Bakhmut, Before It Vanished

“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.

Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at a graveside. The name of my home city suffices for this.

I carry my town inside me and mark it on Google Maps with a heart and the word home. Russia has physically erased it from the face of the Earth and made its name a byword for destruction, for street battles of a ferocity hardly seen since World War II.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Sometimes, I stare for hours at new photos of ruins published in local chat groups. I’m looking for the city I remember: I’ve walked this street hundreds of times on my way to school; my classmate lived in that building; my dentist worked in the neighboring one, where I had an appointment on February 24, 2022, that I never made. When I identify the neighborhood, I feel relief: I haven’t forgotten everything. My town is imprinted in me.

In peacetime, I gave tours of Bakhmut when friends visited from other cities. But I’ve never tried to do this virtually, to walk someone through a city that effectively no longer exists. Few buildings survive here, only ashes, and tons of broken concrete that people once considered their homes. No life remains, or almost none: Visible in drone footage are chestnut, apricot, and cherry trees that miraculously withstood the Russian onslaught, although Bakhmut itself did not.

Let me take you to my Bakhmut.

Bakhmut is small, roughly 40 square kilometers, and just a little more than an hour by bicycle from end to end. In the summer, the steppe gets hot, no matter the time of day. But by October, the leaves have turned and fallen in the light wind.

Stupkey, to the city’s north, sits on massive salt deposits that made Bakhmut a mining town for hundreds of years. Once, I came here with Mark van den Meizenberg, the scion of a Dutch family that established a salt mine called “Peter the Great” 140 years ago. We walked through tall grass until we came to a ravine and a salt lake, near the site of the old mine. Mark’s family lived here until the beginning of the First World War and the revolution, burying their dead in the local Dutch cemetery.

The Bolsheviks put an end to “Peter the Great,” and salt extraction soon moved to richer deposits in Soledar, just 10 kilometers away. I’ve ventured into those industrial salt mines about a dozen times, always finding new marvels: a subterranean church; intricate salt sculptures; galleries with ceilings soaring up to 30 meters, where symphony orchestras have played; a grand tree festooned with garlands; a therapeutic sanatorium; even a football pitch. I brought my friends to see these things—and to feel beneath our feet a seabed from 250 million years ago, whose salts have seasoned the meals of every Ukrainian household.

Once I went with a group that included a local artist, Masha Vyshedska, who brought her ukulele. We nestled into a secluded corner of an expansive gallery, under the soft glow of the lights we’d carried. Masha strummed, and I captured the moment on video. The salt walls reflected her towering shadow and returned echoes of her ukulele as the sound traveled through the underground caverns. So engrossed were we in the moment that we lost track of our group and nearly found ourselves stranded in the mine overnight. Now that enchanted space has slipped behind the front line, inaccessible.

Starting in April 2014, when Russia made its earlier play for eastern Ukraine, militants stormed a military base near Tsvetmet, an industrial area just south of Stupkey, five times, hoping to capture the 280 Ukrainian tanks there. The Russian-backed militants brought guns, grenade launchers, and tanks. Local activists smuggled supplies and essentials over the fence to the Ukrainian soldiers. The militants occupied parts of Bakhmut that spring, but by July, our special forces had repelled them.

I lived near the base at the time. Tsvetmet is mostly factories and private houses, but not long before the war, a much-loved recreational area had sprung up here, called the Alley of Roses for the hundreds of different-colored rose varieties that bloomed from spring to late fall. The park bordered on a lake where we picnicked and fed the ducks and swans.

I remember sitting in the hallway of my apartment building, listening to the rumble of tanks on the asphalt under my window and waiting for the sound of automatic fire to subside. My husband and I were expecting a child. When the streets quieted, I ventured out, just to make sure that the Ukrainian flag still flew over the base. It did, though the base lay in ruins, and when the sun rose, we took our cameras and set out to report. A Ukrainian soldier defending the post saw my look of despair and embraced me, assuring me that, thank God, everyone was alive and everything would be okay.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

My son, Tymofiy, was born in February 2015. The very next day, we felt the vibrations of Russian shells exploding on the outskirts of Bakhmut. A nurse told me to take the baby to the maternity hospital’s basement: “They’re going to shell again,” she said. There we huddled, seven frightened mothers and their infants, as well as silent men and staff members. A girl who had just given birth a few hours earlier was brought down on a stretcher. I started to panic, calling relatives and friends to say that we were being evacuated. I imagined fleeing with my son in my arms. But the rumor of renewed shelling was false, and soon we returned to our rooms.

Being afraid eventually becomes tiring. You start to respond skeptically to warnings of possible shelling, but the tension doesn’t dissipate, even when weeks go by without the sound of cannons and without new rumors that feed on your fear. The Ukrainian flag flying over the tank base always comforted me.  

Yan Dobronosov / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

When Tymofiy was small, we would take him to the local supermarket for ice cream before riding our bikes to the promenade along the Bakhmutka River. The park was another new one: Before the riverbed was cleaned and its banks strengthened, this place was neglected, overgrown with reeds. Now local fishermen climbed over the fence and sat by the water waiting for a catch, and children gathered on playgrounds with swings and basketball courts. Adults hid in the shade of young trees and took photos with green sculptures of dinosaurs, elephants, and bears.

The Bakhmutka gave its name to our city. Around it, in the wild fields, a fortification against Tatar raids from Crimea appeared first, and later, the Cossack saltworks. The fortress of Bakhmut shows up on maps starting in 1701. It sat behind a wooden wall, with straight streets leading to gates, a church, houses, and the saltworks.

In our local museum, a model of the fortress had pride of place. I liked to look at it as a child: The houses were made of matches, and you could see the river that divided the fortress in half. After 500 years, speeches and songs in Ukrainian once again refer to Bakhmut as a fortress—a place whose function is to stop the enemy and to protect.

Bakhmut’s central square has the usual things: a town hall, a fountain, shops and restaurants. But I can’t help lingering on the empty pedestals—granite podiums of history on which no one stands.

One plinth used to hold a statue of Lenin, typical for any Ukrainian city: tall, gray, ugly, constantly soiled by pigeons that left their white traces. Under that statue in 2014, a crowd gathered with Russian flags, agitating against the Revolution of Dignity that had just driven Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-backed government from Kyiv.

I was an editor for a local website at the time, and I brought my camera to the square. I saw buses parked nearby with Russian plates; they had carried demonstrators over the border. But many in the crowd were also locals, and their presence pained me. One protester told me I was forbidden to film, but I kept on. Little did my colleagues and I know that our fellow journalists in an occupied city nearby would be abducted and held hostage for doing the same.

Just 100 meters away from Lenin, on another granite pedestal, stood Artem, a Bolshevik revolutionary who did nothing especially beneficial for Bakhmut, yet for some reason, the town bore his name during the Soviet era. Only in 2016 did Artemivsk become Bakhmut again. That year, cranes lifted the stone replicas of Artem and Lenin and transported them to an industrial zone for storage. But the residents of our town couldn’t agree on who or what should replace them, so the spots remained vacant.

Tymofiy, 4 years old, posed on Artem’s pedestal for a photo in 2019. I compared him to the project “Inhabiting Shadows,” by the artist Cynthia Gutierrez: She installed stairs that allowed anyone to climb the pedestal of a toppled Lenin in Kyiv. There, one could experience the flux of historical symbols, from ascension to decline, and then oblivion.

On summer evenings, my family liked to gather for dinner on my parents’ veranda, at their house not far from the city center. My parents had come to Ukraine as refugees from Armenia in 1989, fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh war to start anew in Donbas. In the 1990s, the four of us lived in a single room, my parents working tirelessly to raise my sister and me. Thirty years on, they envisioned spending their twilight years in the modest house with the veranda. Their grandson came to see them there and played in the yard, under a large cherry tree.

That house and its veranda are gone. Missile strikes first obliterated the roof, then the courtyard. We learned this from satellite images. Our family had taken nothing from the house except documents. Everything my parents had built was destroyed.

South of the city, past the landfill where the city failed to build its waste-recycling plant, are the gypsum mines that, along with salt, made Bakhmut attractive to industrialists. Mikhail Kulishov, a local historian, used to give tours here even for children, taking care to hand out yellow helmets in case the rock crumbled.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending values Americans claim to hold]

The gypsum galleries are alive with bats, which are a protected species in Ukraine. Parts are flooded and attract extreme cave divers. The story of the mines begins at the end of the 19th century, when a German engineer named Edmund Farke contracted with the government of Bakhmut to extract gypsum for alabaster factories. His gypsum works created an extensive cave system, part of which was later used to mature the local sparkling wine. Tourists would go there for tastings.

But for me, the gypsum caves were more of a place for mourning. During World War II, the Nazis used the mines to wall up 3,000 Bakhmut Jews alive. People gathered there yearly to remember the victims. During the Russian occupation of Bakhmut in 2023, the Wagner Group set up its headquarters in the tunnels of the winery.

On the southern edge of Bakhmut, in the year 2023, you'll see nothing but the ruins of my city, the skeletal remains of its burned-out buildings and bombarded streets. There are no longer any people here. For my part, I began our tour with insomnia, nights in Kyiv punctured by air-raid sirens announcing Russian drone and missile attacks. My work for the Ukrainian press brought me to Sloviansk, just 20 kilometers away from Bakhmut, but I could get no closer: Artillery was (and is) still booming there.

Mostly, I offered you this tour from a fortress on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I came here with Tymofiy, now 8 years old, for a retreat so that we could get some sleep—yes, Ukrainians travel now for sleep. The place is ideal, I think, because it is as far away from Russia as you can get in Europe. I climbed the walls of this ancient Portuguese fortress and raised my Ukrainian flag, with the name of my hometown, Bakhmut, written on it.

We are returning to Ukraine, my son and I. Our Bakhmut no longer exists, but one way or another, we’re still there.