Especially the older ones stay
Although the Russian army, located approximately fifteen kilometers from the city, has begun shelling Kramatorsk more intensively, Tamara Ivanyvna is not going anywhere yet. She admitted that it scares her that the queue is getting closer, but in one breath she added that the difficult financial situation makes it difficult for those born earlier to leave.
The average pension in Ukraine is around five thousand hryvnias, i.e. one hundred euros. The allowance for resettled persons amounts to half. Many of them cannot afford to move to another city, where they will have to pay high rent. And so, according to estimates, more than 50,000 civilians remain living in Kramatorsk, while pensioners make up a significant part of them.
“Our village was completely destroyed. There was nothing left of it. We have nowhere to return to. I came to Kramatorsk with a cat in my arms and a bag of documents. Everything was left at home. We were evacuated very quickly. When the bombardment began, the debris flew directly into our yard. We immediately found a ride and left with our neighbors,” recalls 77-year-old Mrs. Ľudmila, who moved to Kramatorsk with her daughter and to a granddaughter from a village near the city that the Russians captured last summer.
The family is not planning to evacuate yet. As Ľudmila pointed out, they have no one to go to, and they cannot afford to pay rent prices in larger cities. Moreover, even in Kharkov or Dnipro, life does not seem very safe to them.
Bombs that fall dangerously close
At the same time, the family only recently experienced a terrifying bombing. The building opposite was almost razed to the ground by a five-hundred-kilometer aerial bomb. The second bomb, which fell nearby, got stuck in the grass next to the road.
“If that one exploded, no stone would be left unturned. When they were disarming it, they asked us to leave the house. We had to wait in another place in the basement. It was a terrible morning. It was about four o’clock. People were still sleeping. We woke up in an apartment without windows and doors,” sighs Ms. Ľudmila, “When the first bomb fell, we only took the crates with our cats and documents from the apartment. That was the most important thing for us at that moment – to save the animals. The main thing is that we stayed alive.”
Even Tamara Ivanyvna remembered one of the Russian attacks. The one from February 12 of this year, when an attack drone at 3:15 a.m. casually dropped a kind of large grenade into the yard near her block of flats. The blast wave blew out all the windows up to the ninth floor.
“I’m already in my seventies. I wake up very early. Sometimes I make coffee as early as three in the morning. That day I also woke up at three. I told myself that I would lie down a little longer. One blink – and suddenly the glass from the windows fell. Window sills flew into the apartment and remained lying on the armchairs. I didn’t even have time to panic. Cars started burning in the yard. One of the The facade of the block of flats caught fire, but there was no fire. The apricot tree that we had in front of the house was cut in two. Fortunately, no one was injured,” she recalled.
What would be the last straw for her? If – most likely – they bombed her house. Until then, he intends to hold out.
War also drives out business
The war is gradually driving not only people out of the city, but also local businessmen.
Constant shelling and destruction of infrastructure in the region led to the fact that the number of closed businesses gradually began to significantly exceed the number of open ones. Also in Kramatorsk, you should notice that some cafes that were still working last year are now closed. Some companies have moved to relatively safer inland. The story of a local wind turbine manufacturing company that moved from Kramatorsk to the Slovak border, to the border town of Perečin, is well known.
But some local companies are determined to endure. One of them is the local Internet service provider. The company even managed to adapt to combat conditions – in this case, it applies literally. It has learned to function even during longer power outages, and its workers have experience working close to the front, where they go to accidents in bulletproof vests and with drone detectors.
“Can we relocate our business? Unfortunately, no. Our business is not cables or panels. Our business is our clients. We cannot relocate them so that they are all together in one place, and what’s more, somewhere where there is no competition. As long as the city is not destroyed or occupied, we will stay,” explains company director Mykola Kučeruk.
To drone detector crashes
At the same time, providing people who live in front-line cities with a connection with the world is – without pathos – a heroic feat. They often come to fix the infrastructure in places after attacks.
“Once a fiber-optic drone approached our guys. He looked at them, but eventually flew away. Our workers have drone detectors, but they won’t protect you from fiber-optic drones. A few weeks ago I was in neighboring Druzhkivka, where you have to have your ears plugged in 100 percent. The drone is buzzing and you can hear it even if it’s a kilometer away, even two. So when you’re standing on a ladder, you have time go down and hide under the trees or hide in a building. Thank God, we don’t have cases where anyone was injured,” Kučeruk described the realities of his work.
But the company is particularly wary of the risk of repeated attacks when it comes to aerial bombs.
From my conversations with people in Kramatorsk, it appeared that they were most afraid of inaccurate and destructive KABs.
If there was a risk of an air attack, the company does not go into the field immediately, but waits a few hours. Experience taught her that.
“It happened that once after the attack we were doing repairs in the old part of the city. We left there, energy workers came to pick us up. And a bomb landed at the same place. One of the electricians was seriously injured. In 2022, we could carry out the accidents within two hours, today it takes us longer, because the safety of our people comes first,” says Kučeruk.
He himself is convinced that the Russians will not succeed in occupying Kramatorsk. However, he admits that if the war continues for a few more years, the Russian army can destroy it even more. “I think once they realize they can’t take the city, they’ll try to destroy all the infrastructure. While the city lives, we work.”
