Until February 2022, eight years of fighting between Kyiv’s forces and Moscow-led militants in eastern Ukraine had taken the lives of only a handful of Pavlohrad’s men; the combat zone was 150km away and the province of Dnipropetrovsk seemed safe from war.
Now, more than 3½ years into Russia’s all-out invasion, a sliver of the region is occupied, the distance from Pavlohrad to the front line has halved, enemy attacks cause long blackouts and there are more than 300 faces on the city’s memorial to its fallen soldiers.
“They attack Pavlohrad all the time. There was a drone attack last night and another just a couple of hours ago, on our railway infrastructure,” the city’s mayor, Anatoliy Vershyna, says in his office overlooking that growing roll of honour.
“The attacks have increased many times over – if earlier in the war it happened once a week, now it is almost every day.”
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Pavlohrad has become increasingly important to Ukraine’s war effort as Russia’s invasion force has ground forward, despite enormous losses, through most of the Donbas area to the east.
Now they have taken villages on the eastern fringe of Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in 11 years of conflict and are pummelling towns such as Mezhova, which until a few months ago felt relatively safe except for the distant rumble of artillery from the direction of Pokrovsk, a small city in Donetsk region that is being destroyed in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
“Before the war we had 104,000 residents, officially. We think that 15-20,000 left after the full-scale war began, but according to official figures about 22,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) arrived here. When you consider unregistered IDPs too, we think there are at least 140,000 people in Pavlohrad now,” Vershyna says.
“There’s a feeling that everyone is waiting. Waiting to see what happens at the front – either it stops approaching, or there arises a possible need to evacuate,” he adds. “It’s not panic, but a sense that sometimes the war is coming close: when there is a heavy strike then people say maybe it’s already time to leave; but then it’s quieter for a day or two and they calm down again.”
Pavlohrad is still well out of range of Russian artillery and the small, remote-controlled and explosive-laden first-person-view (FPV) drones that make simply venturing outside potentially fatal in towns and villages near the front line.
But the Iranian-made Shahed drones and Russian-made copies called Gerans – 3.5m long, with a 2.5m wingspan and a warhead of up to 90kg – are a daily threat, along with ballistic missiles that Ukraine’s thinly stretched air defence systems struggles to intercept.
In one hellish night last summer, Russia targeted Pavlohrad with 120 Shaheds and 21 missiles, and earlier this month a strike on the power grid caused a blackout at eight coal mines near the city, trapping nearly 2,600 miners underground.
“It can seem like people have pretty much got used to the attacks, but then recently many people lost their water supply for something like five or seven days. So that’s another problem, especially for those with small children,” says Tetiana Volkova, founder of the Step (“Steppe”) news website that covers Pavlohrad and the surrounding area.
“Today, for example, the blackout will last for seven or eight hours. My son is 4½ years old, and his kindergarten has to spend practically the whole time in the basement, because of near-constant air-raid alerts,” she explains.
“We tried to protect him from the war at the start, and when he heard an explosion we said it was fireworks. But now he understands more. The other evening, he saw a flash from his bedroom window – a drone hit a factory: ‘I saw something red,’ he said, and I told him it was a drone. ‘It won’t hit our house will it?’ he asked. It’s terrible to hear that.”
Now people in Pavlohrad face the same dilemmas and hard conversations as compatriots further east faced earlier in the war, weighing up the risk of staying against the cost and upheaval of trying to make a new life somewhere safer.
“Some people have already packed an emergency bag of essentials, some are trying to sell their flat while it’s still possible and leave. But others are staying for work, hoping the front line stays where it is, or putting hope in some kind of negotiations – everyone hopes, what else can they do?” Volkova says.
“People understand that the Russians aren’t likely to reach Pavlohrad very soon – they’re much further away than they are from cities like Kharkiv or Sumy or Zaporizhzhia. But they can still make daily life unbearable by destroying the power grid and water supply and so on.”
Vershyna, who was Pavlohrad’s police chief before entering politics, says locals increasingly ask him what to do, and whether it is time to evacuate: “I tell them that if the time comes, when I know legally and morally that this is necessary, then I will say so – but this is not the time.”
