“This is a tactic of the Russians: They take cities as hostages.” “There will be a serious fight,” Sergeant Mykyta said. “We need to leave because we can’t bear it anymore,” Lidia said. 24, was somewhere vaguely west - just anywhere farther away. Through tears, Valentyna added, “I can’t take these sirens anymore.” Their destination, as with millions of other Ukrainians since Russia invaded on Feb. “After what happened at the railway station, we can hear the explosions getting closer and closer,” Lidia said. Both women declined to provide their surnames. Those who were staying in Kramatorsk, many of them older residents, were bracing what may lie ahead: making do without electricity, living in cold damp basements, cooking by fire and enduring the terror of incoming artillery fire.īut on Sunday, Lidia, 65, and Valentyna, 72, dear friends, dressed in nice clothes and decided to leave their lifelong homes together. One resident said that buses sent from western Ukraine were already leaving unfilled. There are no people.”Įvacuation vehicles were still leaving the city but not at the volume they had in the days before. In the distance, the thud of artillery reverberated, barely loud enough to hear but still easily felt. The workers swept where they could until a water truck arrived, hosing down the blood that had pooled by the outside entrance. A pack of stray dogs, frequent visitors to the area around the station, limped around the debris. Still, orange-vested maintenance workers tried to clean around the wreckage from the strike: parts of the train station itself, people’s shoes, a bag of potatoes and broken glass. It would be shuttered for the foreseeable future, as its main source of income, the train station’s passengers, were gone. Just after noon on Sunday, Tetiana closed the small candy and coffee confectionery where she worked. Most small shops have been closed, a few grocery stores remain open and the city square, once teeming with people during these warm spring days, is all but empty. In Kramatorsk, residents have started to hunker down, preparing for a siege. But, he added, many of the nurses have evacuated and there was a shortage of critical care physicians. Their supplies for mass trauma are ample, one doctor said. It feels like an assault here is inevitable: Cutting off Kramatorsk would partly cut off Ukrainian forces fighting in the eastern breakaway regions where Russia is consolidating.Īt the city’s main hospital, City Hospital 3, the staff was preparing for the kind of destruction that has swept over other urban centers. With Moscow’s decision to shift the focus of its war to eastern Ukraine, the people who remain in Kramatorsk fear that they will soon be shelled into oblivion, like the residents of Kharkiv and Mariupol, two other cities that have been ruthlessly assaulted by Russian forces.
“Nobody could understand anything, cars were burning and people were running.” “There were screams everywhere,” she said. A family that took shelter with her at the market was almost crushed by a piece of a falling roof that was sheared off in the blast. She recalled ducking inside a nearby market on Friday to take cover when the missile struck the train station, with what she estimated was 2,000 people inside. “We think we will be swept off the face of the earth,” she said. But she knows more than ever the danger that brings. She said she would not leave because she must look after her 82-year-old mother, who is ailing.
We understand that,” added Tetiana, who has lived for 10 years in Kramatorsk, a city with a prewar population of around 150,000 people and once one of the industrial hearts of the Donbas. Tetiana, who declined to provide her last name, was sure that more death was on the way.
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