By Olha Chepil | 2026-03-30

Anti-drone netting lines the roads. First-person view drones hunt by day, guided bombs fall by night. Explosions reach Kramatorsk, yet cafés and the market stay open, and Viktoria, a server, plans to work tomorrow.

As Ukraine marked four years since Russia's full-scale invasion, Kramatorsk has become one of the most contested points on the front.

"This is the last highly fortified staging area in Donetsk Region. There's a major negotiation going on for it. Russia desperately wants to seize it," Alexander Kovalenko, a military expert and analyst for InfoResist, told Kontur.

A city that hasn't broken

The front sits 20 kilometers (12 to 15 miles) from the city. Train service stopped in November 2025, forcing residents to travel by car along a highway almost entirely enclosed in anti-drone netting. Family members who once rode trains to visit soldiers now travel only as far as Barvinkove in Kharkiv Region and drive the rest of the way.

Around 100,000 people remain in the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk metropolitan area. Schools and daycares are closed and operating online. Stores, restaurants and institutions remain open.

"The city is functioning... Everything is online. But the city hasn't been broken," Akim Galimov, a Ukrainian journalist and producer who recently visited, told Kontur.

After Russia occupied Donetsk, Kramatorsk became the regional administrative center. Logistics reroute around the drone-exposed Izyum-Sloviansk-Kramatorsk highway, complicating provisioning, but the city continues to function. Historians trace its resilience partly to character: Kramatorsk grew around railway and trade, not Donetsk's mining identity.

"Kramatorsk is a Ukrainian city with a long history. In the 18th century the Cossacks settled there on the Kazennyi Torets river, then a town grew up there," Galimov said. Local historians say the city's name derives from the Ukrainian word for goods -- kram -- traded near the Tor fortress.

For decades, Russia attempted to Russify residents through propaganda and pressure on educational and administrative institutions. Kramatorsk's Ukrainian identity held and passed from generation to generation.

The people who stay

Local historian and journalist Oleh Maksymenko has not left. His mother is ill, and he will not abandon her or his archives. He moved her from the city center, where shelling is constant, to their two-story dacha outside town.

"I deliberately brought my mother to our dacha -- we have a two-story house --because when night falls, it's incredibly frightening," Maksymenko told Kontur.

He left his paper archives in his apartment but digitized enough material to continue working on a new book from a village nearby. He returns to Kramatorsk for the market and to check on his home. Last fall, a drone landed near his house by the river. He called police and sappers. It exploded after they left.

"A year ago you didn't see things like that. But now drones are landing -- and not just at night, but during the day too," Maksymenko said.

Viktoria Chernyshova, 21, was born in Kramatorsk and works as a server in a pizza parlor, living with her mother and cat. Most of her peers have left. She stays because moving costs money, and work provides stability.

"Here, the truth is that work is home. And it's hard to go somewhere when you have a pet," Chernyshova told Kontur.

The restaurant opens daily. Two other cafés in the same chain remain. The market thins out, civilian vehicles give way to military ones.

Oleksandr Goncharenko, head of the city's military administration, wrote on Facebook that Kramatorsk has endured 853 strikes over four years of full-scale war, killing 146 civilians and wounding 695. Daily strikes on civilian buildings continue.

"If things start to get truly intolerable, I'll have to leave. But I want to be in my home," Chernyshova said.

The key to Donbas

The Sloviansk-Kramatorsk staging ground is the last fortified defensive zone in Donetsk Region under Ukrainian control -- more than 5,000 square kilometers (1,900 square miles) of territory with dense fortifications, industrial zones and complex terrain, Kovalenko said.

For Moscow, Kramatorsk is the key to Donbas both politically and militarily. Last year, Russia's largest concentrated force in Donetsk Region captured about 2,000 square kilometers (some 770 square miles).

"This is the hardest area for a Russian offensive," Kovalenko said.

Another assault would be far costlier.

"Another big meat grinder awaits the Russians here. The losses will be colossal, and an offensive could drag on for years. That's why they're trying to get this area through political pressure, not by fighting," Kovalenko said.

Kramatorsk's fall could reshape the war. Kovalenko said this line may be where Russia's offensive potential finally exhausts itself after four years of grinding conflict.

For Chernyshova, strategy reduces to something simpler.

"Go to bed, wake up, you're alive and healthy, and it's all good."