A few days before authorities ordered the mandatory evacuation of families and vulnerable residents from Kupiansk, Iryna Viktorivna was serving up free hot food to her neighbours from a trestle table set up in a snowy street in the eastern Ukrainian city, ladling porridge and meatballs and cabbage salad.
The sound of artillery bounced across the shallow bowl in which the city stands, four or five shells a minute – sometimes more – fired by both Ukrainian and Russian gun crews.
Mostly the shells landed far away, but sometimes they fell on the city. A little earlier, one had killed a 63-year-old man and damaged a nursery and fire station.
In the queue waiting to be served was 60-year-old Natalia Ivanivna, wrapped up in a winter coat and scarf and carrying a stick.
Ivanivna said she could have been relocated earlier that day but chose to stay because she was worried about her house being looted. She told of her concern about the cities further to the south along the eastern front, Bakhmut and Vuhledar and others, that have already been reduced to rubble over months of fighting. “It could happen here,” she said.
Viktorivna interrupted to chide her: “Don’t be pessimistic!”
As both women know, the tides of war have twice washed over Kupiansk already. Now it is threatened by a third inundation.
The first time was in the very first days of the war, on 27 February last year, when Russian tanks drove in, beginning an occupation that lasted almost seven months.
Then, in September, it was Ukrainian armour that rolled through the city’s streets, driving out the Russian occupiers. There was more violence the second time: buildings were shattered and gutted and cars were smashed.
The months since have not been quiet, but the situation deteriorated again in the last two weeks of February, as Russian forces sought to advance at this northern end of the frontline, one of five points where they are pushing.
Shells and S300 missiles have landed in the city. The Russian guns have once again crept closer.
In her house, Viktorivna, a 45-year-old nurse, said she had not worked since her hospital was bombed last year.
“We lived here all the through the occupation. I remember on the morning of the 24th [the first day of the war] my younger sister called to ask what I was doing.
“I’d seen Putin’s speech and thought that he was bluffing. So I told my sister I was making sandwiches for the children to take to school. She told me the war had already started.”
Three days later Viktorivna heard the grinding sound of Russian tanks outside.
She kept working through the occupation, mostly on a Covid ward. Then on 9 September she heard shooting and explosions. This time the tanks she saw were Ukrainian. “I can’t tell you how I felt. It was like a rock was lifted off me.”
Now Kupiansk is under threat again.
“It has got much noisier in the last two weeks. Sometimes the whole house shakes. People are scared,” she said. “Some people have evacuated recently because of the situation.”
Confirmation comes a few yards from the food queue, where Svetlana Talalaienko, 55, was loading her dog and belongings into an evacuation van with her daughter Violetta, 22.
Later, having arrived safely at the city of Kharkiv to the west, Talalaienko explained that she had stayed in Kupiansk throughout the occupation and the battle for the city’s liberation, but that the most recent violence had become too much for her.
“Its been very hard with all the shooting,” she said. “Our windows and our roof are damaged. Mentally, it’s been too hard.
“Before the recent escalation it was more random. It was happening outside the town. Now it’s in the city and our neighbourhood. I think if they come back again they will treat us worse than did before.”
Natalia Riabukhina, a neighbour, had agreed to feed the dogs left behind in Kupiansk and keep an eye on the family’s house in a city where looting is on the increase.
“Lots of my friends have left,” Riabukhina said. “But I want to stay for now. I have put 20 years of work into my house. I’ll leave when it’s not standing any more.”
Callout
Despite the rising sense of fear, there was a strange approximation of normal life in Kupiansk.
In the city centre, despite the constant sound of shelling, people queued at the bank machine, went shopping and waited at bus stops. A blue school bus loaded with Ukrainian text books that were hidden from the Russians during the occupation was unloaded outside a school – a sign the teachers hope for better times.
At a little open market, Vitaly, who did not want to give his second name, was selling dried fish and bottled beer 300 metres from where, an hour before, a shell landed on a nearby nursery.
“It was like the earth jumped,” he said. “It was terrifying.” But he stayed at his stall. “What else is there to do?’ he asked.
In his office the mayor of Kupiansk, Andrii Besedin, considered the situation. “I don’t know what the Russians are trying but we are standing our ground and remaining in our positions. What they are hitting is the civil infrastructure.
“We can observe the dynamic that is happening. The shelling is increasing and there are more victims, so now we are focusing on evacuating children and people with disabilities. We had hoped the threat would go away after the autumn and we could start rebuilding like other liberated towns. But Kupiansk can still be reached by artillery and grads so we have to be smart and plan until the time comes when the frontline is pushed away.”
Beyond the Oksil River, which separates Kupiansk from Kupiansk-Vuzlovy (known to local people as Uzlova), the scene changed.
A railway hub with a large industrial area that has come under frequent shelling, Kupiansk-Vuzlovy’s streets were almost empty save for soldiers and a few residents. Local people said less than a third of the population remains, and more were leaving every day.
In the railway offices, Tetiana, 52, a manager who declined to give her family name, looked harried. The rest of her family had left for Kharkiv and abroad. Her block of flats had emptied out. “[The shelling] has become so loud now. It’s really frightening, especially at night,” she said. “Before we could tell who was firing, whether it was our guys or the Russians. Now it’s too loud to tell.
“I don’t know what the Russians are planning but if they think they can try to come back like before, it won’t be a walk in the park. Our soldiers will defend it.”
Further out still, the villages and towns were shattered and empty, except for soldiers and armour churning the muddy broken roads.
Back in Kupiansk, Viktorivna explained why – for now – she planned to stay.
“I am an optimist. I don’t believe they will come back. No, no, no. We will chase them all the way back to Sakhalin [a Russian Pacific city].”
