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“It barely exists anymore,” said the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial town razed by a Russian onslaught shocking even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.
Vovchansk has no great history but its geography could not be more tragic. Just five kilometers (three miles) from the Russian border, drone footage from the Ukrainian military this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.
And it has got worse since.
“Ninety percent of the centre is flattened,” said mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, a towering man in uniform, who runs what is left of Vovchansk from the regional capital of Kharkiv, an hour and a half’s drive away.
“The enemy continues its massive shelling,” he added.
Six out of 10 of Vovchansk’s buildings have been totally destroyed, with 18 percent partially ruined, according to analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat. But the destruction is much worse in the city centre, which has been leveled north of the Vovcha River.
AFP and Bellingcat joined forces to tell how, building by building, an entire city was wiped off the map in just a few weeks — and to show the human toll it has taken.
The sheer pace of the destruction dwarfed that of even Bakhmut, the “meatgrinder” Donbas region city where some of the most brutal killing of the war has been done, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP.
“I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles unfolded there,” Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky insisted.
“What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk.”
Vovchansk had a population of about 20,000 before the war. It now lives only in the memories of the survivors who managed to flee.
Beyond its factories, the city had a “medical school, a technical college, seven schools and numerous kindergartens,” Nelia Stryzhakova, the head of its library, told AFP in Kharkiv.
It even had a workshop that made “carriages for period films. We were even interesting, in our own way,” insisted Stryzhakova, 61.
Add to that a regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with nearly 10 million euros ($10.8 million) of German aid, a church packed for religious feasts, and a vast hydraulic machinery plant. Once the town’s economic lifeblood, its ruins are now being fought over by both armies.
Vovchansk was quickly occupied by the Russian army after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but was then retaken by Kyiv in a lightning counter attack that autumn.
Despite enduring regular Russian bombardment, it was relatively calm. Then something very different happened on May 10.
Exhausted after weeks of hard fighting 100 kilometers to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.
