Thousands were forced to flee their homes as Putin’s forced unleashed a brutal assault on their city. Now it lies as a ghost town ion the Russian border.
A Ukrainian border city was left desolate after it was flattened by Russian forces with 17,000 souls fleeing more than half of their homes being floored by Vladimir Putin’s war.
Vovchansk was an administrative centre in the north-east of the region, divided by the Vovcha River, just five kilometres from the Russian border. In 2022, Vovchansk had 17,000 inhabitants. However, by 2024 AFP and Bellingcat reported that 60 percent of buildings in Vovchansk were destroyed, with damage to a further 18 percent. This left just 22 percent of the city in tact as of late September 2024.
Caught in the trail of destruction were Kindergartens, schools, religious sites, factories and libraries. A ghost town exists in their place. Residents now live as refugees in nearby Kharkiv, and describe desperately fleeing the town under heavy bombardment.
The director of the local library, Nelia Stryzhakova lost all 12,500 of the books she carefully looked after for the city. She told Bellingcat: “I don’t have enough fingers to count what was there.
“There was a technical school, a medical school, seven schools, many kindergartens. How many factories did we have? An oil extraction factory, a butter factory, a furniture factory, a carriage factory, of which there were only two in Ukraine.”
“I took my documents from work and a couple of personal items,” Stryzhakova said. “That’s all I have. Objects are not the most important.”
The city centre suffered the worst with 90 per cent of infrastructure reduced to its skeleton according to the city’s mayor.
In Vovchansk, control of the town has fluctuated between Ukrainian and Russian forces. After Russian troops rolled in at the start of the country’s full invasion in February 2022, Ukraine forced a retreat with an autumn counter-offensive.
Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky of Ukraine’s 57th Brigade Reconnaissance Unit fought in both Bakhmut and Vovchansk. “The pace of destruction was so fast. What happened in Bakhmut in two or three months happened in Vovchansk in two or three weeks. Perhaps it was due to the proximity of the border, or the increase in the number of guided aerial bombs and the intensification of heavy fire,” he said.
“Currently, Vovchansk is destroyed. Yes, it is under control. Yes, we have taken out the enemy and are trying to take physical control of these ruins. But the city does not exist. Seventeen-thousand people lost their homes, and why? Because someone did not build fortifications,” he said, blaming “negligence or corruption”.
Many have remained in the city as refugees since the beginning of the summer when the most intense fighting began. Several citizens described the trauma of the constant barrage of artillery and of watching their neighbours die.
Galyna Zharova, a 50-year-old described living in the north of the city. “We were right on the front line, you understand? No one could get us out of there,” Zharova said.
“All the buildings burned down and we were crammed into cellars,” her husband, Victor, 65, continued. The couple eventually fled the city in June 2024. “The drones were flying (around us) like wasps, like mosquitoes,” Galyna Zharova added.