HRYSHYNE, Ukraine — On a grey Tuesday morning in mid-October, a beaten-up Lada comes sputtering around the corner of a destroyed country house in the village of Hryshyne, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Oblast, stopping in front of what’s left of the town’s center: A closed-down administrative building with its facade shredded by shrapnel, a few red-brick “Stalinka” housing units damaged by shelling, and a small grocery store with its windows boarded up.
Her face partly obscured by a thick woolen scarf, a middle-aged woman selling clothing items from a stall set up on the square shoots a suspicious glance at the Lada’s occupants as they disembark.
With his buzz cut and slightly unkempt beard, the Lada’s driver is almost indistinguishable from the countless Ukrainian soldiers that come daily through Hryshyne on their way in or out of the besieged city of Pokrovsk. But instead of the military camo gear now ubiquitous in eastern Ukraine, 27-year-old Vladyslav Tomilin sports a sleeveless light blue jacket bearing a white dove, the logo of the Ukrainian NGO Proliska.
Since the early days of the war in Donbas in 2014, Proliska’s volunteers — many of them natives of Donbas themselves — have been providing front-line communities in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions with humanitarian, social and psychological aid. While no strangers to war, they have had to considerably scale up their operations after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
It’s a part of the war that doesn’t make the headlines, and one that offers a small window onto the widening strain Ukrainians face fighting off a larger, better-armed opponent in a conflict that shows no signs of ending soon.
According to its website, Proliska has so far provided “necessary help to more than 350 settlements and more than 1.5 million civilians.” But with the Russian onslaught in the Donetsk region escalating in recent months, volunteers and local authorities alike are now concentrating on one main objective: getting as many civilians as possible out of harm’s way.
“I’ve received one of these every day since August 14th,” says Vladyslav Tomilin as he scrolls through an endless list of text messages on his phone. “Dear residents of the Donetsk region! Protect yourself and your close ones! Evacuate!” read the messages sent daily by the regional administration of Donetsk to the region’s remaining inhabitants.
This Tuesday, Mr. Tomilin and his two colleagues — social worker Inna Krugovaya, 23, and psychologist Maria Kondriatouk, 45 — have come to Hryshyne to assist in the evacuation process, a task rendered increasingly dangerous by the deterioration of the situation at the nearby front. It’s physically and mentally taxing, dealing with locals who are increasingly afraid to stay but also fearful of the uncertainty if they agree to leave.
“The situation is always the same: People think that the war won’t get to their cities, that they can wait for it to end and that they’ll be safe,” sighs Mr. Tomilin. “Many wait until the last moment to evacuate. Humans can’t help but be optimistic. But sometimes, by the time they realize they need to leave, they’re not able to anymore.”
Less than a week earlier, a cluster ammunition rocket landed on the other side of the road from where the group was standing, Mr. Tomilin notes, pointing to a damaged residential building less than a hundred yards away.
A tangle of shredded corrugated metal and burnt plastic is all that remains of the garages lining up its courtyard. Over the past weeks, Russian forces have managed to puncture Ukrainian defensive lines at multiple points along the country’s sprawling eastern front line, bringing their artillery pieces within range of Pokrovsk.
Ghost town
The small industrial city of Pokrovsk, once home to 60,000 inhabitants and a strategic railway hub used by the Ukrainian army throughout Donetsk, is now a ghost town, its empty streets echoing with the distant rumble of artillery.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Washington-based think tank, “Russian forces recently marginally advanced east and southeast of Pokrovsk amid continued offensive operations in the area on 26 October,” with geo-located footage indicating that Russia had “recently advanced into the eastern outskirts of Novotoretske (east of Pokrovsk), west of Novohrodivka (southeast of Pokrovsk), into the Korotchenko mine waste heap northeast of Selydove (southeast of Pokrovsk), and into northern Oleksandropil (southeast of Pokrovsk).”
In other words, the city faces threats on multiple sides.
As they advance, the Russians have used their formidable firepower to annihilate entire towns and villages, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. About an hour after the NGO team’s arrival, a worn-out white autobus bearing the logo Sonderfahrt — German for “special trip” — comes to a halt in the center of the village.
Located a mere three miles away from Pokrovsk, Hryshyne has emerged as an evacuation hub used by local and international aid workers, although how much longer it will be safe to be here is an open question.
Clutching the meager belongings they were able to take with them, about 20 civilians are being evacuated on this day, a group comprising mostly elderly people or families with young children. A day earlier, the civilian-military administration of Donetsk had decided to extend the mandatory evacuation order for families with children to multiple cities located close to the front lines, including Druzhkivka, Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk.
“It’s now mandatory. We have been told by the authorities to evacuate,” explains Sveta, a resident from Druzhkivka, packing up to leave with her five-year-old son to Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. “I never once had to go down to the basement with my son and I don’t intend to, so better to leave now.”
While Mr. Tomilin speaks with the driver, his two colleagues come onboard the bus to begin the registration process. Each person is given a form and issued a number enbaling them in theory to claim the status of internally displaced person (IDP) and thus benefit from state social assistance. Those qualifying receive 2,000 hryvnias (around $48) per month per person and 3,000 hryvnias ($72) for a child or a disabled person.
According to Yevhen Tkachev, another volunteer from Proliska, those benefits are accompanied by a one-time payment of 10,800 hryvnias (around $261) from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.
Residents preparing to leave talk of the steadily deteriorating conditions in towns that were once believed to be a safe distance from the fighting.
“It got very loud where we were living. Our building would regularly shake because of nearby explosions,” says Yulia, a young woman from Niu York, a small Ukrainian settlement captured by the Russians in late September.
With her son Timur, 5, and daughter Senya, 9, she had moved to Myrnohrad after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, but the situation there became untenable as Russian forces intensified their offensive to reach Pokrovsk.
“The van that took us out of Myrnohrad went through Pokrovsk and there was not a single person left in the streets there,” she says. “It was scary.”
She says that she now intends to take her children to Pavlohrad, a city of 100,000 people located in the oblast of Dnipro located in central eastern Ukraine and much farther from the heaviest fighting.
The campaign to get the local civilian population to safety can lead to some tough conversations. Clutching an empty plastic bag in his hands, a middle-aged resident of Hryshyne walks up to the volunteers and asks them if they’re handing out food.
“No,” one of the volunteers, clad in a bulletproof vest, answers brusquely. “It’s only for people who have decided to evacuate.”
According to Iulia Ryzhakova, the head of the children’s department of the Donetsk military civil administration, some 364 families with children were still living in the settlements targeted by the October 18 mandatory evacuation order. On September 6, Vadym Filashkin, the head of the regional military administration, said in an interview on Ukrainian television that about 3,500 children remained in these settlements, with roughly 1,500 in the town of Kostyantynivka alone.
“We are working very fruitfully in this direction, but, unfortunately, a large number of people remain on the front line and have no desire to leave,” he said.
On this day in Hrystyne, roughly 30 civilians were registered and evacuated to Pavlohrad — a mere drop in the bucket: According to regional authorities, around 334,000 civilians were still living in the Donetsk region as of October 15.
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.