POKROSK, Ukraine — The impact of the missile slammed the young woman into a fence so hard that she exploded. His mother found him dead on the bench under the pear tree where she had enjoyed the afternoon. When her father arrived, she was gone.
Anna Protsenko was murdered two days after returning home. The 35-year-old did what the authorities wanted: She evacuated the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine as Russian forces approached. But starting a new life elsewhere was uncomfortable and expensive.
Like Protsenko, tens of thousands of people have returned to rural or industrial communities near the region’s front lines at considerable risk because they cannot afford to live in safer places.
Protsenko tried it for two months, then came home to take a job in the small town of Pokrosk. On Monday, friends and family kissed her face and wept before her casket was closed by her grave.
“We can’t win. They don’t put us anywhere else and you still have to pay rent,” said Anastasia Rusanova, a friend and neighbor. There is nowhere to go, but here in the Donetsk region, “everything is ours,” he said.
The mayor’s office in Pokrosk estimates that 70 percent of the evacuees have returned home. In the large city of Kramatosk, an hour’s drive from the front line, officials said the population had dropped from a normal 220,000 to about 50,000 in the weeks following the Russian invasion, but has since risen to 68,000.
This is frustrating for Ukrainian officials as some civilians are on the warpath, but residents of the Donetsk region are also frustrated. Some described a feeling of unwelcomeness among Ukrainian speakers in some parts of the country as Russian speakers.
But often, lack of money was the problem. In Kramatorsk, some people queuing for humanitarian aid boxes said they were too poor to empty at all. The Donetsk region and its economy have been mired in conflict since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began fighting the Ukrainian government.
“Who will take care of us?” asked Karina Smilska, who returned to Pokrosk a month after the evacuation. Now, at 18, she is her family’s top earner as a waitress.
Volunteers have been driving vehicles into the Donetsk region for months since the Russian invasion, helping to evacuate vulnerable people, but such efforts may be quietly doomed to failure.
In a deserted house in the village of Malotaranivka on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, faded twists of fly paper hung from the living room ceiling. Pieces of cloth were stuffed into the window cracks to keep out drafts.
Tamara Markova, 82, and her son Mikola Ryaskov said they spent just five days as an evacuee in the central city of Dnipro this month before deciding to return home.
“We would have been separated,” Markova said.
The temporary shelter where they were staying said they would be moved to a nursing home and her son, whose left side had become immobile after a stroke, would go to a home for the disabled. They found it unacceptable. In their haste to leave, they left his wheelchair behind. Riding the bus was huge.
Now they do. If an air raid siren goes off, Markova goes to shelter with neighbors “until the bombing stops.” Humanitarian aid is delivered once a month. Markova calls it good enough. When winter comes, neighbors will cover their windows with plastic film for basic insulation and sweep chimneys of soot. Maybe they’ll have gas for heat, maybe not.
“It was much easier under the Soviet Union,” she said of her lack of support from the state, but she was even more unhappy that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military forces surrounded the communities around her. What are you doing with
“He’s old,” she said of Putin. “He has to retire.”
Homesickness and uncertainty also lead to withdrawal. A daily evacuation train leaves Pokrovsk for relatively safe western Ukraine, but another train also arrives daily with those who have decided to come home. While the evacuation train is free, the return one is not.
Oksana Tserkovnyi took the train home with her 10-year-old daughter two days after the July 15 fatal attack in Dnipro, where they had been staying for more than two months. While the attack sparked a comeback, it was difficult for Tserkovnyi to find work. Now she plans to go back to her previous job in the coal mine.
Costs in Dnipro, already overwhelmed by evacuations, were another concern. “We stayed with relatives, but it would have been too much if we had needed to rent,” Tserkovnyi said. “It starts at 6,000 hryvnia ($200) a month for a studio, and you won’t be able to find it.”
Taxi drivers waiting for an incoming train in Pokrosk said many people give up trying to settle elsewhere.
“Half of my job is definitely transporting these people,” said one driver, Vitaly Ankiyev. “Because the money is gone.”
In mid-July, he said, he picked up a woman who was coming home from Poland when the place felt empty. When they reached his village near the front line, there was a crater where his house had been.
“She cried,” Anikef said. “But he decided to stay.”
Associated Press reporter Anna Verinetsia contributed.
