Stricken Ukrainian city empties
KRAMATORSK, UKRAINE » Two days after more than 50 people were killed on its platforms by a missile strike, the only sounds at the Kramatorsk railway station Sunday morning were a distant air-raid siren and the rhythmic sweeping of broken glass.
“The town is dead now,” said Tetiana, 50, a shopkeeper who was working next to the station when it was attacked as thousands of people tried to board trains to evacuate the eastern city, fearing it would soon be besieged by Russian forces.
Friday’s strike was a gruesome turn for the city after nearly eight years of being near the front line of the country’s struggle against Russia-backed separatists in the region known as Donbas.
The station’s main hall was still filled with streaks of blood and luggage Sunday morning, with the burned-out hulks of two sedans lying in the parking area outside.
Tetiana, who declined to provide her last name, was sure that more death was on the way.
“We are being encircled. 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 that was once one of the industrial hearts of the Donbas. She said she would not leave because she must look after her 82-year-old mother, who is ailing. But she knows more than ever the danger that brings.
“We think we will be swept off the face of the Earth,” she said.
She recalled ducking inside a nearby market Friday to take cover when the missile struck the train station, with what she estimated was 2,000 people inside. 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.
“There were screams everywhere,” she said. “Nobody could understand anything, cars were burning, and people were running.”
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. 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.
At the city’s main hospital, City Hospital 3, staff members were preparing for the kind of destruction that has swept over other urban centers. Their supplies for mass trauma are ample, one doctor said. But, he added, many of the nurses have evacuated, and there was a shortage of critical care physicians.
In Kramatorsk, residents have started to hunker down, preparing for a siege. 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.
Just after noon Sunday, Tetiana closed the small candy and coffee confectionery where she worked. It would be shuttered for the foreseeable future, as its main source of income, the train station’s passengers, were gone.
“We’re closing down,” Tetiana said. “There is no point. There are no people.”
Evacuation vehicles were still leaving the city but not at the volume they had in the days before. One resident said that buses sent from western Ukraine were already leaving unfilled. Those who were staying in Kramatorsk, many of them older residents, were bracing for what may lie ahead: making do without electricity; living in cold, damp basements; cooking by fire; and enduring the terror of incoming artillery fire.
But Sunday, dear friends Lidia, 65, and Valentyna, 72, dressed in nice clothes and decided to leave their lifelong homes together. Both women declined to provide their surnames.
“After what happened at the railway station, we can hear the explosions getting closer and closer,” Lidia said. Through tears, Valentyna added, “I can’t take these sirens anymore.” Their destination, as with millions of other Ukrainians since Russia invaded Feb. 24, was somewhere vaguely west — just anywhere farther away.
“We need to leave because we can’t bear it anymore,” Lidia said.
Kramatorsk and the neighboring, but smaller, city of Sloviansk are likely to be the first two cities that will be attacked by whatever Russian forces are able to reconstitute in the region after their defeat and withdrawal from around Kyiv, the capital.
Encircling and cutting off Kramatorsk and Sloviansk would allow the Russians to isolate the Ukrainian forces who are holding their old front lines in the two breakaway regions — a maneuver, if successfully carried out, that would mean disaster for the Ukrainian military, as much of their forces are there.
Sgt. Andriy Mykyta, a soldier in Ukraine’s border guard, was in Kramatorsk to try to head off that fate.
“This is a tactic of the Russians: They take cities as hostages.”