The Russian war plane flew above Avdiivka, the Ukrainian city abandoned this month by Ukrainian forces. It looped above the new eastern frontline. And then it dropped a bomb, not far from where Maryna Haivoronska was standing in the village of Novoselivka Persha. “I saw the jet in the sky. It was 9.30am. The bomb landed 500 metres away from me. I threw myself to the ground. My legs are still trembling,” she said.
Since capturing Avdiivka Russian forces have been moving rapidly forward. Earlier this week they overran two settlements down the road from Novoselivka, where Haivoronska is the mayor. Their tactics are brutally effective. First, fighter jets carpet-bomb the area. Then, assault groups using armoured vehicles overwhelm Ukraine’s new and vulnerable positions.
Two years after the full-scale invasion, Russia is close to achieving a strategic breakthrough in the east. It is happening in a rustic landscape of brown fields, wispy yellow feather grass and pyramid-like slag heaps. Ukrainian forces clatter up and down in green Humvees along dusty country roads. But they have no answer to Russian planes, which patrol menacingly above them in an azure haze, leaving decorative curlicue trails.
Ukrainian troops have not given up. They have shot down 10 enemy Sukhoi jets in as many days. But overall they lack tactical-level air defences, which would allow them to chase away Russia’s marauding squadrons, as they move into position above the occupied city of Donetsk. The Ukrainians have little artillery. The Russians have lots. The sound of incoming Grad missiles can be heard every few minutes along the Ukrainian frontline: a terrible thunder clap.
The heavy glide bomb that fell on Novoselivka’s School Street wrecked a private two-storey house. Miraculously the family inside – Alyona Movchan and her two children – survived. The village has been hit before. In 2023 a rocket flattened the main square, destroying everything apart from a garish Soviet war memorial with a silver-painted sculpture of a wounded soldier. Two people were killed. Another died from a heart attack.
Locals say decisions being taken far away – or not, in the case of US Republicans blocking a crucial $61bn (£48bn) package to Ukraine – are existential for them. Their homes and communities are being swallowed up. “We are on our knees, begging the US and the UK for help,” Haivoronska told the Guardian. She added: “I’m from Avdiivka. I believed the city would hold. We lost it because our guys didn’t have planes or enough ammunition.”
Some residents are reluctant to leave, despite the fact the Russians are 10km away, and getting closer. The mayor said 18 people remained. There is no electricity or gas. The village shop – Natalie’s – shut this week. Its disco, kindergarten and surgery closed long ago. In the neighbouring village of Zhelanne 454 people hang on. On Tuesday humanitarian aid was given out at its school. Moscow has bombed the building three times, ripping off its southern facade.
“I have a bag packed. But where am I supposed to go?” 63-year-old Liubov Hryhorivna wondered. She explained: “I have no money. Our pensions are small. I love my country and I don’t want to leave.” What did she think of Vladimir Putin, who has vowed to ‘liberate’ the parts of Donetsk oblast not under Russian rule? “He started with Donetsk in 2014. Now he wants everything. His appetite has grown. He’s our enemy,” she said. Could Ukraine win? “I don’t know,” she replied.
Hryhorivna collected a gas stove, a solar-powered torch and a grey blanket. She said she was living in a flat belonging to her husband’s late parents, after a missile hit her own property, blowing out the windows. “I would like to stay alive so I can see my grandchildren,” she said. Of the 30 people who picked up supplies, one said he supported Russia. “I believe in peace,” Anatolii Anatoliiovych said, predicting: “Russia will win.”
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, this week convened an emergency summit in support of Ukraine, alarmed by the stalemate in the US Congress, where participants agreed more had to be done. The EU, however, has failed to make good on its pledge to give Kyiv a million artillery rounds. Deliveries of weapons – tanks, air defence systems and long-range artillery – have typically come too late, and only after indecision and government caution.
Ukrainian troops, meanwhile, have hastily constructed a new fortified line designed to thwart further Russian advances. It stretches between the villages of Tonenke, Orlivka, and Berdychi. There are trenches. And a body of water. But they offer less protection than the now abandoned concrete bunkers inside Avdiivka’s industrial zone and its sprawling coke factory. These helped Ukrainian combat units withstand Russia and its proxies for a decade. Would the new defences work?
“I’m optimistic,” Mykola Kovalenko, head of the Ocheretynsk military district, which includes Novoselivka, Zhelanne, and other villages west of Avdiivka, said. He explained: “I believe in our armed forces. Look how long they held Avdiivka. The problem on our side is a lack of weapons. Without air power Russia could not have taken the city. Their planes are terrible for us.” He stressed: “Our soldiers are heroes. To stop Russia and its power is not easy.”
Evidence for this could be seen nearby. A Russian aircraft bomb – weighing 500kg and known as a FAB – had demolished a shop and a white-painted house. Fires still smouldered. The ground was warm underfoot. The explosion transformed an orchard into a wasteland of blackened stumps. A tea service lay surreally amid the debris. Its cups were fused and carbonised. The blast ripped off roof tiles, exposing a skeleton of wooden beams.
At 6.30am on Wednesday Russia carried out another airstrike. A 62-year-old woman who had been walking down the street was hurt. Most of the houses in the centre of Zhelanne are smashed. Planks hang from trees, next to a ravaged Lada car. In Novoselivka the same day, a bomb created a spectacular 25-metre-wide crater. There were more aerial attacks on the city of Pokrovsk and the town of Kurakhove, where Ukrainian forces are holding off another concentrated Russian push.
Authorities have ordered the compulsory evacuation of all of the district’s children. About 1,500 adults remain. Most are elderly. Volunteers bring them supplies. The UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, OCHA, brought in a truck full of emergency medical kits. The gas stoves were provided by the Useful People from Avdiivka, a charity founded in 2022 by Sasha Semiletov, and funded by the New York-based organisation Razom for Ukraine.
Previously, Semiletov made regular deliveries to Avdiivka, his home. The trips became increasingly perilous from October, when the Russians launched a major tank offensive. They advanced from three sides, threatening to cut off the only road under Ukrainian control. The same month a Russian serviceman operating a first-person view drone spotted Semiletov’s van. The drone chased his vehicle, caught it, and blew a hole in its metal roof.
“There was an explosion. We smelt smoke. We didn’t stop. When we reached the city we realised it had hit us. It was a moment of ‘Fuck! We are alive’,” he said, adding: “We smiled at our good fortune.” The drone carried a grenade. Shrapnel missed Semiletov and his fellow passenger. On Tuesday he travelled to Zhelanne in an olive-coloured Daewoo Lanos, bumping along exposed ground at high speed, Avdiivka’s factory chimneys visible in the distance.
He recalled how conditions inside the city got worse. Russia targeted administrative structures first, then multi-floor housing blocks. Last summer school No 6, where they gave out food, burned down. He watched as jets pounded the coke plant where he had worked as an engineer. “You could see a black mushroom cloud. In two months the Russians dropped 1,200 FAB bombs,” he said. F-16 jets promised by three European countries might have made a difference. But they did not arrive, he noted.
Zhelanne is now paying the price for the west’s collective hesitancy. While Berlin has dithered, and Washington has bickered, Moscow has ruthlessly adapted. Its factories are making munitions day and night. The Kremlin works with totalitarian friends. It has sourced shells and ballistic missiles from Pyongyang and kamikaze drones from Tehran. Waiting in the sidelines is Donald Trump. His return as US president would probably weaken Kyiv, and hasten the loss of territory.
Ukrainian officials put a brave face on recent setbacks. Hanna Maliar, former deputy defence minister, said Russia was trying to advance all across the eastern sector, in five different directions. So far, she said, it had achieved only “local victories”. Russian generals had given orders “eight times” for the capture of the whole Donetsk region, a goal they have been unable to achieve. “Obviously they will try to do it again,” she said. The enemy was suffering huge losses, she added.
Back in Zhelanne, villagers said they continued to believe in victory, even though this outcome seems increasingly improbable and distant. Valeriiy Yevsiukov, a volunteer with Useful People from Avdiivka, acknowledged that Russian attack groups might swiftly capture more villages. But, he said, they would struggle to make progress in built-up urban centres, such as the well-defended eastern garrison cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
In the meantime he intended to carry on. “There’s no point in crying. I don’t believe in an afterlife,” he said. “Sasha [Semiletov] and I are doing something useful. Between us we have four arms and two heads. We will do whatever we can.”
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, published by Guardian Faber, was this week named Ukraine’s Journalism Book of the Year
