Although living in eastern Ukraine, ravaged by fighting, Galina Porochina was spared the war for a long time. Its mining town of Toretsk is nestled in a sector of the front that, until recently, was relatively quiet.
That was until early June, when Russian rockets began raining down on the town, disrupting his life and that of other residents.
Today, Galina is forced to fill bottles at the public fountain, before returning to her home without water and electricity.
She learns to live hidden in the basement of her house to avoid bombs.
“When everything works, it seems like everything is normal. The water has disappeared, it’s uncomfortable, but we’ve gotten used to it,” explains this 63-year-old retired nursery assistant.
Toretsk is located 40 kilometers north of the large Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and less than 5 kilometers from the front line, where Moscow’s troops are pushing against an opponent exhausted after more than two and a half years of war.
Despite the daily strikes, Galina refuses to leave, because her son and his mother are buried in the city cemetery.
“It’s the kind of bond that’s very hard to break. I can’t leave. I can’t,” she said before breaking down in tears.
“It’s so painful when you can’t go to the cemetery.”
– “Broken City” –
Toretsk, whose population amounted to 12,000 souls before the invasion, is an important barrier in this sector of the front, the fall of which would give the Russian army access to Kostiantynivka, then ultimately to Kramatorsk, the ultimate objective of the Kremlin in this region.
“It was a good town. Small, compact and always clean. A lot of people stayed here and got married,” remembers Galina’s husband Oleksandr.
Lamp on his forehead, he tries to repair a pair of shoes in the dark. He and his wife believed that peace in the city would be lasting.
“There were concerts all the time, local musicians played in the park for dance evenings (…) it was our park,” he says.
Today, the buildings are gutted and onlookers no longer venture into the park. Shellfire echoes in the streets and black smoke rises on the horizon.
“The city is dead. Broken,” Galina laments. “Now the most important thing is human life, survival, to save at least the memory of family members.”
– “We leave” –
Oleksandr Borbrik, who was born and raised in Toretsk, is also a local child. But at 41, he is about to leave his life behind, including his gutted grocery store and his ruined house.
“Every day there are dozens of strikes. It’s scary to stay here. We’re leaving,” said the well-built man with close-cropped hair and blue eyes.
In his empty and dark grocery store, he supervises the move, without knowing what tomorrow will bring. “We haven’t thought about it yet,” he admits.
The governor of the Donetsk region, Vadym Filachkine, had, at the start of the week, urged residents to evacuate, while the bombings are taking place daily.
Because on the front, the situation is “difficult”. Wrapped up in his balaklava, Commander Kurt, as he calls himself, does not mince his words about Moscow’s assaults on the city.
– “Errors” –
“During the period when the rotation (of troops) was carried out, some mistakes were made. The enemy analyzed them and used them,” he concedes, holding his assault rifle firmly.
“Dragon’s teeth”, a kind of concrete block designed to hinder tanks, have been erected all around the city, but Kurt is not convinced of their effectiveness.
“The external defense lines mean nothing,” he explains, recalling the fate of Ukrainian cities that fell under Moscow’s control, despite numerous fortifications.
According to him, Russian forces have been pounding the city since early June with highly destructive gliding bombs and attempting incursions in small teams.
Despite this, some residents of Torestk will not flee, like Galina.
“We have been suffering this type of oppression for ten years,” explains the former kindergarten teacher, referring to the time when separatists supported by the Kremlin seized entire sections of the Donetsk region, from of 2014. “Now, I no longer make predictions,” she says.
