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When pro-Russian rebels tried to seize Donbas in 2014, their abuse of civilians foreshadowed many of the atrocities to come across Ukraine in 2022. The Globe visited Slovyansk to see what might happen if history repeats itself

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Oleksiy Yukov stands in Slovyansk, his hometown, beside an evacuation vehicle used by the Black Tulips, a group he belongs to that collects bodies of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in Donbas.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail

Driving around his native Donbas region, collecting the bodies of dead civilians and soldiers – and with the Russian army closing on his hometown of Slovyansk – Oleksiy Yukov can’t believe it’s all happening again.

The thunder of guns. The divided loyalties. The disappearances and the murders.

Eight years ago, Mr. Yukov was almost a very early casualty of the smaller-scale conflict that preceded Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine this year.

Slovyansk was captured in April, 2014, by a pro-Moscow militia, and in a scene that darkly foreshadowed the behaviour of Russian soldiers toward Ukrainian civilians in now-infamous places such as the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Mr. Yukov was imprisoned in a basement beneath the local security services building. An order for his execution was signed.

Mr. Yukov’s life was spared by the last-minute intervention of a senior pro-Russian official, who appreciated the work Mr. Yukov and his Black Tulips organization did and do – collecting the dead on both sides of the conflict.

It’s a job that was at its grimmest in the summer of 2014. After Slovyansk was liberated by the Ukrainian army that July, it was Mr. Yukov and the Black Tulips who dug up the mass graves left behind by the occupiers.

There were some 200 corpses, Mr. Yukov estimates, including many who bore signs of having been tortured before they were executed, just as in Bucha eight years later.

In the interregnum, the front lines in the Donbas war stabilized – with Slovyansk on the Ukrainian side – and the horrors of what happened here began to fade into memory.

Now that awful history is repeating. The early weeks of the war were marked by rapid Russian advances toward the capital of Kyiv, then a retreat that let the world see the atrocities committed in the places that fell under Russian occupation.

Now, Donbas – an industrial region of eastern Ukraine that’s largely populated by Russian speakers – is once more the main front in the war. And Slovyansk, a city of just over 100,000 people that is still dealing with the trauma of eight years ago, is once more in Russia’s crosshairs.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia wanted to “capture and completely destroy” Slovyansk.

The next day, the city’s mayor told The Globe and Mail that the Russian front lines were only 15 to 20 kilometres from his office in the centre of Slovyansk – putting the building well within the range of Russian artillery, which could be heard pounding the surrounding villages throughout the week.

The city is expected to be the next major target if and when Russia captures the besieged cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk, 70 kilometres to the east. That moment drew closer on Friday when the last Ukrainian forces were ordered to withdraw from Sieverodonetsk to avoid becoming completely surrounded. On Sunday, the Ukrainian military reported Russian artillery and rocket-propelled grenade attacks on 13 villages around Slovyansk, suggesting a new offensive on the city may be beginning.

The last time Russia and its proxies came to Slovyansk, the city’s name became synonymous with terror, a place where local citizens – as well as foreign journalists and international monitors – were kidnapped and interrogated on the whim of the masked gunmen who ruled the checkpoints.

“How could I be surprised [at what happened in Bucha] when I witnessed the same things here in 2014? When you’ve seen so much, nothing surprises you. The only thing that’s shocking is the scale,” said Mr. Yukov, sitting on a bench in Slovyansk’s Shovkovychnyy Park, on what he says was a rare day off from collecting those killed in the Russian invasion that began on Feb. 24.

“It feels like the eight years between the start of the war and the start of the full-scale invasion don’t exist. It feels like these eight years never happened.”


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Slovyansk, 2014: A pro-separatist rebel holds a shotgun decorated in Russian colours at a checkpoint on May 8, about two months before Ukrainian troops liberated the city.Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times

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Slovyansk, 2022: A sign painted in Ukrainian colours spells the city's name the Russian way.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail

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Mayor Vadym Lyakh belonged to the pro-Russian governing party in 2014, but now backs Mr. Zelensky and resistance to the invasion.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail

Mayor Vadym Lyakh is a snapshot of the city he represents. Today, he’s an outspoken pro-Ukrainian patriot, following the tone set by Mr. Zelensky and declaring that all of Slovyansk will resist the Russian invasion.

Eight years ago, he was a member of the Party of Regions, the political faction headed by Ukraine’s disgraced former president, Viktor Yanukovych. His party always sought closer ties with Moscow, rather than the European Union.

It was a pro-Western revolution in early 2014 that swept Mr. Yanukovych from power and set history in motion. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the ouster of his ally by sending troops to seize and illegally annex the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, triggering the first new Western sanctions against Moscow since the end of the Cold War.

Then came the uprising in Donbas, which saw Russian provocateurs stir up anger among the Russian-speaking population of cities such as Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol and Slovyansk. Eventually, the Kremlin began sending regular army units to support the militias of the breakaway “people’s republics” its agents had created inside Ukraine.

Mr. Lyakh doesn’t like talking about where he was or what he was doing in 2014, when he was a deputy on the Slovyansk city council that seemed to almost welcome the pro-Russian militants that took over the city. Though Mr. Lyakh says he was “surprised” by the events of that spring and summer, there are photographs online of him shaking hands and having a private conversation with Vyacheslav Ponomarev, the separatist-appointed mayor who ran Slovyansk while it was occupied.

Mr. Lyakh admits there were many in the city who were happy to see the Russian flag hoisted overhead in 2014. More than half of Slovyansk’s residents are retirees – many of whom were openly nostalgic for the lives they had growing up, when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union.

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A dog in Slovyansk in 2014 wears a face mask with a St. George's ribbon, a Russian nationalist symbol.Gleb Garanich/Reuters

Before 2014, much of Slovyansk got its news from Russian television channels – the city is just 150 kilometres from the border – and were thus worried about the Ukrainian nationalists they were told had seized power via the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv that had ousted Mr. Yanukovych, a native of Donbas.

Eight years later, the propaganda bubble that kept Slovyansk and much of Donbas under Moscow’s influence has been burst by the realities of war. Pro-Russian sentiment has faded as memories of the USSR have been replaced by fresher ones of destroyed cities.

“It’s one thing when you are promised to go back to the USSR and higher pensions and the life you had when you were young. It’s another thing when you see the destruction. These people have seen the destruction, but not the higher salaries,” Mr. Lyakh said.

Not everyone is convinced. “Ask him how many flags he keeps in his desk,” joked a local farmer when they heard The Globe was interviewing Mr. Lyakh.

The implication was clear: there’s a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag in front of Slovyansk City Hall today, but that doesn’t mean everyone inside the building would be bothered to see the white-blue-and-red Russian flag raised in its place.


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Slovyansk, 2014: A woman cries outside the mayor's office, where a Donetsk separatist flag hangs over a barricaded entrance.Gleb Garanich/Reuters

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Slovyansk, 2022: Residents fill plastic bottles with water at a well. The city has been without running water for weeks.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail


As the sound of artillery booms over the centre of her city, Olha Bytska says she’d leave Slovyansk, if she could afford life elsewhere.

Ms. Bytska actually did leave for a while, but says she had to return because she had no way of sustaining herself elsewhere in Ukraine. At least in Slovyansk, the 65-year-old has her home and her vegetable garden and her meagre pension.

“I left, but no one would give me a job anywhere and I need money to take care of my disabled son,” Ms. Bytska said as she stopped at a small market set up by local farmers, who continued to sell their vegetables and pies even as war inched closer to their city.

Staying is no easy decision. Much of Slovyansk has gone weeks without running water, or gas for heating and cooking. Mr. Lyakh says between 23,000 and 24,000 of the prewar population have chosen to remain. Those figures include some 4,000 children.

“If someone gives me the money to go, I’ll go,” said Galina, a 65-year-old who didn’t want to give her family name. She was waiting in a small lineup to fill four plastic jugs at a well that has become the only source of cooking and cleaning water for several surrounding apartment blocks in the battle-scarred north of the city. A pair of shirtless young boys took turns operating the metal hand pump for their neighbours.

“No one offers us help. We have no soap, no toothpaste, nothing. There are explosions all night and day, and they’re getting closer,” Galina continued as she waited for her water jugs to fill so that she could go home and have a shower.

“Look at us, we are children and old women here – and we can’t leave for material reasons. Whatever happens to us will happen.”


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Artem Belov was held captive by Donetsk separatists in 2014.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail

What surprised Artem Belov most about his time as a prisoner of the Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014 is that his captors weren’t Russians. They were locals. People he knew, and who knew him, from Slovyansk, where he lived and worked at the time as a gas-station attendant.

It was someone local who spotted him delivering food, water and medicine to the Ukrainian soldiers on the front line outside the city, and who reported him to the separatists.

Mr. Belov doesn’t know anything about the masked man who arrested him, after knocking four of his teeth out with the butt of his rifle. However, he says it was Donbas natives, speaking Russian with soft Ukrainian accents, who interrogated him beneath the same red-brick security services building where Mr. Yukov was held captive.

“They said ‘take this guy underground. He’s a spy,’ ” the 30-year-old Mr. Belov recalled this week. He was held for 24 hours underground in a 12-square-metre room, with 18 other people of whom he could only see the silhouettes in the windowless basement.

No one spoke, Mr. Belov said, out of paranoia that one of the other prisoners could be a spy. Mr. Belov was told he would be killed – he was shown the knife that his captors said would be used on him – before one of his tormentors recognized him from the gas station and decided he should be let go.

“They were local people. They would come to the police station, and the Russians would give them guns,” Mr. Belov said, adding that many of those who aided the separatist takeover had been Party of Regions members furious over the revolution that deposed Mr. Yanukovych.

But eight years later, Mr. Belov – now a member of Slovyansk’s police force – says the city is no longer ready to welcome the Russians. They have friends and relatives across the front line in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic who tell them about the repression and economic stagnation they’ve experienced under Moscow’s remote rule.

“After what happened over the past eight years, people have changed their minds. They understand how people live in the DPR and how they live in Ukraine. They like having their freedom of speech, and in the DPR, you don’t have this.”


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Slovyansk, 2014: Locals collect parts of a downed Ukrainian military helicopter on May 6, during the period of pro-Russian control in the city.Darko Vojinovic/The Associated Press

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Slovyansk, 2022: A man walks near a residential complex hit by a rocket attack. Slovyansk is expected to take even heavier assault as the Russian forces advance.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail


While Mr. Yukov and his Black Tulips body-collection team have been busy retrieving the bodies of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers left behind on the battlefields of Donbas, they haven’t yet seen a surge in the number of civilians who have died in and around Slovyansk.

Part of that is a lack of access – his team can only reach territory that’s under Ukrainian control – part of it is that the city, despite the near-constant rumble of artillery in the distance, isn’t yet Russia’s main target.

But it will be, if and when Lysychansk finally falls to the Russians. Though the Ukrainian forces have held out for a surprisingly long time in a region where the Russian army has a 10-to-one advantage in heavy weapons, the loss of Lysychansk now appears all but inevitable after the fall of Sieverodonetsk.

After that, Slovyansk and the nearby city of Kramatorsk are expected to face the full brunt of the Russian assault.

Defending Slovyansk may prove militarily difficult for the Ukrainians, too. But what’s clear is that this city will not passively welcome the Russians this time.

“The difference between 2014 and 2022 is that in 2014, the city was captured by 50 people when it had a garrison of 300. The authorities just surrendered the city,” Mr. Lyakh, the mayor, said. “Today is an absolutely different situation. There is not any discussion that Slovyansk will be surrendered.”

Outside the library that sits next to City Hall, 69-year-old Mykolai Grygorovich was tending to a small garden of roses that he has recently planted, optimistically hoping that peace will have come to Slovyansk by the time they bloom. Like many of his generation, Mr. Grygorovich admits to feeling nostalgic for the Soviet era – until the events of eight years ago.

“If Putin had come here in 2014, he could have easily taken this place over,” he said, raking at ground that he is unable to water because of the citywide shortage. “But not now. Putin has made the Ukrainian population cohesive. There’s no going back.”

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