the war in the Donbass region in 2014, people crossed the border daily to go shopping, with Russians flocking to the city’s markets.
“There are a lot of mixed families out there,” Stryjakova said. “Parents, children, we’re all connected. And now we’ve become enemies. There’s no other way to say it.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to AFP questions about what happened in the city.
Mayor Gambarashvili, who was wounded in the leg by shrapnel while overseeing the evacuation of the city, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.
Dozens, no doubt. maybe more. On 10 May there were still about 4,000 people in Vovchansk, mostly elderly people, as most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.
families divided due to war
Kira Dzafarova, 57, believes that her mother Valentina Radionova, who lived in a small house with a charming garden at 40 Dukhovna Street, is probably dead.
His last phone conversation was on May 17. Her mother insisted, “At 85, I’m not going anywhere.” Satellite images and witnesses confirmed that the house was completely destroyed.
“From then on I know it’s over,” sighed Kira, who provided DNA for identification of when and how the fight would end.
In a particularly cruel irony, his mother, a Russian citizen, had moved to Vovchansk so that she could remain equidistant between her two children, who were separated.
Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and officially became Ukrainian two years ago. His older brother, whom he believes supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family’s hometown and the first major Russian city on the other side of the border.
Kira, a psychiatrist, now refers to him only as her “former brother”.
AFP was not able to contact him directly.
Volodymyr Zimovsky, 70, is also missing. On May 16, he decided to flee the bombing in a 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.
Amidst a hail of bullets, the 59-year-old pediatric nurse had barely got out of the car when she was captured by Russian soldiers and held hostage for two days. She managed to escape, hiding in a neighbor’s basement for a night and eventually escaping through the woods.
He narrated his painful ordeal in a calm, measured voice. Now only one thing matters to her: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a proper burial.
‘They took my son away’
A rumor spread among the survivors that the bodies that had strewn the streets of Vovchansk for several days had been thrown into a mass grave. Where and by whom, no one knows.
A handful of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandr Garlychev, 70, claims he saw at least three people when he returned to his former apartment by bicycle to collect belongings in mid-September.
Garlychev lived at 10A Rubezanskaya Street in the southern part of the city, which was relatively unscathed. He had left on 10th August itself.
Vovchansk’s survivors – and even some of its officers – quietly wonder whether it will ever be rebuilt given its proximity to the border, no matter how the war ends.
When asked if she could ever forgive her husband’s killer, Raisa Zimovska remained silent for a long time. Then, whispering, she replied: “I don’t know, I really don’t know. As a Christian, yes, but as a human being… what can I say?”
As for the librarian Strizakova, she can no longer open a Russian book, even the classics, because her only son, Pavlo, was killed in the battle of Bakhmut.
“I know that literature is not to blame for this, but Russia, all this disgusts me. They took away my son, this is a personal matter.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
