One Night in Bakhmut: Civilians Wait for the End as Russia Draws Closer

The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.

BAKHMUT, Donetsk Oblast – Moments of quiet are few and far between in the near-empty city of Bakhmut. Not only is the sound of incoming and outgoing artillery fire constant, but the variety in volume and texture of the sounds shows just how much firepower is being brought to the battle on both sides.

At times, long bursts of rifle and machine gun fire ring out from the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.

Just two kilometers from the center, Russian Wagner mercenaries continue to inch forward toward the city in costly but methodical squad-sized assaults.

As we swung into a nondescript courtyard behind a Stalin-era apartment building in central Bakhmut, we found Hryhorii Ostapenko right where we had left him three days before. Sitting on a bench next to the garage, he was hacking away with a little axe at broken window frames, salvaged to fuel the wood-burning stove inside his home.

We had met residents Ostapenko, 63, and Valentyna, 59, who declined to give her last name out of fear, on a previous trip into Bakhmut a few days earlier, asking for permission to stay the night in their building’s basement with those residents who remained.

After having exchanged seasons’ greetings and handed over a bag of food and hygiene products we brought from Kramatorsk, our accommodation was confirmed.

“Not a problem at all,” said Ihor Selenov, a 50-year-old neighbor with a boisterous manner and a Cossack-style haircut, coming out the front door to greet Ostapenko. “Pop in later and we’ll have some tea.”

As we headed back to the car, promising Ostapenko to return before sunset, a Ukrainian soldier came out from behind a gate, walking slowly and deliberately toward us with arms crossed in front of his rifle. We told him of our plans to spend one night here with the remaining residents.

“You can if you want, I just wouldn’t stay with these people,” he replied quietly, directing a contemptuous glance over our shoulder.

“Most of them say openly that they’re waiting for Russia.”

We thanked the soldier and went on our way. There was little time to find a new host. The sun would be going down in just a few hours and our colleagues were taking the car with them back to Kramatorsk. Walking the city aimlessly while shells and drones flew ahead was unwise at best.

Besides, if the people in Ostapenko’s building were waiting for Russia, whose artillery worked day and night turning their city into rubble and forcing them into a cold and dangerous life in and out of basements, I wanted to understand why.

Russia’s invasion overwhelmingly united Ukraine against the aggressor, sweeping aside the old pro-European/pro-Russian divide that dominated politics before 2014, and was still present to a lesser extent after.

A September 2022 Gallup poll conducted across Ukraine showed that only 0.5% of the population viewed the Russian leadership positively.

Absurd as it seems, it is often places like Bakhmut, the very settlements which have endured the most suffering from Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, where people belonging to this rough 0.5% can be found.

In Ukrainian slang, these people are sometimes called zhduny, meaning “those who wait” in Russian.

For older generations here, nostalgic for the area’s flourishing industry in Soviet times, and who largely voted for former president and Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych, the reality of months of brutal war can be difficult to process.

According to Ukrainian police, around 5,900 civilians are understood to still be in Bakhmut as of Feb. 2, including over 200 children.

Starved of any information on the outside world, and with no savings or connections to help them if they evacuate, the remaining residents of Bakhmut are frozen in inaction as the fighting draws closer.

Whether out of apathy, hopelessness, or dreams of the made-up propaganda idea of the “Russian world,” many make the simple but often deadly choice: to wait.

Last bastion

Before settling in for the night, we pay a visit to the local fire station, officially the headquarters of the Ukrainian State Emergency Service in Bakhmut. With barely anything else working in the city, this proud white building just off the central square is one of the few functioning arms of the civilian state left in Bakhmut.

With a large wood burning stove and generator, the sunken main hall of the fire station is a refuge of warmth and relative comfort.

Christmas lights and a signed Ukrainian flag do more to lift the mood, while a large dog, jokingly named Skabei after the Russian propagandist Olga Skabeyeva, greets visitors with enthusiasm.

Deputy commander Artur Spytsyn, 31, and his colleagues complete various chores around the building while waiting for the next call.

“Our first task is to protect the lives of the team and the residents,” he said, “and by now there is little reason to care about property.”

“We don’t cross the (Bakhmutka) River anymore, there is very little left unruined on the other side.”

Almost if not all the first responders still working at the fire station are locals, from Bakhmut and the surrounding villages.

When not on shift, they return to home lives which often differ little from that of the other residents.

In homes with blown-out windows, there is no water, electricity, or gas, only a choice every night between the relative comfort of the apartment or the relative safety of the cellar.

Volodymyr Hruienko, a 42-year-old fire truck driver, took me around the back of the fire station to an apartment building that was hit on Dec. 26. Several apartments were burnt out in the place where the shell hit, and only a handful of windows remained unbroken: nothing out of the ordinary for Bakhmut.

A group of half a dozen residents, mostly of pension age, were milling around the entrance: some chopping firewood, some cooking on makeshift brick stoves, and some just standing in silence.

A younger man approached Hruienko, asking for urgent help finding water. Hruienko advised him to take a large plastic tank that still stood behind an abandoned supermarket about half a kilometer away.

“It fits around half a ton of water, four of you should be able to carry it over,” Hruienko said. “If you can do that, we can fill it up for you.”

Maintaining regular contact, and trying his best to help with basic necessities like the water, Hruienko has gained the trust of many of the residents on the block, but not all. As we returned to the station, a middle-aged man in a black leather jacket passed opposite.

“Thank you,” he said, sarcastically, looking Hruienko in the eye and pointing at the building’s devastated facade. “Thank you for this.”

“Some certain percentage of people left probably love Putin,” said Spytsyn of the so-called “zhduny” living in Bakhmut.

“Personally I had nine friends before Feb. 24 who thought ‘it wouldn’t be bad’ if Russia arrived, but now there is only one such person left.”

Unwanted

The winter sun was already setting by the courtyard where Ostapenko, Selenov, and Valentyna lived when we returned. Nobody was outside and the doors were locked shut. Circling around to the front of the building, we got the attention of a blurred face, dimly lit by candlelight, sitting by the window.

It was Iryna Ostapenko, Hrihorii’s wife. Coming outside to meet us, she called Valentyna up to let us into the basement.

We quickly realized there had been a misunderstanding. There was a place to sleep for us in another, empty basement, but not where Valentyna and her son, Dmytro, were staying.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I want to help you but I hope you understand it’s very hard to trust strangers here,” she said to us.

Valentyna lit a candle and led us down to where we would be staying. Clean and orderly, the cellar had two beds, a table, and a shelf with some stored food supplies. Lacking a stove of any sort, the space was cold, and the bedding available damp throughout.

Frightened and emotional, Valentyna declined to show us her basement or introduce us to her son, but before she left, we spoke by the flickering light of her candle.

Before the full-scale invasion, she lived with her son in Yakovlivka, a village 15 kilometers northeast of Bakhmut that was taken by Russian forces in December. The area was the scene of heavy fighting, the prelude to the assault on Soledar, Russia’s first capture of a major Ukrainian settlement since summer 2022.

“Friends from my village tell me, crying,” Valentyna recalled, “’Valya, we would go back to our ruins, if only just to kiss the bricks, but let it be home, we only want to go home’… but there are no homes left.”

Valentyna did not come straight from Yakovlivka to Bakhmut, instead first spending several weeks in the central Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi, where she says she was treated with suspicion because she was from Donbas.

“Everyone was looking at us like wolves,” she said.

“My friend told me how when she went to the hairdresser’s and told them that she was from Donbas, they kicked her out angrily, saying ‘Our guys are dying because of you, go back, you can be killed instead’.”

The discrimination in Ukraine of people from Donbas due to language or political prejudice is a cornerstone of the propaganda narrative used by Russia to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

While frequent Russian claims of a “genocide” of the people of Donbas or bans on speaking Russian in Ukraine are complete fiction, the full-scale war has raised some internal tensions.

Valentyna’s case, of having fled to safer parts of Ukraine only to return to an active war zone, is not a rare one.

According to the latest UN figures, 5.9 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion. Many of these people have been able to settle and begin to build new lives in cities all over Ukraine.

But with meager monthly government assistance of only Hr 2,000 ($54) per person and Hr 3,000 ($82) for a child or person with a disability, those without any savings or support networks often find it impossible to make a new start.

“I am afraid, but now I feel that judgment must come on my own land,” she said. “May whatever happens happen, we are not wanted anywhere else anyway.”

Sobbing and overwhelmed, Valentyna politely excused herself, taking the candlelight away and wishing us a good night.

Those who wait

Locked up alone in the basement, we were deciding on our next move when someone started shouting at street level.

“Press! Where are you?” came the male voice, followed by “ratatatata!” a poor imitation of a rifle burst. It was Selenov.

It was hard to tell what kind of mood he was in, but we had little choice but to come out and meet him.

Energetic as ever, Selenov dragged his wife Olena, drunk and half-asleep, out of a parked black 4×4, and together the four of us climbed to his second-floor flat for tea.

Plastic plates and cutlery, some adorned with leftover beetroot salad, were cluttered in between shot glasses on the family’s living room table. The apartment was homely, but had seen better days, with the windows blown out and no water or electricity to speak of for months.

Olena, calling for more to drink, was in a provocative mood, making expletive-laden requests for us to leave.

“Tell me,” she said with a snarl, “how much are the Americans paying you?”

In Olena’s worldview, any journalist working in Ukrainian-controlled territory must be on the payroll of Washington.

Embarrassed, Selenov manhandled her to bed, where she stayed.

With a rough but loving touch, Selenov stroked a young ginger cat as we sipped black tea by the light of a portable LED lamp. Outside the window, the sounds of artillery and rocket fire rolled on.

“If you are sober, maybe you start thinking that’s the end,” he said of the constant shelling of his city, “you wonder where you can hide, but if you’ve had a few, you can sit back and enjoy the ‘concert’.”

Selenov was open from the beginning about his position on the war.

“We are one nation, we are all Slavs,” he said of Ukrainians and Russians, repeating one of the most popular narratives of Russian propaganda. “They (the U.S.) are training us to kill each other like rats, making Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov (Russian surnames also common in Ukraine) fight against Ivanov, Petrov, and Sidorov.”

With soldiers and civilians situated close together as the urban warfare intensifies, tension naturally builds between those defending the city and those watching their homes being destroyed in the battle.

“At first we got on well with the soldiers,” Selenov said, “and now they look at us, speaking Russian, and ask openly, ‘why did we travel a thousand kilometers to fight for you?’”

“I answer them, ‘Why are you fighting for me, why are you destroying my city?’”

Civilians here are repeatedly encouraged to evacuate and given the means to do so.

Those who choose to stay are caught in a world where laws, trust, and social norms quickly start to crumble, together with the buildings themselves.

Selenov holds that Ukrainian soldiers tried to loot the apartments in his building, thinking they were abandoned.

“The day after they first came, we were hit closer than ever, my garage was destroyed,” he said, “and then they checked again to see if we had gone yet.”

Imitating the soldiers, Selenov, who like most residents of the area is a native Russian speaker, tries with difficulty to speak Ukrainian. “’We are searching… clearing the area, we know that the Muscovites had a secret weapons dump here,’ they said to me.”

“Then they broke down my neighbor’s door and started looking for gold and other valuables.”

In almost any war, soldiers often have to use empty dwellings as frontline accommodation, sometimes breaking in forcefully.

Though it is possible that what Selenov described was the truth, there have been next to no documented and verified instances of Ukrainian soldiers looting homes or businesses for profit, one rare example being the Kyiv Independent’s own investigation into alleged misconduct in the International Legion.

In contrast, practices of mass looting have accompanied the advance of Russian forces throughout Ukraine, with countless well-documented cases of theft of Ukrainian property, from washing machines to entire museum collections.

For people like Selenov, existing biases against Ukraine are often made worse by the situation.

Failing to connect the destruction of their city exclusively to the Russian invasion, conclusions are instead made based on what they can see.

“When the battles started for Popasna and Lysychansk, our city started to get hit from our side, from Chasiv Yar,” he said. “Later of course, the Russians started shelling as well, but at first, this city was messed up by our own.”

Russia’s assault on Donetsk Oblast has practically destroyed dozens of settlements with artillery, rocket, and tank fire. In over six months on the front line, Bakhmut has joined the likes of Volnovakha, Popasna, Sievierodonetsk, and most famously Mariupol, as cities ruined beyond recognition by Russia’s war.

“There are people who just don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand what’s going on,” first responder Spytsyn said of beliefs like this.

“Propaganda has destroyed any ability to see what is happening in front of their own eyes, which cannot tell who is shelling their city.”

City of the living

Excusing ourselves from Selenov’s apartment, we returned to the freezing basement Valentyna had opened for us, and quickly decided it was no place to spend the night.

Reluctant to bother any more of the residents at this hour, our only option remaining was to return to the fire station.

On foot and wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, walking around Bakhmut in the evening was a dangerous prospect, with Ukrainian sentries likely on the lookout for suspicious activity. Luckily, the fire station was only three blocks away.

The streets were empty, but lit brightly by a near-full moon through the clear skies. Sticking to the shadows, we hurried.

Just as we stepped onto the central square, the sound of incoming Russian Grad rocket launches made us crouch close to the wall. The sky briefly glowed orange as the rockets thudded in not far behind the Palace of Culture.

We arrived at the fire station to find it empty and locked. Only Skabei answered our banging on the large doors.

For 20 minutes, we sat on the steps like children waiting to be picked up after school, listening to the Battle of Bakhmut. Finally, the noisy Soviet-era fire truck lurched into the driveway, back from an evening job.

Acknowledging our presence, the helmeted silhouettes emerging from the truck walked past us and opened the door. Within minutes, the truck was back inside, and the firefighters had undressed, bathing with a bucket of hot water left on the stove.

The crew had been out fighting a fire near Ivanivske, a settlement on the way to the recently captured Klishchiivka to the south, that has since become the next target for Russia’s advance. One elderly woman reportedly died, her home burnt to the ground.

As the firefighters decompressed, a middle-aged man with a puffy red face paid an unannounced visit. Funeral services worker Oleksandr, 57, who wished to keep his full identity private, was no stranger, greeting the men with a familiar smile.

Having spotted the fire himself, Oleksandr had come to alert the team, only to find they had already done their job.

Oleksandr did not wish to speak about his profession. “What do you think it’s been like? I’ve worked alongside the first responders, I’ve pulled corpses from the rubble,” he said. “Ask me about anything else.”

Oleksandr’s children are living safe in a village near the city of Dnipro, where he said they are treated with respect and care. Still, he was also saddened by the treatment he has faced personally in other parts of Ukraine.

“I don’t understand, they all shout all the time in the west that we are a united Ukraine,” he said, “but when you arrive and say you are from Donbas, they can call you a separatist without knowing anything about you.”

“I am Ukrainian, we all live in Ukraine, there needs to be this human understanding.”

Oleksandr eventually left for home, and the others slowly retired to their quarters. Only Hruienko remained, fixing something under the gearbox of the truck.

“Check this out, I found this song just yesterday on (Russian social network) VK,” he called to me.

The track from 2012 was an amateurish but warm ode to Artemivsk, the old Soviet name of Bakhmut, before decommunization returned the city’s original name.

Entitled “City of the Living”, the song’s optimistic Russian-language rap lyrics rang out through the empty hall of the Bakhmut fire station:

There are fewer troublemakers these days, culture is developing;

Everything is being sorted out, but some people are stuck in the previous century;

They sit in their chairs and never change anything, but at least the rest of us are thriving!

People, let’s show them our city of the living!

Don’t hide in your apartments, it’s time to show our city to the world;

Not just a spot on the map but the pride of our country.

Approaching storm

Protected from both cold and shelling in the basement, the night at the fire station passed calmly.

As we waited to be picked up by colleagues the next morning, small teams of journalists and volunteers mingled in front of the fire station building. In one van, two British volunteers were traveling with a Ukrainian priest.

I spoke briefly to one of them, a softly-spoken forty-something man who introduced himself as Andrew. He had been working for months in and around Bakhmut, evacuating dozens of civilians from some of the most dangerous front-line areas.

A few days later, the news broke that British volunteers Andrew Bagshaw, 47, and Chris Parry, 28, had gone missing in Soledar, caught up in Russia’s assault on the town while on a mission to evacuate an elderly woman. Photographs matched the face of the Andrew I had briefly met.

On Jan. 25, their families confirmed that both men had been killed, though the exact circumstances of their deaths remain unknown.

On the road out of Bakhmut, excavators could be seen digging fresh trenches on the western edge of the city.

The fate of Bakhmut is far from predetermined. Russia’s reported losses are staggering, with the Ukrainian military estimating around 150 are killed and as many wounded on an average day of Russia’s grinding attacks on the city.

Even with heavy casualties, Russia has so far failed to make significant inroads into the urban area of Bakhmut.

To the north and south of the city, the picture is very different. The mercenary Wagner Group’s capture of Soledar in mid-January has brought the northern highway into Bakhmut under Russian control, while the capture of Klishchiivka in the south has placed the last main Ukrainian supply route under serious threat.

While the battles rage for the territory of Donbas, stories like those of Valentyna, Oleksandr, and even Selenov show that a separate struggle continues, no less difficult, for the hearts and minds of its people, even in the face of Russian brutality.

While most of the first responders plan to leave if Bakhmut is occupied, Hruienko vowed to stay in his hometown.

“I won’t go anywhere, even if they come,” he said, smoking a cigarette in the winter sun.

“I was born here and I will stay. Who will help people here if we all leave? I’ll take my car and start bringing people water… maybe I’ll even fight some fires.”

We Still Live: What Is Life Like in Russian-Occupied Mariupol?

The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.

CHAPTER I: Destruction

Each time Yekaterina films the streets of Mariupol, she knows she may be caught. Every day, this resident of the Russian occupied Ukrainian port city shoots images of destroyed buildings, charred windows and numerous bullet holes in walls that are still standing.

She films what is left of her city, which is still suffering the consequences of the devastating siege of March last year. Any Russian soldier in the street may check her phone, or someone may grass on her.

With these videos, which Yekaterina shares with her thousands of followers on TikTok, she wants to show what life looks like under the Russian regime. She started making them last summer when she saw short videos on this social medium about ‘how everything supposedly went so well after the “liberation” of the city,’ she says in a chat with de Volkskrant.

In the first place, however, the videos are ‘for my compatriots who have left Mariupol,’ she says. She often makes them by request from residents who have fled the city. In the videos she takes them on a tour of the remnants of houses where they once lived, shops where they bought their groceries and parks where their children played.

Via their accounts, TikTok-ers are approached by residents who fled the city to show them specific spots or houses in Mariupol.

Yekaterina is not the only one doing this. Dozens of Mariupol residents visit destroyed buildings on request, filming them with their phones and sharing the footage on TikTok. The social medium now has thousands of recent videos of the city.

Since the city fell in Russian hands in mid-April, the situation in Mariupol is unclear. The two last remaining Western journalists, Ukrainians from the French press agency AFP, left in March and for months the lack of electricity and Internet made communication as good as impossible. Through the images and stories of the residents it is now possible for the first time to see what daily life in the city actually looks like.

De Volkskrant has analysed more than two thousand video images on social media and had chat conversations with eight residents who either remained in Mariupol or returned to it. They tell us how they survive, how Russia eradicates all that is Ukrainian from public space, how the Russians take repressive measures and how some residents keep resisting, wherever possible. Because of the risk of reprisals by the Russians all the names in this report are fake, details about the participants’ lives have been left out and no video images are shown of the residents with whom we were in contact.

It’s not that Yekaterina stayed behind voluntarily. She tried to escape from Mariupol three times. First she was stopped by tanks, then by planes that were bombing the city, and the last time her car was hit during shelling in the night. She would still rather turn her back on these ruined streets, but the only available route out of the city leads to Russia.

Now she and her child have no choice but to stay with the other stay-behinds. Daily life in the city is difficult for her. ‘I no longer have a job, my son doesn’t go to school any more. He is fed up with being cooped up with me all the time,’ she says. ‘We gave up playing outside a long time ago. After 3 PM we don’t dare to leave the house anymore. Even in the daytime we don’t feel safe in the streets.’

Yekaterina is staying in the house of friends who did manage to flee the city and are now elsewhere in Europe. There is little left of her own house. Like many other residential blocks, it was destroyed by Russian bombardments in March and April. All her possessions went up in flames.

Many other residents de Volkskrant spoke with, have sent photos and videos of what once must have been living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Videos on social media show residents walking past the charred and partly collapsed residential blocks. ‘All my dreams were buried here,’ writes a man while passing a collapsed house.

To get an idea of the destruction de Volkskrant analysed thousands of satellite images of the city. These show that in the city centre alone, one third of the buildings was damaged. The sheer scale of the destruction becomes evident when the damage buildings are superimposed on the city map of Mariupol.

Of the 7000 analysed buildings, more than 2,600 show clear signs of damage seen from the air.

In reality probably many more buildings were destroyed as from the air only broken rooftops are visible and you can’t see the damage to the sides of buildings. After the siege, Ukrainian soldiers spoke of a ‘city that is destroyed for 90 per cent’.

An unknown number of civilians were killed during the siege or died from hardship. Ukrainian government estimates that more than 25,000 people lost their lives.

Between waves of shelling, families buried their loved ones in improvised graves, in inner courtyards and city parks.

When the fighting stopped, many of them were reburied. Some residents who had fled, returned to give their loved ones a dignified funeral. Fields full of white crosses emerged around the city. Satellite images still show the contours of these fields with graves.

There may very well be the mortal remains of several people buried in a single grave.

At the large cemetery of Stary Krym just outside the city some 8,500 graves have appeared since March, an analysis of satellite images from November last year shows.

The residents de Volkskrant spoke with have also lost family members and friends. Galina’s mother-in-law was killed by the Russian bombardments in March. Maria was ‘one of the lucky ones’: she didn’t lose any family members, but many ‘friends, acquaintances and neighbours’. ‘I’ve seen many dead bodies in the city when we had the chance to go out into the streets again,’ she says.

Yekaterina’s uncle was killed when his house took a direct hit. ‘He died together with a friend who was with him at the time. Almost nothing was left of them. We don’t even know whose remains we buried. From the house only the foundation remains.’

‘I remember the shelling, the fear, the hunger, the cold, the thousands of bodies, the hundreds of graves in inner courtyards, the stench of corpses in the destroyed houses,’ says resident Galina. For her this was one of the reasons why she and her son fled Mariupol last summer. Her husband didn’t want to leave and stayed behind. After one month in a refugee camp, Galina decided to return with her son after all.

Since then, she’s been trying, together with residents who did stay and others who, like her, returned, to pick up their lives again. On social media residents demonstrate their resilience, sharing encouraging words with their followers. In videos of the destroyed city they write – in Russian, as a form of resistance – ‘We shall live.’

CHAPTER II: Life in the Destroyed City

Until a few weeks ago, Anna was living in the darkness of her boarded-up house. It was heavily damaged during shelling in March and her windows were blown out by ‘three huge explosions’. Together with her husband and children she has been trying to rebuild their lives.

‘We found some old window frames that still had glass and we put them in so we had some daylight in the house again,’ she tells. ‘My husband repaired holes in the roof as best he could. We are now living with the entire family in two heated rooms where we can keep the temperature at 18 to 20 degrees.’

In May, after the Russian military had taken the city, Anna and her family left Mariupol for a short while. However, fearing for their possessions and the house they left behind and being concerned for their relatives they went back home again after two weeks. ‘No matter where you are, the thoughts of your birthplace never leave you,’ she says. ‘Home sweet home.’

Especially during the first few months the stay-behinds were struggling to survive in mediaeval conditions. The inhabitants of residential blocks were compelled to prepare food on open fires in their inner courtyards.

They would fetch water from ponds, wells and streams while the grenades were coming down around them. There was no communication with the outside world.

‘For eight months we lived without water or electricity,’ says Anna. Since this summer the Russians have started repairing the electricity, gas and water grids. TikTok videos show residents filming how the burners of their ovens are working again and tap water is available again.

Still, life is far from normal. The streets are much less busy than before. According to Ukrainian estimates there are only some 100,000 of the original 430,000 residents left. The majority of shops are either empty or destroyed. And even those who have by now been hooked up to electricity or gas again have to deal with frequent failures.

Residents then have to fall back on emergency solutions that are reminiscent of the days of the siege. They have to ‘go out again and cook on open fires,’ says Yekaterina. ‘And if there is no water for a longer period of time, we go to the well. Which is quite some distance away.’ In various Telegram groups messages are posted about living rooms where temperatures drop below zero this winter.

Civilians who have gone for months without heating, electricity or Internet, or who are homeless, turn to local authorities or ‘write letters to Putin’s assistants,’ says Yekaterina. A photo shows a banner with the words: ‘Help us, we are freezing. No heat, no gas, no power, no water.’

Up until the summer, the Russians provided humanitarian aid, say residents. On TikTok people are showing what was in the food packages. In ‘unboxing videos’ they show tins with fish or meat, bags of flour, bottles of water, sunflower oil and pasta.

Meanwhile only pensioners, people with disabilities and children under the age of three are receiving emergency aid, according to a document of the Russian authorities that de Volkskrant has seen. The other residents have to buy food in the markets or in one of the few shops that are still open.

The regional government has opened state shops these past few months, and these are by now well-stocked. Pro-Russian TikTok-ers point their cameras at overflowing shelves while stocking up on groceries.

But scarcity and inflation have pushed up prices in the state shops. Yekaterina often cannot buy certain things or goes and looks for cheaper offers in markets or from private citizens. ‘If you wish to buy things for a more or less low price, you have to visit half the neighbourhood.’

On top of that, many residents hardly have any income because of the lack of jobs in the city. Yekaterina sits at home, unemployed. Some residents, like Galina, find temporary jobs. ‘I work in a shop, for very little money. There is no heating, the temperature doesn’t rise above ten degrees and I receive the equivalent of twenty dollars for a twelve-hour workday.’

Most shops can be found in demolition and construction. Anna and her husband opted for that type of work. ‘Even without experience, you can start right away,’ she says.

After the conquest, Moscow promised to rebuild the city. Denis Pushilin, of the illegally annexed province of Donetsk, even saw in Mariupol ‘a future bathing resort’. Russian job sites list dozens of calls to come and work in Mariupol; from roofers to plumbers and from construction workers to land surveyors.

Buildings that were shot to pieces or burnt down are being levelled in great haste.

Throughout the city notices are posted to inform owners or tenants about the demolition. TikTok-ers, such as Karina, film the buildings before they are razed to the ground. ‘I make images for the sake of history,’ she says about her videos.

Residents also use this social medium to show the contrast between the devastation and what Mariupol was like before the war. A prewar video in which students are dancing in their still intact dance school cuts to images of the same dance room, only this time with broken windows looking out on ruins.

Another video by the same maker features her classmates and the words: ‘There are six of us left. There were eighteen of us.’

The Russian authorities focus on the reconstruction of the city and use it for their propaganda. Immediately after the first newly built apartments were completed in early September, the municipality organised a festive opening. On a small platform, surrounded by Russian flags, the first tenants were presented with the keys. The Russian state television broadcasted a report of the event.

Pro-Ukrainian TikTok-ers responded with cynical videos that show how the inhabitants of the new, pristine-white apartment complex have a view of the destroyed residences across the street from their balconies. Pro-Russian TikTok-ers on the other hand film only the newly constructed neighbourhoods.

An analysis of satellite images shows how the Russians have thrown up at least nineteen blocks of flats since they started construction in June. Fifteen more blocks are still under construction. This contrasts sharply with the thousands of destroyed and mostly uninhabitable buildings elsewhere in the city.

A residential block built by the Russians in the heart of the destroyed city.

Many people who no longer have a home are still waiting for a place to live. According to residents, most housing is allocated to pensioners, people with disabilities, and residents who display a cooperative attitude towards the occupier.

Construction workers from Russia also are immediately given a house. Many of the displaced people are now on long waiting lists.

‘None of my friends was given a home,’ says Yekaterina. ‘The Russians have tons of excuses: you either have the wrong certificate or you don’t have all the documents you need.’

Many residents take a pragmatic view. Anna, for example, views the building of the Russian apartments as ‘a good opportunity’ for people to have a roof over their heads again.

To others it feels unpleasant to live in houses built by the Russians who have all but destroyed the entire city themselves. ‘Of course it’s a good thing that houses are built,’ says Galina.

‘People need places to live. But this is not a gift, it is just compensation for what has been destroyed.’

CHAPTER III: Russification

‘Blasphemous for the city, for the survivors and especially for the dead,’ is Maria’s qualification of the diligence with which the Russians build new residential blocks on top of the ruins of her city. Not only does she see how Russian apartments are constructed in Mariupol, but also how the Russians remove everything that is Ukrainian. ‘This is unpardonable.’

It’s a miracle how Maria survived the siege in the first place. For days on end, she and her husband remained in the stairwell of their building, which had no bomb shelter. ‘The worst part were the planes. Then the whole building would tremble like in a heavy earthquake.’ The situation became untenable when their neighbourhood came under heavy fire on 12 March. ‘All around us houses and cars were burning. It was just hell.’

They gathered some warm clothes and food and left on 14 March. ‘That was the last time we saw our house.’ While the bombs were falling all around them, she and her husband fled to a suburb of Mariupol. A few days later, their apartment building was burned to the ground. Now Maria stays with family on the outskirts of the city and looks after her ageing mother.

Maria tries to keep the memory of prewar Mariupol alive. On TikTok she watches videos of the demolition of residential blocks and of the undamaged city in better days.

Many others on TikTok post similar images, such as a video that shows the letters of the city’s name in Ukrainian blue-yellow, welcoming visitors to the city. These letters have now been painted over in the Russian tricolour.

Over the past few months, the city has been ‘russified’ at full speed. The Russians are intent on transforming Mariupol into a Russian city. They are rebuilding it to their own design, systematically erasing everything that has to do with Ukrainian history and culture from the streets.

Russian flags now line the streets. The city’s central square – the Freedom Square – has had a makeover. It featured 25 stone pigeons, representing the freedom of each Ukrainian region.

The Ukrainian symbols on the pigeons – traditional embroidery – have been removed and the square itself has been renamed Lenin Square.

Amidst the 25 pigeons now flies the Russian flag. A mural that was popular among many residents was also removed by the Russians. The metres-high work portrayed Milana, a girl whose mother was killed during Russian shelling in 2015. Milana herself was wounded and lost a leg. A video on social media shows how two men are painting over the mural. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ is one of the comments.

Recent footage shows that the mural has been replaced by a pro-Russian banner with the name of the new ‘sister town’ St Petersburg.

The mural of Milana was removed.

And that’s not all, as the changes also directly affect daily life. For example, the people of Mariupol now receive only Russian TV stations and, following the Russian example, there is no longer daylight-saving time, which means that it is now one hour later in Mariupol than in the rest of Ukraine.

Many shops now only accept Russian roubles, the currency imposed by the Russians. Gradually the Ukrainian grivna is disappearing from people’s wallets. The same goes for identity cards. Restrictions are imposed on those who have only a Ukrainian passport. Without a Russian passport it is impossible to work as a teacher, a doctor, a police officer or civil servant.

The Russians are also covering up the traces of their own war crimes. In December they started tearing down what remained of the town’s theatre, where in a Russian bombardment on 16 March hundreds of sheltering civilians are presumed to have been killed.

Very little evidence remains of those horrors. Veiled scaffolding surrounds the theatre.

The screens bear portraits of great Russian playwrights such as Lev Tolstoi, Alexander Pushkin and the Ukrainian-born Nicolai Gogol.

Behind the screens excavators are removing the debris and a new theatre is built.

The russification extends to schools. ‘Students are taught in Russian and the teachers are newly certified and trained in Russia,’ says Maria. According to Yekaterina, her young nephew has to learn the Russian anthem. ‘It’s just terrible. In school they now teach children that Ukraine is bad and Russia is good.’

Ukrainian school children are given Russian educational material.

Russia also organises ‘summer camps’ for youngsters as an introduction to their new country. TikTok videos from November show how busloads of children return to Mariupol’s Freedom Square after a trip to St Petersburg.

They were a ‘third cohort’ of ‘350 pupils and 19 teachers who are introduced to the northern capital during a two-week visit,’ the regional government of St Petersburg writes on the social medium VKontakte. It is unclear whether participation is voluntary. Last August, the Russian state press agency Tass reported that some children ‘had been treated in specialised institutes in St Petersburg, on doctor’s advice’.

According to Ukraine, Russia even goes as far as deliberately separating children from their parents and grandparents. On an archived version of a meanwhile no longer existing Russian government website money and support are offered to people who are willing to adopt children from Mariupol. According to this site ‘more than a thousand’ children were brought to Russia from the city. Adoptive parents received a ‘one-time benefit’ of 20,427.77 roubles (some 273 euros) for each adopted child.

CHAPTER IV: Repression and Resistance

Before going to the office of the police district a few months ago, Yekaterina cleaned up her smartphone, as a precaution. She purged her photos and videos and deleted incoming calls and text messages so the Russians wouldn’t be able to find anything. She had heard from others what to expect and she knew that not everyone had successfully completed the so called ‘filtration’ procedure.

Yekaterina was given a single sheet of paper. ‘There were questions on it about where I was at the beginning of the “special military operation” and whether I had relatives or friends that support Ukraine.’ She was asked if she had been present at Euromaidan in 2014 – the large-scale protest that led to the fall of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. ‘They then fingerprinted me and photographed my face. I was taken to be “interviewed” and a soldier checked my phone.’

She told them there was nothing on her smartphone because she didn’t have Internet at home. Yekaterina ‘passed’ the filtration, was handed a stamped document, and could return home. A man who had been interviewed that same day was less fortunate. ‘He came out with a broken face,’ Yekaterina says. ‘I asked him why they had beaten him. Instead of “special military operation” he had used the word “war”.’

Although residents describe the procedure euphemistically as ‘not pleasant’, many, like Yekaterina, undergo it voluntarily. This is because the screening is needed to obtain all kinds of documents, such as a pass to leave the city, which is surrounded by checkpoints. Without having been screened it is almost impossible to go anywhere; residents call the filtration paper ‘the most important document beside your passport’.

Resistance in Mariupol is limited to images on social media displaying Ukrainian symbols.

The filtration procedure is one of the clearest examples of repression by the Russians. They use the screening to ‘filter out’ residents with pro-Ukrainian sympathies and members of the Ukrainian forces and thus prevent resistance.

From interviews with residents, it is clear that the filtration procedure is being widely applied in Mariupol. Some people were taken away after the screening. Human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch have accused Russia of detaining people in special ‘filtration centres’.

Those without proof of filtration are subjected to a barrage of questions at checkpoints, says Maria. Residents have to undress so they can be checked for pro-Ukraine tattoos. Their smartphones, laptops and bank accounts are checked. ‘Everything is aimed at finding out any political beliefs and connections that may pose a threat according to the new government, such as ties to the Ukrainian forces or providing support for them.

Russia tries to eradicate everything that refers to Ukraine, but the residents of Mariupol keep writing slogans such as ‘Slava Ukraini’(glory to Ukraine) or the Ukrainian trident on walls.

During the first weeks of the occupation, the Russians even went ‘from door to door to check people and search houses,’ says Maria. ‘It didn’t happen everywhere. In some places people were lucky.’ Yekaterina tells how in one of the districts ‘all the men under 65’ were taken to ‘filtration camps’ outside the city.

‘My uncle was taken,’ says Yekaterina. ‘He stayed there for almost a month and was allowed one phone call home each week. He was constantly interrogated. In the end he was given a stamp and was allowed to go home.’

Residents interviewed by de Volkskrant report that not everyone ‘passed’ the filtration. ‘Some friends of mine ended up in a cellar or prison,’ says Maria. In the door-to-door operations some civilians were taken from their homes when the Russians found something they didn’t like. ‘Their possessions, cars, food, and drugs were taken from them.’ It is not clear what has happened with these people since.

Ribbons with the Ukrainian blue-yellow in bushes and among the rubble, as tokens of resistance.

In other areas that have been under Russian control for a long time, such as Kherson, illegal prisons and torture chambers were found after they were liberated. Some people were arrested for espionage in retaliation for having a relative in the Ukrainian armed forces or because of pro-Ukrainian resistance. None of the people we spoke with knows of any such examples in Mariupol.

There doesn’t seem to be any widely organised or armed resistance in Mariupol. Residents state they haven’t heard about it themselves. There are some signs of resistance on social media. ‘You will be mowed down’ can be heard in the background of a TikTok video as the camera slowly zooms in on a Russian flag waving over the streets of Mariupol. ‘Everything has become uglier’, is the text in another video with a Russian tricolour.

Also, images circulate in which the Russian flag has vanished from the Freedom Square. In some places in the city pro Ukrainian graffiti has appeared on walls: the battle cry Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine) and ‘3CY’, the abbreviation of the Ukrainian army. Or the letter ï, the counterpart of the by now well-known Russian Z. This letter is not in the Russian alphabet and also looks a bit like a trident, the symbol of the Ukrainian armed forces.

What resistance there is, is mostly silent and subtle. Residents of Mariupol deal very differently with the occupation anyway. Some are ‘specifically against Ukraine and are deliberately collaborating with the Russians,’ says Yekaterina. A large group prefers a ‘neutral’ or ‘apolitical’ stance. According to Yekaterina, some of them are ‘convinced that the intruders have come here to stay’ and adapt to the circumstances.