Life in Kramatorsk was getting more difficult in other ways, too. The city had been without gas since May, after a Russian strike on the city’s main pipeline. The family had bought an electric stove for cooking, in hopes that the situation would stabilise over the summer. But then the Ukrainian authorities said there would be no heating or any water during the cold season. “How could we live there with small children? We had to leave,” Kulbayeva said.
Her parents decided to stay behind, as did those of her husband Oleksandr, and Kulbayeva worries about them.
“My mother told me: ‘As long as my house is standing, I won't leave.’ She is 70, you know how attached to their house [old people] can be, how hard it is for them to leave it. But I have hope that she will change her mind when it gets very cold,” Kulbayeva said.
“The most important thing is that [the war] ends,” she told me. “We don’t want to [live under Russian rule], we can’t forgive them. As long as Kramatorsk remains in Ukraine, even if it’s in ruins, we’ll return. We grew up there, our whole life was there,” Kulbayeva says, cradling her five-month-old daughter Kseniya in her arms.
‘How could I have kept her warm?’
Today, in Donetsk, the frontline between Russian and Ukrainian forces moves little, running along the cities of Bakhmut and Avdiyivka.
Meanwhile in the Kherson region, Russian forces are being pushed towards Crimea by Ukrainian troops, and the Ukrainian army is still successfully holding the defence near cities that neighbour the occupied Luhansk region.
Towns close to the fighting – such as Kramatorsk, Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka – are under constant fire. They are slowly but steadily being destroyed, especially when it comes to infrastructure.
Even if the shelling were to stop or Ukrainian forces managed to regain more territory in Donetsk, it would still be a long time before these areas became inhabitable again.
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