When a Russian soldier appeared outside the destroyed home of 98-year-old Lidiia Lomikovska in eastern Ukraine in late April, the first thing he did was shoot and kill the family dog.
“What have you done?” —Her daughter-in-law, Olha, 66, shouted at the Russian. “He was protecting me.”
“Now I will protect you,” he told her, Olha recalled in an interview.
Lomikovska, who lived through a Stalin-orchestrated famine that killed millions in the 1930s and the German occupation of her town, Ocheretyne, during World War II, said she did not know why her life had been marked by pain. .
But when the war came to his door again, he knew that he did not want to live under the “protection” of Russia.
When shells exploded around the city, she was separated from her family in the chaos. Then she set off alone on foot. For hours, in slippers and without food or water, she walked past the bodies of dead soldiers, tripping over bomb craters, unsure if her next step would be her last.
“I was walking the whole way and there was no one anywhere, just gunshots, and I was wondering if they were shooting at me,” he said in an interview. “I walked, crossed myself and thought: if only this war would end, if only everything would stop.”
But the war is not over, and Russia’s relentless attacks on the Donetsk region threaten to expose half a million civilians living in areas under Ukrainian control to even more intense shelling.
At the same time, Russian forces recently pushed new lines of attack in the northeast, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, and Ukrainian officials warn that Moscow could try to open another front in the north by crossing the border into the city of Sumy. More than 20,000 people have been evacuated from the Sumy and Kharkiv regions in recent weeks, Ukrainian officials reported in late May.
Russian advances have been slow and bloody. With each step forward, another city, village or settlement is invariably left in ruins.
“It’s terrible, it’s like hell, when you come to a settlement where everything is burning nearby, where these guided aerial bombs have completely destroyed houses, multi-story buildings, private houses,” said Pavlo Diachenko, 40, a police officer. Angeles Blanco police, a group dedicated to evacuating civilians from the highest risk areas.
Last month, the group strived to help 10 to 20 people each day in the Donetsk region.
“People don’t even have the opportunity to take anything with them; they just carry a bag with their belongings or a small purse,” he said.
At the moment, the Russians are mainly besieging relatively small villages and towns, many of which are already practically empty.
But as the front line shifts, hundreds of thousands of civilians in towns and cities still under Ukrainian control in the Donbas region watch nervously.
In February, Ukrainian officials said that over the course of the war at least 1,852 civilians had been killed in the Donetsk region, part of the Donbas, and another 4,550 had been wounded.
As of May 10, that number had risen to 1,955 dead and 4,885 injured, local authorities said.
Those figures likely vastly underestimate the total death toll, according to Ukrainian officials, human rights investigators and United Nations observers. There is still no internationally recognized count of civilians killed in areas under Russian occupation.
For Diachenko, persuading people to evacuate is often a challenge and sometimes ends tragically.
“When you come and talk to people about the need to evacuate, the next day, unfortunately, you come to take them away and they are already dead from the shelling,” Diachenko said. “This is probably the most painful thing for each of us.”
During the months when the front line remained relatively static, many people who fled near the beginning of the full-scale war returned with the belief that the risks were manageable and offset by a deep attachment to their homes.
The most dangerous place in Ukraine is the area that is within the range of artillery and drones of both armies. It extends approximately 20 miles in any direction from the front line, and violence increases exponentially closer to the point of contact between the two armies.
The earth is cratered like a tortured lunar landscape, corpses are not collected for months amid constant bombing, and the prospect of death hangs in the skies, where drones stalk all who move. Mortars, mines, missiles, bombs explode day and night.
Even small changes to the front open new villages to destruction.
Serhii Bahrii, head of the village of Bohorodychne in the Donetsk region, knows well what happens when fighting reaches a new town.
“In 2022, a bomb fell on my house and we miraculously survived in the basement,” he said. “It was terrifying. Everything was burning. Everything was red. I remember there was no oxygen. I tried to inhale it, but there was nothing.”
In Bohorodychne, he said, only 29 of the 700 inhabitants have returned.
There is no electricity or running water. Miles of dragon teeth, pyramid-shaped concrete spikes meant to trap tanks, stretch over the hills beyond the shattered houses. The people there survive largely on small, carefully tended gardens and volunteers who bring food, water and medicine, as well as a sanitation trailer donated by an American Mormon for showering and washing clothes.
Still, Bahrii said, people were hopeful that the delivery of American weapons would prevent the Russians from arriving in the area a second time.
“Hope,” he said, “but not certainty.”
Many of those who fled did not go far and chose to stay in nearby cities in the Donbas to be close to their lands. If the Russians made major advances, he said, those new homes in those cities would be threatened.
“It’s unlikely anyone will stay,” he said. “These people already know what bombings, explosions and death are like.”
Mrs. Lomikovska, 98, did not want to leave. Even when the fighting intensified around her house, she tried to continue tending to her garden: planting potatoes, onions, garlic and herbs.
Born in 1926, a few years before famine devastated the land, she knew what it was like to be without food. Regardless of the dangers around her, her family said, her plot of fertile land was a lifeline that she carefully tended to.
“In my childhood, times were very difficult and there was nothing to eat,” Lomikovska said. “We survive on what we grow in the garden.”
When the Germans occupied her village in 1941, she was a teenager.
“I wasn’t afraid then,” he said. Although the German soldiers slept in the family home, he said, “they didn’t touch anything.”
She and her husband raised two children in the house they built in Ocheretyne, and she spent long periods working on the railroads as a cabin conductor, serving passengers. Her husband and her youngest son died before the current war turned her world upside down again.
He remembered the horror of the last sleepless nights before the Russians took his city in April.
“I didn’t lie on the bed lengthwise, but widthwise,” he said. “I pulled my legs towards me. My bed was next to the window and there was nothing left on the window. If we block the window with something, they will just break it. And the wind was strong. It was very cold. “I stay there and hear gunshots.”
She now lives with her granddaughter in a small house about twelve kilometers from Chasiv Yar, a hilltop town that is being razed as Russian forces try to capture it.
If the Russians manage to take Chasiv Yar (which currently prevents Russia from laying siege to the Donetsk region’s major population centers), Lomikovska knows she might have to flee once again.
“And now,” he said, “I don’t know where else I’ll go.”