By AFP | 2024-11-07

KHARKIV, Ukraine -- "It barely exists anymore," said the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial town razed by a Russian onslaught shocking even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.

Just 5km from the Russian border, drone footage from the Ukrainian military this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.

And it has gotten worse since.

"Ninety percent of the center is flattened," said Tamaz Gambarashvili, director of the city's military administration, who runs what is left of Vovchansk from the regional capital of Kharkiv, an hour and a half's drive away.

"The enemy continues its massive shelling," he added.

Six out of 10 of Vovchansk's buildings have been destroyed, with 18% damaged, according to analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat.

But the destruction is much worse in the city center.

AFP journalists in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Paris worked with Bellingcat to tell how, building by building, an entire city was wiped off the map in just a few weeks -- and to show the human toll it has taken.

The sheer pace of the destruction dwarfed that of even Bakhmut, the "meatgrinder" Donbas city where some of the most brutal killing of the war has been done, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP.

"I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles unfolded there," Lt. Denys Yaroslavsky said.

"What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk."

Invaded, then freed

Vovchansk had a population of about 20,000 before the war. It now lives only in the memories of those who fled.

Beyond its factories, the city had a "medical school, a technical college, seven schools and numerous kindergartens," Nelia Stryzhakova, the director of its library, told AFP in Kharkiv.

It even had a workshop that made "carriages for period films. We were even interesting, in our own way," insisted Stryzhakova, 61.

Add to that a regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with almost €10 million of German aid, a church packed for religious feasts and a vast hydraulic machinery plant. Once the town's economic lifeblood, its ruins are now being fought over by both armies.

Vovchansk was quickly occupied by the Russian army after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but was then retaken by Kyiv in a lightning counterattack that autumn.

Despite enduring regular Russian bombardment, it was relatively calm.

Then on May 10, Russia launched a surprise offensive into the city.

'Drones like mosquitoes'

The people of Vovchansk were plunged into a nightmare.

"The Russians started bombing," said Galyna Zharova, who lived in an apartment building now reduced to ruins, as images analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP confirmed.

"We were right on the front line. No one could come and get us out," added the 50-year-old, who now lives with her family in a university dormitory in Kharkiv.

After subsisting in basements until June 3, the couple fled on foot. "Drones were flying around us like wasps, like mosquitoes," Zharova remembered. They walked for several kilometers before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.

"We had everything," sighed librarian Stryzhakova. "No one could have imagined that in just five days, we would be wiped off the face of the Earth."

Her library's entire 125,000-book collection went up in smoke.

More than half of the families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. In Vovchansk, before the war in the Donbas region began in 2014, people crossed the border daily to shop, with Russians flocking to the city's markets.

"There are many mixed families," said Stryzhakova. "Parents, children, we're all connected. And now we've become enemies."

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to AFP's questions asking for its account of what happened in the city.

Municipal military administration chief Gambarashvili, who was wounded by shrapnel as he oversaw the city's evacuation, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.

Dozens, no doubt. Perhaps more. About 4,000 residents were still in Vovchansk on May 10, mostly senior citizens, since most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.

Families divided by war

Kira Dzhafarova, 57, says her mother, Valentina Radionova, is likely dead.

Their last phone conversation was on May 17. "At 85, I'm not going anywhere," her mother insisted. Satellite images and witnesses have since confirmed that the house was destroyed.

"I know it's over," sighed Dzhafarova, who provided DNA for identification, if and when the fighting ends.

In a particularly cruel irony, her mother, a Russian national, had moved to Vovchansk so she could be equidistant between her two children, who had fallen out.

Dzhafarova has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and became officially Ukrainian two years ago. Her older brother, who she believes supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family's Russian hometown.

Dzhafarova, a psychiatrist, now calls him her "former brother."

AFP was unable to contact him directly.

The body of Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70, is also missing. On May 16, he fled the bombardment in a car with his mother, his wife Raisa Zymovska, and a neighbor.

Zymovsky and his mother were shot fatally, "most likely by a Russian sniper," said Zymovska.

Amid the hail of bullets, the 59-year-old pediatric nurse had barely got out of the car when she was grabbed by Russian soldiers and held for two days. She escaped, hid in a neighbor's cellar for a night, and eventually fled through the forest.

One thing alone matters to her now: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and burying them properly.

'They took my son'

A rumor has circulated among the survivors that the bodies that littered the streets of Vovchansk for days were thrown into a mass grave. Where and by whom, no one knows.

A handful of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandr Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at least three when he returned to his former apartment on a bicycle in mid-September to retrieve belongings.

Garlychev lived in a southern part of the city that was relatively spared. He left only on August 10.

Vovchansk's survivors -- and even a few of its officials -- quietly wonder whether it will ever be rebuilt.

As for the librarian Stryzhakova, she can no longer bring herself to open a Russian book, even the classics, since her only son Pavlo was killed in the battle of Bakhmut.

"Russia, all of it disgusts me. They took my son; it's personal."