Hope amid the horrors Ukrainians find sense of purpose, spirit of community amid the devastation and uncertainty of nearly two years of Russian aggression By: Melissa Martin Posted: 1:59 PM CST Friday, Jan. 12, 2024

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This article was published 12/01/2024 (644 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Katerina Seledtsova has a six-year-old son, whom she adores, but she also dreams of someday having a daughter. So in 2018, when she opened a bakery and coffee shop on a pretty, tree-lined street in her hometown of Kramatorsk, she designed it as the type of place that imaginary daughter would love. Bright pink walls. Bright pink couches. Everything soft and pink. Like a Barbie house, Seledtsova says, or a princess castle.

Life was good in Kramatorsk then, though not without its tensions. In the spring of 2014, the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic militia, backed by Russia, had seized the city, one of a string of urban centres that form the industrial spine of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The ensuing battle of Kramatorsk raged for three months.

That was a scary time, Seledtsova recalls. Nobody knew what was happening. Her apartment was blown up by a rocket, though luckily she was unharmed. What she didn’t know then, was that the chaos of 2014 was setting the stage for a much larger war yet to come, one that would leave her life, her city and her little pink café forever changed.

“Maybe that’s why I’m not scared now,” she says. “I know what we’re expecting.”

It’s a chilly afternoon in early January. At the Coffee House Sweet Bakery, Christmas pop songs jangle on the stereo and festive lights blink cheerfully in the window. One might almost be able to forget the front line is just 30 kilometres east, in the city ruins of Bakhmut, were it not for the exhausted soldiers trudging in for coffee, or the booms of tank fire reverberating down the street, emanating from a Ukrainian training ground somewhere over the hills.

When foreign journalists come to Kramatorsk now, that is what they see: the city as a staging ground for the war. They did not see the city before. They did not see the hopeful years after the summer of 2014, when the Ukrainian army drove the separatists back and a new energy flourished. Many Ukrainians fleeing the nearby breakaway regions settled there, and opened restaurants and shops. With the city of Donetsk still under separatist control, the government moved the region’s administrative centre to Kramatorsk.

Investment flowed into the city. There were upgrades to the roads and public spaces and Kramatorsk bloomed with art. New sculptures celebrating Ukrainian history rose in the city’s broad and neatly manicured parks; downtown, artists from across Europe came to paint dazzling murals on the sides of old Stalin-era apartment blocks.

“Our city became a really comfortable place,” says Oleksiy Ladyka, a journalist with the online media outlet Kramatorsk Post. “We had battles about art, and it was good. Not about the war, not about the language you speak, not about the face you trust. Just about art.”

“Our city became a really comfortable place. We had battles about art, and it was good. Not about the war, not about the language you speak, not about the face you trust. Just about art.”–Oleksiy Ladyka, a journalist with the online media outlet Kramatorsk Post

So when Seledtsova opened the bakery in the middle of that peaceful spell, it was another new jewel in a city that, she says, felt like a “little Monaco,” a place where fancy cars and new money mixed with old poverty. At first, her customers were what she’d imagined. Fashionable young women flocked to sip lattes and snap Instagram selfies next to the pink walls; mothers treated daughters to sumptuous cakes decorated with berries.

Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and overnight, everything changed.

Today, the physical beauty of Kramatorsk remains, but the city is deeply scarred and its full civilian life suspended. In the first months of the invasion, around 60 per cent of its 200,000 residents fled, boarding up shop and apartment windows as they left. There are few jobs, and even fewer things to do.

The war hangs over nearly every facet of life. Military vehicles and soldiers fill the streets and grocery stores, gathering goods for bases scattered throughout the region. Curfew falls three hours earlier than it does in Kyiv, at 9 p.m. Alcohol sales are banned, though it’s easy enough to buy bootleg vodka or homemade samogon liquor, if you know who, and how, to ask. After nightfall, the streets and even apartment stairwells are kept in pitch darkness, so as to cloak the city from possible Russian attacks.

There have been too many of those, in Kramatorsk. The city is within range of Russian short-range rockets, which cannot be intercepted by Ukrainian air defences. Apartment blocks and factories lie smashed to rubble. Two of the war’s most infamous civilian attacks happened in the heart of the city: in April 2022, a Russian missile slammed into the train station courtyard where fleeing residents were waiting, killing 63. Last June, 13 civilians were killed in an attack on the Ria Pizza lounge, a popular eatery for NGO workers, journalists and off-duty soldiers.

Yet somehow, under a constant shadow of grief and threat, life carries on. City buses still run, taking citizens to the central market, where stout-armed women hawk cheese, fresh cuts of meat and jars of homemade pickles. Fast-food kiosks serve up shawarma and burgers to hungry soldiers. Even a few beauty salons remain open, offering manicures behind windows boarded up for protection against shrapnel.

In this new reality, this new world of war, Seledtsova found her dreamy pink bakery had a role to play, one she could never have imagined.

When the full-scale invasion began, she’d rushed her mother and son to safety in Dnipro, about a four-hour drive west. But she was determined to re-open the bakery, even though most of her staff and customers fled. By the time she did, in June 2022, it felt as if there were no women in Kramatorsk, she says — and then the soldiers started coming.

At first, Seledtsova says with a laugh, these new customers were put off by the decor: “Pink?” they’d exclaim, while she jokingly apologized. But her bubbly demeanour won them over, and they’d come back with their brothers-in-arms. Soon, it felt as if the bakery was home to a “big family,” a long list of regulars she knows by name.

It’s the conversation that brings them back, perhaps more than the cake and coffee. When the soldiers come, Seledtsova chats with them about “everything” — their homes, their wives, the lives they had before the war. When one of their friends are killed, they tell her about it, and grieve together. And when her son visits, she notices how the soldiers gaze at him with gentle eyes, thoughts drifting to their own children.

“It’s like psychotherapy,” she says. “For me and for them, really. I’m like his mom, or his sister, or maybe a daughter. It’s very easy small talk. Easy, fun optimism. And they take my energy, all emotion, and it’s like therapy.”

From these bonds, Seledtsova found a new purpose. In recent months, the coffee shop raised cash to buy vehicles or drones for customers’ military units. She even met her boyfriend there, in October 2022. That morning, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine; cellphone service was down, so she couldn’t reach her mother and son in Dnipro.

Terrified, she was sitting on the pink couches, crying, when a soldier in uniform came to sit with her. They spoke for two hours and after a while Seledtsova realized she wasn’t crying anymore. “His voice was so soft,” she says. They’ve been together ever since.

So connections like those give her hope, but even that is fragile. Russian forces are less than an hour’s drive down the road. For now, the battle lines are holding; that could change at any time. There may come a day when Kramatorsk’s remaining residents have to flee, and the little pink bakery will have to close.

“I am a realist,” Seledtsova says. “I understand that maybe someday or in some months, we must take all of this and go somewhere. But I live now. Day by day.”

To get through, she tries to focus on one good thing that happens every day. An interesting person she met. A special moment with her son. A caring conversation with someone who needed to talk. These things, and a sense of meaning in holding a space where civilians or soldiers can savour a fleeting sweetness, a candy-coloured refuge from the war.

“Maybe it sounds very strange,” she says, quietly. “But I’m happy.”

Yet, it’s unsettling when she ventures out of Kramatorsk. When she goes to Kyiv, or Dnipro, “it’s very difficult for me,” she says, “because everything is different there.” She sees young men in those cities, far from the front and not under so much pressure, out drinking with their friends. She notices their clean shirts and the ease in their steps.

She shakes her head and gestures to two soldiers, sitting on the pink couches nearby.

“Look, look. They want to sleep. They want to eat normal food. And I see all these guys, and I want to hug them, and protect their emotional (well-being). When I go to Dnipro, it feels like it’s OK, they have normal life, and I can’t…”

She trails off.

“It’s very sad. I don’t know. It’s hard. But I am optimistic. And I try to help them.”

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To understand what it’s like to live in Ukraine now, near the end of the second year of the full-scale invasion, one must first understand the experience is divided into very different worlds. On this, most everyone in Ukraine agrees, though whether that’s good or bad or just a neutral fact is a matter of opinion.

That contrast Seledtsova notices when she leaves Kramatorsk? Everyone who’s spent time in both worlds feels it. It can be jarring. By last summer, soldiers returning from the front began describing Kyiv as “dreamland,” which isn’t a compliment. “There’s no war in Kyiv,” a soldier told me once, a rueful joke about the relative comfort of civilian life in the capital.

It’s not, of course, a true statement. The war still wreaks trauma, danger and death everywhere in Ukraine; in December, many cities far from the front were bombarded by multiple air attacks, including the largest ballistic missile barrage of the war. In Kyiv, a robust air defence, bolstered last spring by the arrival of American Patriot systems, shot nearly everything down.

But what is true is that the stabilized front lines, and upgraded air defence, have bought much of Ukraine the space for a bearable civilian life. Even on mornings after a major air attack, Kyiv bustles with activity. There are concerts, art exhibitions, trendy craft markets, thriving nightlife districts. Tourists have even started returning, cautiously. It’s not normal, exactly, given the air-raid sirens that still wail many days, but there’s enough security to allow the city’s vibrancy.

In front-line cities such as Kramatorsk, no such imitation of peacetime rhythms is possible. The war disrupts everything. Kramatorsk Post reporter Ladyka doesn’t agree with the joke he’s also heard, that there’s “no war in Kyiv” — his friends there don’t forget even for a minute about the war, he says — but he does see the difference, when people have more room to breathe.

“It’s quite difficult to live here (Kramatorsk) for the whole time,” Ladyka says. “You can’t relax. I know people who lived here for all the time, they never leave the city, and I see that they have problems with their mental health. They are more aggressive. They are very angry to the people who leave the city. They said, ‘you betrayed us, don’t come back ever.’

“It’s not OK, but I understand that they just feel so bad because it’s very hard to live here,” he continues. “Today is quiet, but you don’t know what will be tomorrow. And Russians, they still want to capture our city, and now they have some success in the front line. We think, what will be in the next year? Maybe Kramatorsk will be next.”

Ladyka’s Instagram posts and TikTok live-streams have become a source of connection for thousands who have fled Kramatorsk. Sometimes, viewers ask him to walk by their homes while he’s filming; once, someone even asked him to visit their girlfriend nearby.

“I said, ‘no thank you,’” Ladyka recalls, laughing. “She’s your lover, not mine.”

But sometimes, the requests are more sombre. On one bitterly cold afternoon in early January, he took a cab to the new military cemetery on the edge of Kramatorsk. As he walked slowly down the rows of blue-and-yellow flags, past the intricate wreaths piled on graves, he pointed out people he knew. A city administrator, who enlisted with the army. A chess coach. A distant cousin.

On this visit, though, he is searching for someone specific.

“Ah,” he says, pausing. “Here it is.”

Ladyka did not know the soldier who lies in the grave, a 50-year-old named Dmitro who was killed in March 2023. But one of his viewers did, and they asked if Ladyka would leave a few tokens on their behalf: a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of Pepsi and a Snickers bar.

He nestles the offerings beside the cross, then leans in to take a photo with his phone, to show the viewer the task was completed. Then he stands up, and flips the phone camera on his own face. He starts to walk down the rows again, thinking about what he wants to say.

“I think I will make a TikTok, so they can see that we care about each other, even in death,” he says, before he starts filming. “Not like the Russians.”

Ladyka himself had left Kramatorsk in April 2022, finding refuge with his colleagues in western Ukraine. He didn’t stay away long. Within weeks, he’d returned to the city to work. It was only short trips, at first, but gradually he stayed longer. In September, he moved back permanently, and doesn’t plan to leave again.

“When you’re not at home, it’s not comfortable,” he says. “A lot of my friends are still here. And I know everything here. I feel like I’m at home. I missed everything.”

“When you’re not at home, it’s not comfortable. A lot of my friends are still here. And I know everything here. I feel like I’m at home. I missed everything.”–Oleksiy Ladyka

He’s not alone. Throughout 2023, displaced residents trickled back into the region. Seledtsova noticed more familiar faces, or just non-military ones, around Kramatorsk: “I think they’re very tired,” she says. “To live in another city, other country, it’s difficult. It’s a very lonely life.”

Anton Yaremchuk is familiar with that story. A documentary filmmaker who was born in Kyiv, Yaremchuk was living in Germany when Russia invaded. He rushed back to Ukraine to help rescue civilians; the organization he co-founded, Base UA, soon grew to become one of the most respected grassroots NGOs working in the Donbas region.

For months, Yaremchuk and his colleagues worked tirelessly to ferry families and the elderly away from encroaching Russian forces, and to safety in central or western Ukraine. Now, almost two years later, some families have started returning, having struggled to find adequate housing or work in Ukraine’s war-crippled economy. They decide to take their chances at home.

“It seems kind of strange, because it’s not like these areas are much safer,” he says. “But they haven’t found a long-term solution. You can’t stay, if it’s a family of five, and you stay in a tiny room, after 8 p.m. you can’t be loud, you can’t eat in the room, all these rules of shelter living. After a while it becomes very difficult, so people come back.”

Base UA has launched a program to try to address that problem, buying up houses in safer parts of Ukraine for as little as about $4,400, and just giving them to families who want to evacuate dangerous regions. But it’s also time, Yaremchuk thinks, for humanitarian organizations to change their thinking on what residents of front-line regions need most.

For the most part, supply routes are stable almost to the front, and residents in those regions can address their basic needs. Boxes of food aid stack up, unused; so do piles of cheap toys and tattered secondhand clothing donated from Europe.

“We’re not in that crisis mode anymore,” Yaremchuk says. “Most of the things (the big NGOs) are trying to provide, people don’t need it. Food packages, and also this superficial approach to working with kids. People come here and give them sweets.”

He shakes his head.

“It’s counterproductive, actually, because kids start to accept this as a normal reality. It creates this very unsustainable system as well… which is people coming from outside and giving them things. It completely breaks a normal perspective on how society actually works.”

In other words, Yaremchuk says, it’s time to start thinking about how to make life in front-line regions more complete, like it is in Kyiv. Mental health. Education. Culture. Recreation. The war won’t end soon, and many residents can’t or won’t leave. So how can they support civilian life, especially for youth, and rebuild a community rich enough to sustain them?

“Generally, the government and most of the big humanitarian agencies have completely failed this part of the issues,” Yaremchuk says. “Everyone is providing food packages. Everyone is trying to provide health care… but there is very little attention to these very complicated and long-term issues that also require complex and laborious approaches.”

The challenge in switching direction, he notes, is largely one of accounting. Large NGOs, such as the United Nations, have a great deal of resources to distribute to front-line groups such as Base UA, but the paperwork encourages getting the most concrete return on the numbers.

“They need to say they spent 50,000 euros to support 10,000 people with 10,000 food packages, because that looks good on paper, and obviously is very tangible,” Yaremchuk says. “But following a human being, a person, and trying to make sure they do get a chance at life, that’s very difficult to calculate.”

At Base UA’s home in Kramatorsk, Yaremchuk and his team had an idea.

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When Nastya grows up, she wants to be an artist, a dancer, a photographer and a furniture maker. She’s learning English and can use it to count up to eight, which is her age, and past that too, so she’s excited to meet a visitor from Canada with whom she can test that skill.

She loves Kramatorsk — “duzhe, duzhe, duzhe,” she says, beaming: “very, very much”— and she tries not to think about the war, even though it surrounds her. When there’s an attack, her parents take good care of her, she says. They take her to the bomb shelter, and she feels safe with them. She lets them worry about the worst that could happen.

What Nastya struggles with more is that she’s been to school just one year in her life. After that, the COVID-19 pandemic forced classes to go online. In Kramatorsk, where it is still too dangerous for in-person schooling to resume, that’s how they’ve stayed.

It’s a lonely life, for a child. Most kids and parents here have few good words to say about the online classes — “it’s horrible,” one parent told me — but mostly, Nastya misses her friends because her home isn’t close to theirs.

This is a common story for the roughly 7,000 children and youth remaining in Kramatorsk, and the thousands of others throughout the region. Most of their friends from before the war are gone, having fled with their families to western Ukraine or countries beyond; those who stayed behind have nowhere to go, nothing to do, few places to learn new skills or meet other kids.

“They lack socialization massively,” says Oleksandra Chernomashyntseva, a Base UA volunteer.

It’s Saturday afternoon in late December. Inside a ground-floor space on one of Kramatorsk’s central streets, beside a convenience store about 15 kids, ranging in age from seven to the teens, are listening raptly as Yaremchuk shows them how to work a Leica camera. In a few minutes, they will dash off to play a game, finding creative ways to make shapes for photos.

This is the opening weekend of Terikon, Base UA’s new youth drop-in centre. The vision was to create a space that could host a diverse slate of educational and recreational programs: art classes, English lessons, digital animation workshops. These sorts of exploratory extracurriculars were sparse in Kramatorsk, and Ukraine’s education system generally, even before the war, Yaremchuk says; now, in this region, they’re non-existent.

Above all, Terikon is a safe place where kids can come, make tea, do their homework and just hang out with peers. That’s what Nastya is most excited about. She likes to learn new things, and she loved the art and photography activities staff led that day. But mostly, she says, as she clutches a tiny stuffed animal to her chest, she’s eager to make some new friends.

“I cried yesterday, because all of this energy,” Chernomashyntseva says. “A lot of them, when they came here yesterday, were saying they don’t have any friends because first of all, they’re always at home, and second, a lot of their friends left. We had this question today, about what was their best memory. One of the girls said it was when her friends came back from abroad.”

Getting Terikon open, and keeping it running, is a labour of love for the Base UA team. They spent months renovating the space and filling it with fun things to do: there are racks of art supplies, a kitchen, a row of new computers. There’s even a bomb shelter in the basement, which is uncommon in this region; they’d had to use it that morning, when Kramatorsk was shaken by the blast of a rocket attack on a settlement nearby.

But that work feels crucial now, every bit as much as the evacuations always did. There’s no way to know what the future holds for Kramatorsk and its surrounding villages; only that there will be a future, and these kids will have to live in it. War has disrupted their lives, and taken away many things kids need to thrive. It’s time to restore them.

“Sooner or later, this will be over, one way or another,” Yaremchuk says. “Starting to look for ways of rebuilding then will be too late. We need to do it now. We need to do damage control now, as much as we can. We need to also think of what we’re going to do in the coming 10 or 15 years. If we don’t start building these fundamentals right now, it takes so much longer later. That goes for everything.”

As the afternoon draws to a close, and the kids begin to put on their parkas and head home, I pause to look at the art they’d made earlier that day. Chernomashyntseva had suggested they draw pictures of Kramatorsk, and the colourful results of that prompt are spread out on a table.

In the children’s drawings, Kramatorsk is home. It is apartments, mostly Soviet Khrushchevka blocks, sketched in teetering lines, surrounded by hearts and cars and dashes to suggest rays of sun. A place that holds all of their memories. A place to discover. A place to grow up.

They did not draw the city’s wounds. It’s too much to hope they don’t feel them.

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As night gathered on Jan. 7, a sparkling snow fell on Kramatorsk. It was Christmas Day, by the Julian calendar that all Ukraine’s Orthodox churches once followed, until just last year when the Kyiv patriarchate moved its celebrations to Dec. 25, separating from the Moscow patriarchate’s traditions. About half of Ukraine’s believers made the switch, while a third planned to celebrate on both days.

In the heart of the city’s downtown, a young girl, about 10 years old, slipped through the front door of an old Soviet-era apartment block, alone. She climbed the stairs in pitch darkness, rising up through the building’s cold concrete throat, knocking on doors as she went, hoping for an answer. For the first three storeys, only silence greeted her back.

Finally, on the top floor, she banged on a door, and from inside, a muffled voice responded.

“Do you want to hear some carol singing?” the girl called out.

The resident, charmed, opened the door. It’s an ancient tradition in Ukraine for children to sing for their neighbours on the holy days around Christmas and New Year’s Eve, performing carols in exchange for a bit of cash, or some treats. They don’t usually do it alone, though. In normal times, they would travel in pairs, at least.

So the resident stood as the girl sang, listening appreciatively as she recited the familiar carol. When she finished, her lone audience member handed her all the coins he could dig out from his wallet: about 40 hryvnia, or $1.40. The little girl, pleased, turned to leave, but paused before venturing back into the cold.

“Do you know if there is anyone living here?” she asked. “Because I just knocked the doors, and no one opened.”

If they are not opening the doors, the resident replied gently, then probably there is no one.

Then the girl was gone, back down the lightless stairs, past the silent suites. Back out into a newborn evening that spread a heavy velveteen over the city, a darkness punctuated only by the lights of the occasional shop and the scattered glow of occupied apartment windows in mostly empty buildings. A darkness that was almost beautiful, if one could forget, for just a moment, why there is so little light.

Because of war. Because of disruption. Because a city, once thriving, now sits pulled between lines of life and death, its fate still hanging in the balance, no way to know what will come next. Still standing, but always under threat; and trying, despite these privations, to hold onto what makes life worth living. To tradition, to culture, to education; and to the hope that comes from something as simple as a song, a cup of coffee or a soft voice on a scary morning.