Standing in front of the shattered apartment block where her parents and grandmother were killed by a Russian air strike, what infuriates Alona Yakovenko more than a year later is that some people in her city still believe life was better under Russian occupation.
The anger boils over as she stares up at what was once her bedroom in the family’s third-floor apartment – until it was cut in half by the March 9, 2022, attack. The white desk with yellow-and-blue drawers that she studied at as a high-school student dangles, somehow intact, over the crater of the building on Pervomaisky Street, where Ms. Yakovenko lived for the first 17 years of her life.
“I don’t know how people who live in Izyum, after seeing all this, still dream of living in the Russian World,” the 21-year-old said, referring to a Kremlin-created concept of a confederation of Russian-speaking peoples. “This is the price of some people’s desire to be part of Russia. This is the face of the Russian World. People died here screaming under the debris.”
Alona Yakovenko lost three family members – her parents and grandmother – when a Russian airstrike destroyed the apartment block where the family resided. Among the rubble of the home she grew up in, Yakovenko finds some of her belongings scattered about.
September will mark the anniversary of the liberation of Izyum and much of the surrounding Kharkiv region after six months of harsh Russian occupation. The city, which had 46,000 residents before the war, became infamous last fall after a freshly dug cemetery containing 445 graves was discovered in a forest on the outskirts of town. Ms. Yakovenko’s parents and grandmother were buried under wooden crosses numbered 164, 174 and 199.
The trauma of that time has been amplified by lingering suspicions over who did what while the Russians were in Izyum, creating a gulf of anger and misunderstanding between those who remained during the occupation and those who fled, returning only when the Ukrainian army liberated the city.
“There’s huge mistrust. People who remained call those who left ‘betrayers,’ and those who left call those who remained ‘collaborators,’” said Kostiantyn Grygorenko, the chief editor of the Izyum Horizons weekly newspaper. “Even for me, it’s hard to talk to those who stayed through the occupation,” said Mr. Grygorenko, who fled to western Ukraine one day before the Russians arrived after being told he was on a list of people the Russians wanted to interrogate.
The divide in Izyum points to larger troubles ahead if the Ukrainian army achieves its goal of liberating Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The millions of people who live in those regions have been under complete or partial Russian occupation for the past nine years – inhaling Kremlin propaganda that portrays the government in Kyiv as “fascist” and bent on eradicating Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority.
Many of Izyum’s postliberation tensions, Mr. Grygorenko said, were caused by the “infection” of living in the Russian propaganda bubble for six months. Should Ukraine succeed in liberating the rest of its territory, reintegration could prove more challenging than rebuilding.
Izyum Horizons newspaper back in business after being shut down during Russian occupation
Kostiantyn Grygorenko, editor-in-chief of the Izyum Horizons weekly newspaper. He says the post-liberation tensions in Izyum were caused by the Russian propaganda bubble that encircled the city for six months.
Pro-Russian Ukrainians are not just a fringe minority in Izyum and the surrounding area, which like the other formerly occupied regions was largely Russian-speaking before the war and had an economy reliant on cross-border trade. Twenty-one-year-old Serhiy Dumindiak, a city hall employee, said he believed a majority of Izyum residents, especially older people, still hold views that he described as a mix of pro-Russian sentiment and nostalgia for a time when both Ukraine and Russia were republics of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Dumindiak, who lived in Izyum for the first month of the occupation before fleeing with his parents, said the Russians told residents it was the Ukrainian army that had hit apartment blocks such as the building on Pervomaisky Street. “There was a lot of propaganda. They were telling people it was the Ukrainians who did this, the fascists,” he said. “I didn’t believe it, but a lot of people did.”
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Complicating matters is the fact that both armies have taken turns firing at civilian areas of Izyum. An investigation by New York-based Human Rights Watch found that the attack on the Pervomaisky apartment block was likely carried out by a fixed-wing aircraft at a time when Russia had complete control of the skies over the city. However, the same organization also said, in a separate report, that Ukrainian forces had repeatedly fired cluster munitions into Izyum while it was under Russian occupation, scattering tiny “butterfly” mines around the city. (The Biden administration recently agreed to ship such munitions to the Ukrainian military, but both Russian and Ukrainian forces already use the weapons, which have been banned by Canada and more than 100 other countries.)
Cluster munitions continue to claim victims 10 months after the fighting stopped here. Anatoly Kovalenko, the chief surgeon at the Central City Hospital, said an average of three people a week – usually local residents looking for mushrooms or firewood in parts of the city and the surrounding region that have not yet been demined – are brought to the hospital after suffering injuries caused by butterfly mines. Local police continue to advise residents not to walk on the grass, even on their own properties.
When The Globe and Mail first arrived in Izyum last September, just days after it was liberated, an elderly resident pointed around the destroyed city centre and said most of the damage had been done by Ukrainian fire.
People with pro-Russian views are keeping silent now that the city is back under Ukrainian control and the security services are hunting for collaborators.
Colonel Dmytro Hrinchak, the head of the local police department, said his office had officially notified more than 80 residents that they were officially suspected of collaborating with the enemy, with another 100-plus cases still under investigation. Those numbers do not include more serious matters, which are handled by the national SBU security service, nor “more than a dozen” cases of Izyum police officers who continued doing their jobs, and received salaries from Russia, while the city was under occupation.
The most common cases of alleged collaboration involve people who worked for the occupation administration, though exceptions were made for people such as doctors, nurses and firefighters, who performed life-saving functions. But anyone who paid taxes to the occupation authorities or exported goods from Ukraine to Russia, as several farmers have been accused of doing, was breaking Ukrainian law.
Colonel Dmytro Hrinchak, head of the local police department, said his office is investigating over 100 cases of suspected collaboration with the enemy.
Col. Hrinchak said he had no sympathy for those who say they were simply trying to survive a difficult situation as best they could. “My job is to show that this is Ukraine, and will be Ukraine, and if someone wants to support another country, they can pack up their things and go live there,” he said.
Some residents who remained in the city during the occupation say they feel misunderstood by those who fled and have now returned. On Kakhovska Street, a group of elderly women who spent much of the occupation hiding in the neighbourhood bomb shelter bristle at the suggestion that they remained because they harboured pro-Russian sympathies.
“We had nowhere to go. I have five dogs and five cats – how could I leave them? Where would I go? My car was destroyed, there was no public transportation, no centralized evacuation,” said Lyubov Vasileva, a 70-year-old retired bank teller whose red brick home bears the scars of a cluster bomb that landed in her yard, scattering 17 smaller bomblets, only two of which exploded.
Ms. Vasileva said she and the others who stayed accepted Russian deliveries of humanitarian aid, as well as a single payment of 10,000 rubles (about $150) meant to help compensate for pensions that had gone unpaid since the start of the war. “We were only taking this money because we need to buy bread,” she said. But those who returned to Izyum after the occupation “don’t believe us. … Or if they believe us, they don’t show compassion to us.”
Dr. Kovalenko, who left the city with his patients at the start of the occupation but crossed the front line a month later to get back to Izyum and help keep the hospital running, said Ukrainian forces locked the city down for a week after it was liberated. People registered as living in Izyum were prohibited from leaving the city while the security services hunted for collaborators.
Dr. Kovalenko said he treated wounded Russians on several occasions and was questioned by SBU officers about his decision to return. The officers also checked his phone, he said, but eventually accepted the answers he gave them. “We can’t refuse to treat people. A doctor is a doctor,” he said.
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The Central City Hospital is, like most of the city, still partially destroyed, having sustained a direct hit to its operating theatre during the initial Russian assault. It was also damaged by Ukrainian fire while the city was occupied. “One of the biggest concentrations of Russian soldiers was near the hospital,” Dr. Kovalenko said. “There was incoming fire the whole time.”
Ten months later, the city is still half-empty and eerily quiet. While the Kyiv region, which was partially occupied by Russian forces for a month at the start of the war, buzzes with reconstruction, Izyum is still too close to the front line – with Russian forces positioned just 50 kilometres east of the city and mounting a new push toward the nearby transportation hub of Kupyansk – for major rebuilding work to begin.
Apartment blocks and factories still lie in ruins, and even buildings that are still largely intact bear scars of small or heavy weapons fire. The main bridge that connects the two halves of Izyum across the Siverskyi Donets River is a crumpled mess of concrete. A smaller wooden span erected to take its place is one of the few evident repairs.
Izyum residents observe the crumpled mess of concrete that was once the main bridge connecting the two halves of Izyum across the Siverskyi Donets River. The bridge is yet another casualty of the Russian attack on the city.
Many apartment blocks and factories in Izyum still lie in ruins, and even buildings that are still largely intact bear scars of small or heavy weapons fire.
Shops and government buildings on the city’s main square – where a statue of Vladimir Lenin stood until 2016 – remain scorched husks. The only notable change are the loudspeakers mounted on utility poles around the square. They carried Russian propaganda during the occupation but now broadcast Ukrainian language news and music across the empty plaza.
Those who listened to the Russian version of events are now ignoring the Ukrainian broadcasts, and vice versa. Meanwhile, collaborators are believed to linger quietly among the city’s population.
In late May, buildings around Izyum were struck by explosive drones. The Ukrainian government said in the aftermath that “industrial enterprises, civil infrastructure and a school” had been destroyed in the Russian attack. But several locals told The Globe that the buildings had housed security personnel and equipment – all of which had been moved to those locations after the occupation. Only someone living in Izyum could have given the Russians the new co-ordinates, the locals said.
“There were people who lived through the occupation and who were happy to see the Russians. They’re still here now,” said Tanya Vasileva, a designer who works for the Izyum Horizons newspaper and remained in the city throughout the occupation. “They are our neighbours. We say hello to them. But we know. Everyone knows.”
In the rubble of a five-storey apartment building is a makeshift memorial to those killed by the Russian airstrike during the battle for the city of Izyum.