The death throes of a Ukrainian city
Even from a few kilometers away, the death rattle of another Ukrainian city echoed through the fog and mist. Russian warplanes dropped more thousand-pound bombs on Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, reducing an already battered city to rubble and ash.
Since Jan. 1, President Vladimir V. Putin's forces have dropped about a million pounds of aerial bombs on an area of just 12 square miles, according to estimates by Ukrainian officials and British Intelligence.
Avdiivka fell to the Russians on Saturday, after some of the most horrific and destructive fighting of the two-year war. Ultimately, Russia's superior firepower and manpower overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces for many months, even as Russia suffered a staggering number of casualties.
The Ukrainians retreated under devastating bombardment and fought fierce battles in devastated streets to escape Russian attempts to encircle them. According to Ukrainian soldiers who fought at the plant, Russian warplanes bombed the colossal coke processing plant on the northern outskirts of Avdiivka, using incendiary devices to blow up fuel tanks, creating a toxic smog.
“Avdiivka is a constant barrage of aviation bombs,” Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Special Assault Brigade, said on Friday. “It feels like the largest number of aerial bombs on such a piece of land in the entire history of humanity. These bombs completely destroy all positions. All buildings and structures turn into craters after just one airstrike.”
Astonishingly, according to city officials and police, more than 900 civilians remained in the city – out of a pre-war population of 30,000 – living underground and surviving on food and supplies brought in by aid workers.
In the wake of the Ukrainian withdrawal, their fate was unknown.
“I have not been able to reach anyone in the past two days,” said Ihor Fir, a mechanic at the coking plant before it was destroyed, who regularly risked his life to bring food, water and medicine to civilians still living there. Avdiivka and surrounding villages.
The last messages he received were from people desperate to escape but unable to move under the constant shelling. He said any survivors in the city would likely be stranded. “There's no way for them to get out,” he said by phone Saturday. “The road is being shelled.”
In an interview last week, Mr Fir called conditions in Avdiivka “simply terrible” and shared videos and photos of the devastation from his latest trip to the city earlier this month. “There are ruins everywhere,” he said. “Not a single house was left untouched.”
“Multi-storey buildings collapse like houses of cards, and very often people are left under the rubble and unfortunately we cannot reach them,” said Vitalii Barabash, the head of the Avdiivka military administration.
He estimated earlier this month that at least 800 guided bombs, each weighing between 550 and 3,300 pounds, had been dropped within the city limits this year. His claim could not be independently confirmed, but British intelligence reported that Russian warplanes had dropped some 600 guided bombs on Avdiivka in just four weeks, with as many as 50 recorded in one day.
The Russian tactics in Avdiivka were “a textbook example of a punitive campaign, which they have orchestrated in Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine and even Afghanistan,” Seth said. G. Jones, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is designed,” he said, “to increase the social costs of continued resistance and force the opponent and its people to give up.” Putin called the capture of Avdiivka “an important victory,” the Kremlin said on Saturday.
There are no reliable statistics on the number of soldiers or civilians killed in the bombings.
Mr Fir shared photos of the ruins of a supermarket hit by a bomb last week, as 15 people took shelter in the basement. At least 10 of them died and remained buried under the rubble, he said.
“Someone goes to sleep and doesn't wake up,” he said while traveling to bring food and water to refugees in a village about five kilometers from Avdiivka. As the Russians advanced north and west, they also flattened that village. At least half of the houses where the refugees sought refuge were bombed.
Avdiivka has been on the front lines of the battle for a decade, since the first Russian attempt in 2014 to split off part of eastern Ukraine. The constant skirmishes often faded into the background. Life for the 30,000 residents could be difficult, but manageable.
The city was then known for the sparkling blue lakes that filled former quarries. The residents were proud and determined to stay and lead active lives despite being on the front lines. At the annual festival celebrating the city's founding in 1956, loud music drowned out the distant shelling.
“Avdііvka was a good, beautiful city,” said Victoria, 52, who was one of the last citizens to escape Avdiivka earlier this month and asked that her last name not be used because she feared for her life. “We lived. We worked. Everything was good for us.”
That all ended on February 24, 2022, when the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion.
The Kremlin immediately set its sights on Avdiivka, shelling from a distance and skirmishing in industrial zones, but time and again failed to breach Ukrainian fortifications.
After his home was destroyed last May, Mr. Fir fled with his wife. In June, there were fewer than 2,000 civilians in Avdiivka, most of whom lived largely underground.
The colossal industrial plant with its warren of Soviet-era nuclear fallout shelters housed people as the fighting intensified. But eventually civilians were evacuated and the factory became a fortress for the Ukrainian army. Civilians who remained in Avdiivka mostly took shelter in cellars.
Victoria refused to evacuate. “My husband was killed by a bomb on July 15, 2022,” she said. He was getting water from a well when he was blown apart, she said. When her mother also died, she only had her dog and her mother's dog to keep her company.
“I didn't want to leave because the graves of my relatives remained here,” she said.
Dozens of interviews over the past two years show that the reasons why civilians remain behind in war zones are complicated.
“I just put up with it,” Victoria said. “I thought that sooner or later it had to end somehow. It didn't stop, it just got worse and worse.”
In early October, Russia launched the first of a series of large-scale offensives aimed at largely encircling Avdiivka.
Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and injured in repeated attacks, according to Ukrainian and Western officials. Despite suffering its own losses, Ukraine held on.
The Russians devised a new plan this winter, using a three-kilometer-long drainage tunnel to dig under Ukrainian fortifications, infiltrate a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city and ambush the Ukrainians.
As the Russians advanced, some civilians escaped on foot to the city center, where they were met by a special police unit known as the White Helmets to be evacuated.
Ukrainian police shared a video of an evacuation last month, with citizens describing the chaos and bloodshed as Russians entered their neighborhood.
“When the Russian troops came in, it wasn't just a nightmare, it was like Armageddon,” said an old man. 'Blood, killing, looting. Thirty-four years in the mines, and everything I did for my family is all destroyed.”
Their accounts could not be independently verified.
But dozens of horror stories were told by residents who managed to escape as Russian troops fought their way deeper into the city.
Viktor Hrydin, 87, who helped build the coking plant that has long been Avdiivka's economic engine, refused to go even as his world burned around him. A neighbor, Tetiana, 52, came to live with him to care for him.
At Christmas a bomb exploded in their house.
“I was covered in blood,” Viktor said in an interview in a hospital where he was recovering. “And her blood flowed like a river.”
Tetiana's leg was torn apart and a bullet tore through his arm. Still, he managed to get her to safety. She was recovering in a room with seven other seriously injured women. They were still alive, but their lives were destroyed.
“As I got older I had nothing left,” Viktor said.
Even after two years of unfathomable violence, Victoria was unprepared for Russia's final attempt to destroy her city.
Residents of Chernyshevskoho Street, near the entrance to the city, she said, “were bombed so heavily that people just wrapped themselves in white sheets” and walked outside, hoping to find a volunteer to get them out.
“People were dying there every day,” she said. “There's nothing you can do to escape, no basement, nothing.”
“I realized that if I didn't leave,” she said, “I would just go crazy.”
She was one of the last people to leave Avdiivka, on February 2, before evacuation became impossible.
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from outside Avdiivka. Natalia Novosolova And Anastasia Kuznietsova reporting contributed.