How Russia ‘wiped this Ukrainian city off the face of the earth’

Vovchansk doesn’t have a big history, but its geography couldn’t be more tragic. Just five kilometers from the Russian border, drone images from the Ukrainian army this summer show a moonscape of kilometers of ruins.

And since then it has gotten even worse.

“Ninety percent of the center has been flattened,” says Mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, a towering man in uniform who governs what remains of Vovchansk from the regional capital Kharkiv, an hour and a half drive away.

“The enemy continues its massive shelling,” he added.

Six of 10 buildings in Vovchansk have been completely destroyed, with 18 percent partially destroyed, according to analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat. But the destruction is much worse in the city center, which was razed north of the Vovcha River.

AFP journalists in Kiev, Kharkiv and Paris teamed up with Bellingcat to tell how, building by building, an entire city was wiped off the map in just a few weeks – and to show the human toll it has taken.

The pace of destruction alone paled in comparison to that of even Bakhmut, the Donbas region’s “meat grinder” city that saw some of the war’s most brutal killings, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities said to AFP.

“I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles went there,” Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky insisted.

“What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk.”

Invaded and then liberated

Vovchansk had about 20,000 inhabitants before the war. It now lives only in the memories of the survivors who managed to flee.

In addition to the factories, the city had a “medical school, a technical university, seven schools and numerous kindergartens,” Nelia Stryzhakova, the head of the library, told AFP in Kharkiv.

There was even a workshop where ‘coaches for historical films’ were made. We were even interesting, in our own way,” the 61-year-old Stryzhakova emphasized.

Add to that a regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with almost 10 million euros ($10.8 million) in German aid, a church packed for religious celebrations, and a huge hydraulic machinery factory. Once the economic lifeline of the city, the ruins are now fought over by both armies.

Vovchansk was quickly occupied by the Russian army after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but was recaptured by Kiev in a lightning counterattack that autumn.

Despite regular Russian bombings it was relatively quiet. Then on May 10 something completely different happened.

Poorly defended

Exhausted after weeks of heavy fighting 100 kilometers to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.

“We saw two Russian armored troop carriers who had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who led the unit.

They formed the vanguard of one of the most intense Russian offensives since the start of the war, with Moscow throwing several thousand soldiers into the city.

“There were no fortifications, no mines” to slow their advance, Yaroslavsky said, still furious about the “negligence or corruption” that made this possible.

About 17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because someone didn’t build fortifications,” the 42-year-old officer fumed.

“We control the city today, but what we control is a pile of rubble,” he added bitterly.

President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled an overseas trip to rush to Kharkov, admitting that the Russian army had penetrated between five and 10 kilometers into Ukraine.

The people of Vovchansk, meanwhile, were living a nightmare.

Drones love mosquitoes

“The Russians started bombing,” said Galyna Zharova, who lived at 16A Stepova Street – an apartment building now reduced to ruins, as images analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP confirmed.

“We were right on the front line. No one could come and get us,” added the 50-year-old, who now lives with her family in a university dormitory in Kharkov.

“We went to the basement. All buildings were on fire. We were locked in basements until June 3 (for almost four weeks),” her husband Viktor, 65, added.

Ultimately, the couple decided to flee on foot. “Drones flew around us like wasps, like mosquitoes,” Galyna remembered. They walked several kilometers before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.

“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything,” sighed librarian Stryzhakova. “Nobody could have imagined that we would be wiped off the face of the earth in just five days.”

The 125,000 books in the library she had at Tokhova Street 8 went up in smoke.

More than half of families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. In Vovchansk, before the war in the Donbas region began in 2014, people crossed the border every day to shop, while Russians flocked to the city’s markets.

“There are a lot of mixed families,” Stryzhakova said. “Parents, children, we are all connected. And now we have become enemies. There is no other way to say it.”

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to AFP’s questions asking for a report on what happened in the city.

Mayor Gambarashvili, who was hit in the leg by shrapnel as he oversaw the evacuation of the city, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.

Dozens, no doubt. Maybe more. On May 10, there were still about 4,000 people in Vovchansk, mostly elderly, as most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.

Families divided by war

Kira Dzhafarova, 57, believes that her mother, Valentina Radionova, who had lived at 40 Dukhovna Street in a small house with a charming garden, is probably dead.

Their last telephone conversation was on May 17. “At 85, I’m not going anywhere,” her mother insisted. Satellite images and witnesses have now confirmed that the house was completely destroyed.

“Since then I know it’s over,” sighed Kira, who provided DNA for identification if and when the fighting ends.

In a particularly cruel irony, her mother, a Russian national, had moved to Vovchansk so she could have equal distance between her two children, who had fallen out.

Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and officially became Ukrainian two years ago. Her older brother, who she says supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family’s hometown and the first major Russian city across the border.

Kira, a psychiatrist, now only calls him her “former brother.”

AFP was unable to contact him directly.

Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70, is also missing. On May 16, he decided to flee the bombing in a car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raisa and a neighbor. Zymovsky and his mother were both shot dead, “most likely by a Russian sniper,” Raisa said.

Amid the hail of bullets, the 59-year-old pediatric nurse had barely gotten out of the car when she was seized by Russian soldiers and held for two days. She managed to escape, hid in the neighbor’s basement for a night and eventually fled through the woods.

In a calm, measured voice she talked about her harrowing odyssey. One thing only seems to matter to her now: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a proper burial.

They took my son

A rumor spread among the survivors that the bodies that lay in the streets of Vovchansk for days had been thrown into a mass grave. Where and by whom no one knows.

A handful of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandre Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at least three when he returned to his former apartment on his bicycle to collect belongings in mid-September.

Garlychev lived at 10A Rubezhanskaya Street, in a southern part of the city that was relatively spared. He did not leave until August 10.

Vovchansk’s survivors — and even some officials — quietly wonder whether it will ever be rebuilt given its proximity to the border, regardless of how the war ends.

When asked whether she could ever forgive her husband’s murderer, Raisa Zymovska remained silent for a long time. Then she replied in a whisper, “I don’t know, I really don’t. As a Christian, yes, but as a human being… What can I say?”

As for the librarian Stryzhakova, she can no longer bring herself to open a Russian book, even the classics, since her only son Pavlo was killed in the Battle of Bakhmut.

“I know that literature is not to blame, but Russia, it disgusts me. They took my son, it’s personal.”