A return home at front lines, renewed yet resigned
Despite risks, 5.5 million people have gone back
POKROVSK, Ukraine — A new sound wafts through the open windows at night in this town near the front line: children hollering at each other down the block, even long after dark.
The markets are full. Sales are surging at the local bike shop. Red tulips, planted by hand, are bursting open everywhere.
It is remarkable — “Unrecognizable,” one city official said — how different this small town in eastern Ukraine feels from a year ago. Last summer, Pokrovsk was a spooky landscape of boarded-up houses and bushy yards. No one was around. Now it’s hard to take a few steps without passing someone on the sidewalk.
Nothing has changed outside Pokrovsk. The front line is still 30 miles away. Ukrainians are still dying in droves. One of the biggest armies in the world, that of the Russian Federation, is still bombing cities while Ukrainians sleep and trying to take as much territory as it can, at a terrifying cost.
But what has changed — and it reflects something broader happening in small towns across this vast country — are people’s calculations. How much danger are they willing to accept? What is the best for them and their families? How should they accommodate the war on a daily basis? The answers to these questions seem different this year, and without consulting each other, many people have reached the same decision.
It is resilience, yes, but perhaps also something a little less shiny: resignation.
“The war is here. There is no safe place in Ukraine. So you might as well get on with it,” said Dr. Natalia Medvedieva, a family doctor who tried living in a safer place in western Ukraine with her son but came back here a few months later.
And home is home.
“It’s hard to describe what is so special about home,” said Pavel Rudiev, an engineer at Pokrovsk’s small train station. “It’s where everything is familiar, where you know people, where you have friends.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this principle didn’t hold. More than 13 million Ukrainians — onethird of the country — fled from their homes. But as time went on, it became harder to stay away.
Since last summer, at a pretty steady rate, Ukrainians have been returning. More than 5.5 million have gone home, according to the International Organization for Migration, and not just to large cities like Kyiv, the capital, or Dnipro, but to small places as well, even those right behind the front line. While the exodus at the beginning of the war was dramatic and widely covered, the homecomings have been more gradual and haven’t generated nearly the same attention.
Of course, there’s concern. Medvedieva keeps a bag packed with her documents, money, and some clothes. Viktoriia Perederii, a veterinarian, who returned to Pokrovsk last year after trying to live in central Ukraine, said that many families bring her their pets to get clean health certificates for international travel in case they need to leave in a hurry.
“It’s difficult to evaluate the risks,” she said. “There is no safe place in Ukraine. Look at Uman,” she added, referring to the recent missile strike that killed 25 people in a city that, until that moment, many Ukrainians had considered safe.
At this time of year, Pokrovsk is basking in spring.