“What if there was something special in Vovchansk? But have you never been there?” says Nelia Stryjakova, a former librarian in this small town in northeastern Ukraine.
Impossible, the city has been bombed for months and has been the target of an attack by the Russian army of rare intensity since May 10: “We can say that the city almost no longer exists,” notes its mayor clinically. Tamaz Gambarashvili, from his makeshift office in Kharkiv, 68 km to the southwest.
Vovtchansk is a town without history but with geography: five kilometers separate it from the Russian border, a proximity which sealed its destiny. It is a lunar landscape made of ruins stretching several kilometers around, shown in images filmed by Ukrainian military drones at the end of May and then at the beginning of September.
“The enemy continues its massive bombings and, today, 90% of the city center is razed,” continues Mr. Gambarashvili, a colossus in uniform, officially still head of the civil and military administration of the urban community of Vovchansk .
– Building after building –
AFP journalists in Kharkiv, kyiv and Paris joined forces with Bellingcat, an independent collective investigating using Open Source Intelligence (Osint, using digital investigation and public data) to tell how, building after building, almost an entire city was wiped off the map in a few weeks.
To be precise, 60% of Vovchansk was completely destroyed and 18% partially destroyed at the end of September 2024, according to a systematic analysis of satellite images carried out by Bellingcat. The figure is much higher if we stick to the city center alone, north of the Vovtcha, the river which crosses the city.
This pre-war town of around 20,000 souls only lives in the memory of its inhabitants who survived and took refuge in Kharkiv where AFP interviewed them.
“There was a technical school, a medical school, seven (general education) schools, numerous nurseries. How many factories did we have? An oil extraction factory, a butter factory, a carpentry and only one of the two factories in Ukraine manufacturing carts (used in the filming of period films) We were even interesting, in our own way,” insists Ms. Stryjakova.
To which must be added a regional hospital (rebuilt in 2017 with nearly ten million euros from Germany), a church packed to capacity on special occasions.
– Poorly defended –
After the Russian army began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Vovchansk was quickly occupied before being reconquered by Ukrainian forces in the fall of the same year.
Since then, the city has come under regular fire from Russian artillery. But it's a completely different story that began on May 10, the day when the Russian military opened a new front by attacking, from the northern border, the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city.
By pure coincidence, it is in Vovtchansk, considered a calm place, that the 57th Ukrainian brigade, exhausted by weeks of fighting in Koupiansk, about a hundred kilometers further south, regains its strength.
“We then spotted two Russian armored personnel carriers which had just crossed the border,” recalls Denys Yaroslavsky, the head of the brigade’s reconnaissance unit.
Moscow then launched one of its most intense offensives since the start of the war, undoubtedly mobilizing several thousand soldiers, according to kyiv.
“There were no fortifications, no mines” to slow down enemy progress, Lieutenant Yaroslavsky then discovered. “17,000 people lost their homes and why? Because someone didn't build fortifications,” fumes the 42-year-old officer, who denounces “negligence or corruption.”
In the city center, the spare parts factory for hydraulic machinery, Agregatny Zavod, a dual purpose establishment built in 1970, therefore during the Soviet era, is the subject of fierce fighting.
President Volodymyr Zelensky cancels a trip abroad to make an emergency visit to Kharkiv on May 16. The Russian army has advanced five to ten kilometers, he admits.
The inhabitants of Vovchansk, for their part, are falling into hell.
– “Drones like mosquitoes” –
“After May 10, the Russians started bombing,” says Galyna Jarova, 50, a native of Vovchansk who lived at 16-A Stepova Street. The building is nothing but rubble today, according to images analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP.
“We were just on the front line, you understand? Nobody could come and get us out of there.”
“All the buildings burned and we went down to a cellar. We stayed huddled there until June 3,” continues her husband Viktor, 65.
The couple decided that day to flee on foot. “The drones were flying (around us) like wasps, like mosquitoes,” recalls Ms. Jarova. They walk for several kilometers before being taken care of by Ukrainian volunteers.
Disputed by the two armies, the Agregatny Zavod factory, where they were both employed, is now also in ruins.
In the municipal library at 8 Tokhova Street, which Nelia Stryjakova has run for five years, the 125,000 books in Russian and Ukrainian went up in smoke.
“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything. No one could have imagined that in just five days, we would be wiped off the face of the earth,” sighs this 61-year-old lady with a lively look.
Even worse than in Bakhmout, a town in eastern Ukraine conquered by the Russians in May 2023 and scene of some of the most violent clashes in two and a half years of war, estimates Lieutenant Yaroslavsky.
“I was there and I know how the fighting took place there. What happened in Bakhmut in two to three months took only two to three weeks in Vovchansk,” he says.
“We control the city today,” he continues bitterly, “but what we control is a pile of ruins.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to AFP's questions about its version of the fighting in Vovchansk.
– How many killed? –
Wounded by a shrapnel in the leg on May 16 while directing the evacuation of his constituents, Mr. Gambarachvili shakes his head to express his helplessness when asked to estimate the number of civilians killed. Dozens probably, they say.
More, who knows? Around 4,000 people remained in Vovchansk on May 10, according to the local official, most families with children having been evacuated for several months already.
At the head of a private clinic in Kharkiv, Kira Djafarova, 57, assumes that her mother Valentina Radionova is long dead, at 40 Doukhovna Street, a small house with a lovingly tended vegetable garden.
Their last telephone conversation was on May 17. “At 85, I’m not going anywhere anymore,” Valentina repeated at the time.
Satellite images collected by Bellingcat and direct witnesses confirmed that the house had been completely destroyed. “Since then, I understood that it was over,” whispers Kira, who gave her DNA for possible identification, when the fighting ends.
A particularly cruel irony is that Ms. Radionova, of Russian nationality, moved to Vovchansk in 2015 to be equidistant between her two estranged children: Kira, the psychiatrist who has been present in Kharkiv for 35 years, has become Ukrainian at heart and for two years of Nationality; and his older brother, seen as supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin and remaining in Belgorod, the family birthplace and the first major Russian city across the border.
Kira no longer pronounces the first name of the man she only calls her “old brother” – whom AFP was unable to contact.
Also dead Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70 years old. On May 16, he decided to flee the deluge of fire by car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raïssa and a neighbor. The husband collapsed at the wheel after a few minutes, his mother too, killed “more than certainly by a Russian sniper”, says Raïssa.
Under the whistling of bullets, this 59-year-old ex-childcare worker only had time to extricate herself from the vehicle. She is arrested by Russian soldiers and detained for two days. She manages to escape, hides in a neighbor's cellar for one night, flees through the forest.
– Bury your dead –
This odyssey between life and death, this blonde with blue eyes speaks about it in a soft, calm voice. Only one thing seems to matter to her: finding the bodies of her husband and her mother-in-law, to give them a proper burial.
Because a rumor is circulating among the refugees: the corpses which had been littering the streets of Vovtchansk for days had been thrown into a mass grave, thanks to a suspension of fighting. By whom? Or ? It is impossible to find out more at this time.
Of the civilians still alive in Vovchansk, there are a handful left. Nobody knows how many. Oleksandr Garlytchev, 70, claims to have seen at least three when he went to his old apartment in mid-September to collect some things, by bike for greater safety.
Mr. Garlytchev lived, it is true, at 10-A Roubiejanskoe road, in a relatively untouched area in the south of the city, which he only left on August 10.
In Vovchansk, before the start of clashes in the eastern region of Donbass in 2014, border trade was daily, with Russians roaming the aisles of its markets.
More than half of families in Eastern Ukraine have Russian parents. “There are a lot of mixed families. Parents, children, we are all linked. And now we have become enemies,” says Ms. Stryjakova.
When Raissa Zymovska, a devout Christian, is asked if she can forgive her husband's murderer, her silence seems interminable. And then, a whisper: “I don’t know, I really don’t. As a Christian yes, but as a human being… What can I say?”
