One Year On from the Kharkiv Counter-Offensive, Civilians Still Face Bombing and Deprivation

Billboards on the road from Slovyansk to Kharkiv show photos of fallen Ukrainian soldiers, with descriptions such as “he gave everything for your freedom” or “he gave his life, so you could live”.

The sounds of shelling can be heard faintly in the distance and the roadside is littered with decimated and abandoned houses. It is one of the most haunting sights in Ukraine.

In Kamyanka, a village in Kharkiv oblast with a pre-war population of 1,000 people, has shrunk to perhaps a dozen. Here we met 59-year-old Serhei. He and his wife were living in a shed in their backyard – they had two daughters, one living in Poland, the other in western Ukraine.

Their house had been damaged by artillery fire twice – first by the Russians when they took the town, and the second time by the Ukrainians, who were trying to dislodge a Russian platoon that had taken up residence in his basement. “The orcs were down there,” he pointed out, “and then GRAD rockets hit the house”.

They received no support from the Ukrainian authorities, he said, only a power generator provided by a volunteer organisation. He said they hadn’t been visited yet by de-mining teams and he had cleared his house of spent rocket shells by hand.

A friend told me that her grandfather, a farmer from a nearby town, had blown the front wheel off his car trying to remove detritus from his field.

As Serhei showed me the remains of his house, one object stood out: a dust-covered suit jacket that belonged to his grandfather. Pinned to the lapels were several medals for gallantry, received for fighting the Red Army as it liberated the territory from the Nazis. Three generations later, the invaders are their former comrades.

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It has been just over a year since Ukraine liberated a swathe of cities in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions.

Olya Kartasheva, from the town of Sviatohirk, recalled the horrors of occupation. “A shell hit the basement we were staying in, but we miraculously survived… all our relatives were looking for us and when we got out, I read on Facebook that I had died in the hit,” she said.

Her family had no time to celebrate her survival – Russian troops moved into the city a few days later. The 48-year-old former bank worker remembers the first two weeks of the Russian occupation of Sviatohirsk last year as the worst time of her life.

“The hell started on 1 June… whole streets were burning,” she said. “We spent almost two weeks sitting in the basement not going out.”

She wanted to leave for the safer city of Kramatorsk, but her 72-year-old grandmother refused to go. She spoke from a humanitarian hub where she works delivering aid to the remaining civilians.

Before the war, the town had around 4,000 inhabitants, as well as those who have trickled back after the city’s liberation. As she tells it, it was her near-death experience that awoke her desire to help others. “After that, I realised that if God left me alive, then I was still needed for something,” she said.

Inside the city of Kharkiv, a sense of normality has returned, although people remain tense. While Kharkiv was never captured, it was subjected to intense bombardment for months. After Ukraine liberated the territory, it also pushed Russian forces far enough from the city that they could no longer attack it. More than half the original population of 1.5 million fled the city when it was besieged and nearly encircled by the Russians in the early days of the war. Now the city has around 1.2 million inhabitants, bolstered by those who have returned and others who have fled from battlegrounds further east.

“We hear the sirens about a minute after the explosions,” said Anastasia Siryk, a local NGO worker, “just like normal in Kharkiv”. For this reason, most schooling is either online or done in basements.

Rockets can reach from neighbouring Belgorod in around a minute, meaning people do not have time to reach a shelter before impact. Because of its precarious security situation, Kharkiv lacks the vibrance or energy of Kyiv. The capital, with beach parties and an extensive bar scene, is a hub for journalists, aid workers, and visiting foreign politicians looking for a photo op.

Siryk works for Mission Kharkiv, which has been providing humanitarian aid for civilians in the region for more than a year. They described how, over the years since the region’s liberation, the needs of the population have changed. Their organisation has gone from providing humanitarian supplies to those immediately in need because of lack of food, essential medicines or shelter, to what they call the “third order” victims of the conflict.

The war severely strained Kharkiv’s already fragile medical system. Last year alone, there were more than 700 attacks