Holding out for liberation

Their town razed by Russia, these villagers believe they’ll be saved by the same forces

Crammed into a damp cellar under a former hospital nicknamed “the sanctuary,” Katia stirs water and potato chunks in a plastic bucket as the vibrations of not-so-distant artillery strikes permeate the shelter.

With little water and no power for more than a year, the frail pensioner has struggled to stay alive, living underground in Sivers’k, about 10 kilometres from the front line near Bakhmut, the city in eastern Ukraine where Russian forces are close to victory after months of fierce fighting.

“Do you know how long we will have to live in the cellar?” she asked the Star reporters who dodged a Russian drone attack to reach her.

She is hoping for the war to end soon, but not necessarily a Ukrainian victory.

Katia is one of a few thousand people who have refused to evacuate from Sivers’k and rely on humanitarian deliveries to survive.

Ukrainian soldiers call them “waiters,” suspecting that they are waiting for Russian soldiers — who occupy territory to the north, east and south — to arrive and end the war. They may hope, being Russian speakers, they will be spared the brutality now synonymous with the Russian invasion; it would be dangerous for people in Sivers’k to say so outright, but the assumption hangs in the air here.

“My husband died … My house is destroyed. There is nothing left but clothes,” said Katia, a Russian-style kerchief covering her hair.

With the town’s television, internet and phone services destroyed by airstrikes, Katia is completely isolated from the outside world and wary of strangers: the World Food Programme staff members who deliver bread; the British volunteers who bring in water; the Ukrainian

soldiers protecting what is left of the village from Russian attack. With a kind smile, she grasps uneasily for news from the Star reporters.

“I want to ask if you know when this will end,” she probed, her spoken Ukrainian dotted with Russian words.

Representing a sizable minority of the town’s 11,000 pre-war residents, about 1,000 Sivers’k “waiters” feel more affinity to Russia than to Ukraine, even as Putin’s bombardment endangers their lives.

Some have family they want to join in Russia. Others are afraid to move west, where they fear Russian loyalists are not welcome. All are victims of Russian propaganda that has made them fear the people trying to keep them alive. The Star is using only partial names.

On the direct path of a Russian advance beyond Bakhmut in the Donbas region, Sivers’k is a strategic next target for the Russian army to access Kostyantynivka and Kramatorsk, two towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Close geographically to the border and regions that have been under Russian control since 2014, it is part of the most pro-Russian region in Ukraine and home to families with ties to both countries.

The danger of Russian attack is ever present. A Russian drone circled the water delivery team the day the Star visited. Within moments, soldiers of the Ukrainian army opened fire with small arms, and after five frenzied minutes, the drone was downed.

Waiting nervously for his water ration as the rumble of artillery grows louder, 69-year-old Aleksandr revealed his support for Russia in a recorded video interview.

“We just wish all these (Ukrainian) soldiers would go away from here,” he said in Russian.

His beard scraggy from a year with little water to shave, Aleksandr rocked back and forth nervously on his stiff legs and squinted in the spring daylight after months in the dark.

“We have been bombarded for a long time,” he said with a roguish glance to the Star’s Russian-speaking Ukrainian translator that seemed a test of sympathy for Putin.

“How to define peace is an interesting question.”

Aleksandr will eat grass and dig for water if humanitarian agencies become unable to deliver food and water to Sivers’k, he said. Waving

proudly at the few modest sheds still standing in the village, he remains loyal to the country that is trying to destroy him.

“Look. All this is all mine,” he said. “Why should I leave?”

Once the camera turned off, he muttered angrily and walked away. “I am Russian,” he said. Russian or Ukrainian, everyone from Sivers’k has a story of hardship and death. Townspeople starved in Stalin’s genocidal famine of the 1930s, witnessed fierce fighting in the Second World War and endured a violent occupation by Russian-led forces in 2014. Residents who remain tend to be over 50, as the Ukrainian government required parents with children to move to safer areas of the country last fall. They grew up under the Soviets, who disparaged Ukrainian culture and placed countless Ukrainians in concentration camps known as the gulag, Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, wrote in the magazine Foreign Affairs.

Since 2014, locals have been told “that Ukrainians are really Russians who want to be invaded and also Nazi satanists who must be exterminated,” Snyder wrote.

Speaking in Russian outside the town’s bombed-out pharmacy, Sasha and Valentina were clearly uncomfortable talking about Ukraine. A tattered sign in Russian seemed to mock their desperate circumstances:

“Taking care of you and your health.”

Sasha, whose tired eyes and unshaven face revealed the stress of living in a war zone, paced nervously and walked away at mention of the hostilities. Born in Sivers’k, the couple moved briefly to the relative safety of Poltava, a town 300 kilometres to the west, but were unhappy there, said Valentina, over the drone of an emergency generator, her eyes misty in the dusty air.

Her son lives in Chelyabinsk, an industrial centre in central Russia once known as “Tankograd,” for its production of tanks and diesel engines, she said sadly. She has no way of contacting him.

After a difficult winter, the air in Sivers’k is warming, but the streets are a reminder of just how brutal life can be in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Deep shell craters filled with black water score the main street, the aftermath of a fierce Russian assault in July 2022. Blocks of flats gutted and exposed, their tattered and scorched curtains blowing in the gentle breeze, offer no protection to the remaining residents who have been forced into cellars and basements.

Little is untouched by the intensity of the Russian assault on the town; the damage is almost total, and it is impossible to imagine normal life ever returning to these devastated streets. Many years ago, villagers planted exotic fruit trees in the market square but were forced to cut them down for firewood to survive the savage winter. The leaves on the remaining trees are unable to hide the destroyed façades of homes, many with graves in their front yards.

Sivers’k is one of Ukraine’s largest population centres cut off from water, gas and electricity, according to Aquaducks, a humanitarian group that delivers water there.

“Without water, there is no life anywhere” said Nikolayevich, 71, who moves awkwardly, his joints failing after months of living in a basement that he leaves only for water or food.

But nothing will deter Nikolayevich — whose three sons live in Russia — from waiting in Sivers’k. Once employed at the town’s aqua-coloured train station, he now collects rainwater for washing and wood for cooking despite daily shelling. Life in Europe would be too difficult, he said.

“At least, as they say, even a tree here is native.”

To a certain degree, the decadeslong Russian propaganda campaign has been a success in parts of eastern Ukraine like Sivers’k.

And the elderly, especially those with strong family connections in Russia, see little media at all, even in peacetime, relying instead on information gleaned over the phone from relatives in Russia.

“I think this is where the idea (comes from) that if the Russians come, it will be OK. That’s what they’re told by their families,” said Sergio, the Star’s translator, who works in the region.

“The reality is, the Russians would shoot them before they opened their mouths.”

But though they may feel more native to Russia, the “waiters” in Sivers’k hope for peace just like everyone else in Ukraine.

“We may have to survive another winter in the basement,” Katia said.

“I wouldn’t wish this life on my worst enemy.”

PAUL CONROY IS AN AWARD-WINNING PHOTOGRAPHER AND WRITER. HIS MEMOIR OF BEING ATTACKED WHILE COVERING THE SIEGE OF HOMS, “UNDER THE WIRE,” HAS BEEN MADE INTO A FEATURE FILM. KATHARINE LAKE BERZ IS A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO THE TORONTO STAR. SHE WRITES ABOUT THE IMPACT OF MAJOR NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ISSUES ON INDIVIDUAL LIVES.