Galina Klimanova thought Slovyansk had survived the worst, when Ukrainian forces expelled Russian-led militants from the city in July 2014 after three months of occupation.
But now she does not know if she will ever go back, after fleeing Slovyansk this week to escape intensifying Russian air strikes and the approach of a front line that is biting ever deeper into Kyiv-controlled areas of the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
“My husband and I didn’t want to leave – no one wants to be uprooted at our age. But my daughter has small children and she wouldn’t manage without us. And all the explosions were really hard on the children,” says Klimanova (71), who left Slovyansk with her family on Monday.
“You could sort of get used to the explosions before. They only happened at night, and you could relax a bit in the daytime, but now they happen all the time – rockets and drones and bombs…There ... used to be shelling every few nights, then it became every night, and now it can be anytime,” she adds.
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“In 2014 there was some shelling and damage close to our house, and we had no gas or light or water for a while. But then things calmed down and were more or less fine. I never imagined this terrible sequel would come.”
The neighbouring small cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk have been Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk region since Russia’s proxy militia seized and cemented control over the provincial capital, also called Donetsk, and nearby areas in 2014.
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They became even more important to Kyiv after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, when the large Azov Sea port of Mariupol in southern Donetsk region fell to the Kremlin’s forces.
Hundreds of thousands of Russia’s soldiers have since been killed and injured in its grinding advance through the province, which has devastated cities such as Mariupol and Lysychansk and all but obliterated others, such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
Now the front line is less than 30km from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, and they will loom large in the Kremlin’s sights if the powerful force it has committed to seizing Pokrovsk, 70km to the south, takes the small city and establishes control over nearby highways.
Until 2022, about 1.9 million people lived in the two-thirds of Donetsk region that Kyiv still governed. Now it holds less than one-third, and about 250,000 civilians remain.
Dozens of people fleeing the region arrive each day at a reception centre in Pavlohrad, a city 100km west of Pokrovsk in Dnipropetrovsk province, where they are offered everything from food and medical and psychological help to assistance with lost documents, benefit payments and long-term accommodation.
Hundreds of displaced people arrived every day in the summer, as the window to leave Pokrovsk in relative safety began to close. It is now almost impossible to evacuate people from the city, which is swarming with Ukrainian and Russian drones and crackling with gunfire as the opposing armies fight for every district.
“We hoped for the best, that things would calm down, but that didn’t happen,” says Natasha Sadulayeva, who fled Pokrovsk as fighting intensified and spent time in nearby villages before reaching Pavlohrad last week.
“Rockets were flying everywhere. My house and my apartment were destroyed. I don’t know where we’ll end up. We have no relatives who could help. I have health problems, so I just need some peace and quiet,” adds Sadulayeva (62), who is travelling with her partner Andrei.
Serhiy from Dobropillia, a town 25km north of Pokrovsk that has also been engulfed by heavy fighting in recent weeks, says he was “almost ready to flee on foot” when an armoured vehicle sent by the regional authorities arrived to evacuate him.
“I had no option but to leave. There was no power or water supply. Just a few neighbours are left, elderly people who are surviving on food they’ve stored away. They say the town is being destroyed.”
The Pavlohrad reception centre, which has been set up in a former school, can provide temporary accommodation for about 70 people in converted classrooms and in several large, heavy-duty tents erected outside, where evacuation vans deliver new arrivals.
“There are people who flee at the very start; those who can put up with it for a while and then leave when the front line approaches; and those who stay until the last minute,” says Yevheniya Pinchuk of Ukrainian aid group East SOS, one of several organisations that work together at the centre.
“In the last category are people who have no resources to evacuate by themselves and start again somewhere else. They often don’t realise they can get help here – they think they will be left alone without assistance from anyone.”
In fact, most of the people waiting to help them have also escaped from front-line areas, and understand the trauma of displacement and the daunting prospect of starting from scratch, or very close to it.
“I left Pokrovsk on September 1st, 2024,” says Pinchuk, who is a lawyer by training. “So many of our volunteers have had to flee themselves. When we tell people arriving here that we had to do this too, and we got through it, it really helps them.”
A volunteer called Nataliia is helping in the centre’s medical room. A few hours earlier, she had seen what used to be her apartment building for the first time since escaping Pokrovsk in April: a friend had sent her a freeze-frame from a video that showed two Russian soldiers standing in front of the bomb-shattered high rise.
“We had heard the damage was bad but we hadn’t seen pictures,” she says. “I lived in that flat since I was four- years-old – so for 43 years. It was my everything.”
Outside the centre, mother and daughter Armenui Matinyan and Aykush Ayvazyan are staffing a mobile pharmacy run by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). Matinyan’s story of displacement goes back decades.
“I’ve been in Ukraine for more than 35 years. We came here from Armenia after the 1988 earthquake in Leninakan [now Gyumri] that killed 25,000 people. We left everything behind and began again,” she says.
They settled in Toretsk, a Donetsk-region town that has now been swallowed up by the front line: “There were no earthquakes here, everything was good. But we were unlucky again. We have had to leave everything and start over once more.”
Dressed elegantly in a grey-and-black winter coat and with a matching handbag over one arm, Klimanova refuses to believe that she has said a final goodbye to Slovyansk, where she lived for 49 years after growing up in Mariupol and studying in Donetsk – both of which are now occupied.
“I don’t know where we will go. But I want to stay close to home, so we can go back quickly if it becomes possible,” she says.
“We have lots of plans for after the war. We have figs and pomegranates and strawberries in our garden, and I hope we will return and grow them again, and grow new things too. I’m optimistic – I think we’ll go back and fix everything and make it even better.”
