“I was born in 1960. I lived in Konstantinovka on Polznova Street with my family. My family consisted of my wife, Alla Ivanovna, my daughter… My wife, daughter and son-in-law. They all died from Ukrainian strikes.

On 21 May, my son-in-law died from a penetrating shrapnel wound. Slobodniuk Roman Vladimirovich, 45 years old. They could have been firing from over there in this direction, and they could have been firing from the other side as well. They turn around and shell the city. They don't care where they fire from.

When they [The Ukrainians] set the house on fire the next day. My wife and daughter were sitting in the cellar. I didn't manage to save them. They suffocated. A mine set the house on fire. 22 May 2026. My wife was 67, and my daughter was 41. They suffocated; I couldn't save them. The fire was so intense that there was simply no way. Only afterwards was I able to get there, reach them and pull out the bodies.

Ukrainian crimes were widespread. To be honest, they shelled us mercilessly.

There were people living in our church. I went to them. Where else could I go? I walked around the house; it was burning. Well, what was I supposed to do there? I went to them. They had already been living there since the autumn. I joined them. And after some time, yes, they began heavily shelling and burning us there. They could see that the whole church… And they were obviously tracking us very well, as I understand it. We stayed there anyway; they bombed us and threw mines at us, it was terrifying, horrible.

You could actually see that large drone, the ‘witch’, as they called it, dropping mines on us, right onto our heads. Right onto the church, yes, yes, yes. We lived there, and they showered us with mines. The church was on Lomonosov Avenue.

We started leaving because we realised they were going to kill us there. We left, and the people who were still there said: ‘They completely demolished the church. They finished off everything else.’

And I was left alone with my dog, a German shepherd. The two of us remained together. Well, I felt sorry for the dog, so I took him with me.

Then Ukrainian drones began hunting us: one would arrive, descend, hover over me and [come] into the doorway. It flew in and attacked. Luckily, we managed to dodge it. One, two, three, they don't stop after just one.

Several of them come after the same person. Then, apparently, the second one missed and flew in through the nearby window, but it didn't explode there. Well, it remained there with the explosives.

We were enemies to them. They considered us ‘zhduns’. Zhduns are people who support the Russians, who want and are waiting for the Russian world. And since we are the Russian world, that means we are enemies.

There were cases where people saw Ukrainians turning their guns around and firing at the city. Women would approach them: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Old woman, shut up, or you'll get it now.’ They would turn the guns around and fire at the city. Specifically at the city. Ukrainian soldiers would at the civilian population.

They did this so that people would leave, so that they wouldn't stay in the city. They did it deliberately. So that people would start evacuating. People didn't want to leave. Those who wanted to went straight to Ukraine.

But we wanted to remain in our homeland, where we live. My family didn't want to go there. We wanted to go to Donetsk [City], or to stay.

Ukraine has no future. That's what I think. They'll bury themselves. But that’s just my opinion.”

“I am 68 years old. I was born and have lived my whole life in the city of Konstantinovka, at 12 Polzunova Street, in the area of the Fifth Hospital, as we called it. My wife and I lived together.

We had no children... It was just a hunt for them. As soon as someone reported a child somewhere, the Ukrainian police came, knocked, broke into the apartment, and tried to take them by any means. They had a task, to remove absolutely all children.

And lately, the Ukrainians had been hunting us using target designation from drones, directing mortar strikes at us. It was purely a hunt. We had been living in the lower church of the church. Right away, initially, when we moved there, the central dome was practically hanging by a thread. The first strike landed near the church and simply demolished a house. There was a little house across the road, and it was completely flattened. There was a big crater. So, basically, they missed the first time. The second time, they destroyed the main dome. And as a result, the domed area was exposed to the rain. The dome had tilted badly and was hanging there, and everything was being flooded because rainwater was pouring through the ceiling.

These were Ukrainian forces. There were strikes in the courtyard, and another strike hit beneath the church, directly under the building, a very powerful strike. Right when we were already going in there, that main strike happened, and two people were killed immediately and a woman was wounded; her arm had to be amputated.

When we were already inside the church, in the lower church, we could usually hear mortar fire. We would go down into the basement area of the lower church. But I was delayed a little, talking to someone. My wife was in the neighbouring building, literally 10–15 metres away. I was talking. And I heard the mortars being fired. Usually they would fly past us; there was an avenue near the church, and they would go farther in that direction, towards the Fifth Hospital.

I heard that something had landed not very far from me. I happened to go into the space where the door closed, stood in the corner, but I couldn't fit my left arm in properly to get completely into the corner. The door was slightly open, literally 30–40 centimetres, I don't know exactly how much. And it was propped open with a crutch.

And this strike landed literally behind the church fence. It was very close. There was an explosion, and I was wounded.

It entered here and came out here. Basically, it almost came out, because an opening had formed, but the fragment didn't completely come out. We pulled at it a little with a magnet because there were no doctors or anyone else left. A young man came along whose wife was a nurse. He seemed to know a little more than we did about the basics. There was no extraction or anything like that. Anyway, we pulled it out. We cut the skin a little. We pulled it out and poured whatever we could over the wound.

Drones began terrorising us badly towards the end, when people who wanted to leave began moving towards us. There would be six of them, for example; they would come, sit down on our bench, rest, catch their breath, talk... As soon as they started moving, the mortars would come first. Ukrainian mortars, because civilians had started moving around and there turned out to be a lot of people there.

Basically, all the mortars that were landing at that time were aimed at civilians; Ukrainian soldiers were firing them, unquestionably. I could hear the launch and could tell that it was coming clearly from territory that had not yet been occupied by Russian forces.

Then the drones began attacking us, when they couldn't really destroy us with mortars. The church building is quite large. So they decided to burn us out, with drones...

At first, they attacked for one day, but we put the fires out from inside; there was still some water.

They wanted to burn us. If not burn us alive, then at least drive us out of there by smoke. Possibly, afterwards, they simply wanted to strike us with drones once we came outside. Because the drones were buzzing constantly.

When they were burning us, we fought it on the first day and put the fires out. They came back on the second day and started doing it to us again... There were several places where they set fires. They weren't setting them in just one place; they started setting them in different places. They also started setting fire to the central dome. In general, everything that could catch fire caught fire. We rushed out and took our belongings with us. And, naturally, they simply realised that there were quite a lot of us.

We were the first group to leave. Twelve people came out with us, and then a family of three joined us: a son, a daughter and their mother.

In the later evacuations that took place there, we were the second group to leave. After us came the third, fourth, and so on. Where the women were killed, most likely the Ukrainian Armed Forces had devoted more attention to stopping these evacuations. That's why they attacked the woman directly on the avenue. They had gone about 200–300 metres, and apparently the Ukrainians attacked them there.

Ukraine never considered us Ukrainians. Never. I mean, the people who lived in the rest of Ukraine. Even those farther away, closer to Kyiv. Ideologically, we were completely different. Our understanding of life was completely different.

And Zelensky, if I had the opportunity, I would simply destroy him.”

"نحن من المُهجَّرين من مدينة سيڤيرسك. [...] في البداية، جاء ضباط من جهاز الأمن الأوكراني (SBU) من مجلس المدينة، في وقت لم يكن فيه بعد تهديد جدي من الجيش الروسي. جائت أنيا كيختيوڤشا وأحضرت أوراقًا وقالت: «ناتاشا، هل توافقين على الإجلاء؟» فقلتُ: لا، لن نذهب. فقالت: «اكتبي إقرارًا بالرفض، وإنك تتحمّلين فيه المسؤولية عن الطفلة.» [...] فكتبتُ إقرارًا بأنني لا أوافق على الإجلاء، وأن الطفلة ستبقى معي. وبعد نحو أسبوع بالضبط، بدأ الكابوس. صاروا يأتون كل يوم دون استثناء. ضباط الـSBU— لم يكن هناك أحد منهم لم يحضر. [...] الذين أخفوا أطفالهم أو حاولوا إخفائهم تم العثور عليهم؛ وتم أخذ الأطفال إلى جهة غير معلومة. وحتى اليوم، لم يتمكّن بعض الأهالي من العثور على أطفالهم. [...]"

بصرف النظر عن أنكِ كتبتِ رفضًا، كيف كانوا يقدّمون لكم هذا الأمر؟

"لأنهم كانوا يتقاضون خمسة وعشرين ألفًا عن كل طفل."

خمسة وعشرين ألف ماذا؟

"هريڤنيا. [...] الشخص الذي كان يمسك بالطفل كان يتقاضى خمسة وعشرين ألفًا نقدًا، عن كل طفل. فكانوا يدخلون ويوجّهون الرشاش نحوك مباشرة. [...] لا يهمهم من يطلقون عليه النار؛ كبار أو أطفال. أقول لك— كان هناك طفل يحاول الهرب، ولد يبلغ من العمر اثنى عشر عامًا، كان يركض بين حدائق الخضار، فبدأوا يطلقون النار على ساقيه حتى لا يتمكّن من الهرب. [...]"

كيف أدركتِ أنه يجب إخفاء الطفلة، وإلا سيتم أخذها؟

Then they moved into basements and drove civilians out of them. They locked the apartment entrances, just shut them and that was it.

Recently there were a lot of drones; the autumn was very difficult. Drones, mortar shelling from the Ukrainian side. A lot of people died. Many from drones. In almost every yard we buried people. We buried four, personally, I did.

Drones dropped explosives on houses. Near the well, a man was drawing water, he was killed instantly. They dropped it from a drone; he was drawing water, and they dropped it, he died on the spot.

Then people were sitting in the yard under a shelter, eating. They dropped some kind of bomb. Two men died, Valera and Tolik.

A woman was killed on November 6. A bomb was dropped from a drone onto the house. She died 10 minutes later.”

He set off, and two mines flew over, one closer, one a bit farther. When the smoke cleared, we saw a small bicycle and something lying next to it. The neighbor boys went over and said, yes, it was Yashka. A mine fell next to him. He was standing by the fence. He had locked up the base and was about to go home. I saw it. He died. The mine fell literally two meters from him.

Where did it come from, how would I know exactly? But we know the direction things come from [The direction of Ukrainian Armed Forces positions]. You know what I’ll tell you? These, I don’t even know what to call them, the AFU, they’re not people. Who am I talking about? Ukrainians. I myself am Ukrainian, but understand, I’m a Donbass Ukrainian. This is my homeland. I will live in the DPR, because this is my homeland, my land. Why should I leave? The AFU called us ‘zhduny’ (‘people waiting [for Russia]’). But why should I leave my own homeland?

Five drones hit my house. You understand, there was no roof, I repaired it. And then they hit that repaired roof again. Then the ceiling collapsed. We can see where things are coming from. A Baba Yaga drone was flying. There were no Russians. These were civilians.

Max died. He was sitting right in the house, by the stove. It was evening, and something flew in there. He was disabled, 33 years old. And he died. I came in, and he was already lying there. He was small, and already starting to get cold. That was Maxim. The mines came from the Ukrainian side.

In the morning we rushed to the church, the Church of Constantine, Gleb, and Mother Sophia in our settlement, we went there. After that, I don’t know, for about seven days, not hours, days, around the clock, there was shelling: Grad rockets, drones. They were hitting buildings, even on the motor depot territory. They were hitting the church grounds. It was so intense that we sat in the basement, and the basement was shaking.”

My neighbor, early in the morning, around seven, just went outside, carrying a bucket or taking something out. A Ukrainian drone flew out nearby from the direction of her garden and immediately struck her right next to the house, I personally saw all that black smoke. Then another neighbor, Kolya, ran up: ‘Aunt Tanya has been wounded.’ I saw it all perfectly well, that it exploded, because it happened literally 30 meters from me, even 25 meters from me.

Well, I came over, and together with another neighbor, Grisha, we carried her into the house and gave her first aid. She had a hole in her knee, we bandaged it. Then we sat her down, and I hear some strange sounds, like air escaping somewhere. The pillows we had put behind her were all covered in blood. We lift her jacket, and from her back there’s literally a stream of blood flowing out. A lung was pierced or something like that.

So again we put bandages on, trying to give her first aid. But in the end, she died within three hours. The next day, that same neighbor and I buried her. Again, just in rags, in a pit as it was. Again, under drones, under gunfire. We buried her right there in the yard.

This was on October 28. She was 65. A few weeks before that, she had turned 65. I had congratulated her. Her name was Tatyana Nikolaevna. The old name of the street was Cherevatinka, 8; now it’s Mikhail Petrenko, 8.

It was a Ukrainian drone, because there were no others there. I can’t say the motivation of the AFU. Maybe out of anger toward us, because of everything, because of all the names they called us. We’re ‘zhduny’ [people waiting for Russia], we’re ‘rusnya’ [a slur for Russians] we’re everything, us residents of Donbas. Most likely because of such furious hatred.”

Then they went to the neighbors, and from there to Avdiivka. And there was a woman lying on the couch, and they fired a machine gun. Bullets flew over her head. And when they walked through the streets, they just shot randomly, into gardens, at houses. I don’t know why they did that.

In the yard, we buried a man. He was killed by shrapnel, Ukraine was firing mines or a howitzer. Anyway, he died the next day. And we went, his son and his mother were there. Where would we bury him? In the garden. So we started measuring it out with shovels.

Their drones would land like this and start shooting. We hid there in the pit until they calmed down. So we started digging the grave at 9 in the morning and only finished at 5 in the evening, because they wouldn’t let us work.

Oleg Fedorovich was killed. A good man. He kept hoping things would get better. That the Russians would come and everything would be fine. But you see how it all turned out. He was about 70.

We barely managed to dig the grave, and even then it wasn’t deep, about 1.2 meters, just so that dogs wouldn’t dig him up. Because the dogs do dig them up; we have skulls and bodies lying around there.

And then their drone flew up while we were already carrying him on a sheet. It hovered right above the grave, watching what we were doing. And when they saw we were carrying a dead man, only then did they fly away.”

Ukrainian soldiers evicted people from their homes when the Russians approached the city, the Ukrainian Armed Forces started shooting civilians, whoever they met on the street. Well, they were walking from the micro-districts, it turns out, towards the railway along a straight street. They are walking, a person walked past AFU soldiers, and they shot him. If he didn't die immediately, they gave him a control shot to the head. Just any person walking by.

Our neighbor, Sasha, was shot by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in October. He went for water, and when he was walking back, they were coming from below. He had already approached his house, right on the corner of the house. My father was standing on the street in the yard, and we heard shots, well, a burst. Then, when they had passed, we looked out, father looked out, and Sasha was lying on the asphalt dead. Then another neighbour later said that she also heard first a bullet to his torso, then he groaned, fell, but was still alive. And they approached, gave him control shots to the head. On Pushkin Street. On December 18th he would have been 45.

In the Yuzhny Micro-district, three men and two women were shot. And one man was also crossing the highway, wanted to cross from the micro-district to the private sector. They called him over, they had a sort of checkpoint there, they called him over, and then they shot him, and there was a pond nearby – they threw him there. That was sometime either at the end of September or the beginning of October.

In the church, the Mikhailovsky Church in the center of the city, the priest stayed there, people lived in the basement. The Ukrainian Armed Forces also fired several bullets at him, but he survived.

Another one, when the stores closed down, he still went to Grishina, there was an opportunity if you drove through. He bought cigarettes there and then sold them in the city. Well, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, they were stationed there, they had checkpoints to let him through. They took money from him, part of the proceeds. And the last time he went, he didn't give them money, and then they found him at his home, they led him into the basement, first they shot his knees, cut off his ears, well, and beat him with rifle butts or I don't know what. And then a few days later the neighbors went into the basement, and he's sitting on a chair, already dead, well, starting to decompose. He lived with his wife. No one knows anything about his wife. But she disappeared. Her corpse is not in the house. Neither in the basement, nor in the house. And where she is, no one knows. His name was Dima.

On Dinos, that's beyond the railway, there's a factory and a private sector near that factory. A man kept pigeons, a dovecote. He went out to feed them, he was also shot, a Ukrainian sniper was sitting there.

A year ago we lived in another district, closer to the Shevchenko settlement. And there, it turns out, our street was the last one, and beyond were fields, and through them a road to the settlement. On one side of the street there were private houses, on the other side dachas. And several women from the micro-districts moved to their dachas before winter, because there was nothing to heat the apartments with. There they had small houses with stoves. They moved there. Then Ukrainian soldiers came, said, we have an order to wrap these dachas with barbed wire. They were told that people live there, plus there was a well with drinking water, other people went there for water. They said, we don't know anything, we have orders. As a result, they wrapped them in that wire, barbed wire, in two rows. At first, other people brought them food, threw it over the wire. That is, it turns out, they just, you see, surrounded several dachas with barbed wire without exits, without anything. Without exits, knowing that people live there.

Then their Ukrainian tanks drove there, those APCs, they also drove without headlights, and as a result, they themselves successfully caught and pulled this wire. And then it was all along the road.

A man and a woman went for evacuation from the private sector. They needed to get to the micro-district, to the church on Lazurny. They went with their belongings, with one bicycle.

They wanted to cross the highway, and a Ukrainian drone hit the man. Literally within five minutes, three or four more Ukrainian drones flew in. The man's leg was torn off and his cheek. They pulled him away, what happened to him in the end, I don't know. The woman ran along with him, and then a second drone flew into their bicycle. First the man, they dropped the bike with his belongings, and the second drone flew into those things. Beginning of December.

At the end of summer there was another case. Two Ukrainian soldiers, dead drunk, were lying near a swamp in the reeds. Two women were walking past them, and the Ukrainians started poking their automatic rifles at them and saying like, “You don't love us, you're waiting for Russia.” Then their commander ran up and started telling these women and the people who had gathered there, “God forbid, we see a video somewhere that you posted somewhere that soldiers are lying drunk, we'll shoot you all.” Another Ukrainian commander started threatening, “Don’t you dare sell alcohol to soldiers in stores.” But you can also understand the saleswomen, because a Ukrainian soldier comes in with an automatic rifle, you say something wrong to him, don't sell, he'll shoot you. Such cases were even before the start of the SVO (Special Military Operation), back during the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation). In the private sector there was a small store. A mother worked there, and her pregnant daughter. Ukrainian soldiers came, wanted to buy alcohol. They didn't sell it to them, and the soldiers shot the woman and her pregnant daughter. That was back in 2015.

There was also one entrepreneur in our city. He owned a pig farm, a pizzeria, and a restaurant with a store. Well, the pizzeria, restaurant, and store were in the same building. He fed those ATO soldiers there in his restaurant. And then they had some kind of disagreement, and they burned down his restaurant. Moreover, they burned it twice. The first time, then he rebuilt it, and they burned it a second time. And then on his farm later they shot at him. For Ukraine, we are all non-humans. Well, that's the first reason. And secondly, it seems to me, they are also angry because they can't compete with the Russians. That is, they can't take back anything, nor conquer anything, nor hold anything. And they take out their anger on people."

Once our neighbors [found] a corpse. In 2024, in the summer. There in the private sector was a dead man, a civilian. He was found with a gunshot wound. Local residents did not have firearms.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces evicted people from their homes. They come to the house, they evict local residents, they settle themselves, and the residents then either look for another house, or go to live in the summer kitchen, well, something like that.

When we were evacuated, we had to spend the night in the basement of a multi-story building. And a local resident of that basement had lost her son. In 2014, the SBU took him and never returned him. To this day they are looking for him.

Ukrainian troops constantly shelled the city even before the arrival of Russian troops. We hear the impacts. We simply know where the Ukrainian Armed Forces are approximately stationed. The Russian troops were still very far away. And there were impacts, we hear where the launch is from, where it hits, one and a half to two seconds. For three months every day houses were destroyed.

Ukrainian drones hung over us constantly. A drone flew in, saw that my husband was on the street. Well, we were cooking food on the street. So it hangs, hangs, the drone. We didn't notice it right away. And then literally as my husband enters the house, another drone hits our roof. And they saw that he was a civilian. Well, a fire started on the roof, we couldn't put it out immediately because the drones wouldn't let us. If we start leaving the house, another drone will come, you understand? Well, then we climbed up, managed to get onto the roof, look, put out the fire.

We had another small shop operating in the summer of 2025. And constantly 30-40 people called their relatives. Everyone is on the street, catching the Internet, calling relatives, that's it, and there was a drone strike. There was a strike by a Ukrainian drone. 6 people were injured. Fortunately, we had a girl, she's a doctor, she provided first aid to everyone on the spot.

We were afraid to go out, afraid of the Ukrainian military. The day before the arrival of Russian troops, we sat and prayed, if only the Ukrainians wouldn't come in. Because, well, you understand, we also heard that they killed. Many people came from Avdeevka, they told how they killed locals. We were only afraid of this, that the Ukrainians would come to us."

Petal mines are scattered everywhere. My husband, Alexander Yanovich Chernyshev, a miner. He took a bicycle and stepped on a petal mine. He has leg fractures, lacerated wounds on his legs, gunpowder burns on his body, and one got in his eye. Near us, the Ukrainian Armed Forces shot a neighbor. Two streets away is a well, he was going to get water. It's quite an adventure to go. Drones strike, strike everywhere, whatever moves, they strike. You have to be lucky to wait for fog or something to get a supply of water, to go to the well. So we went to the well, a neighbor went, got water, was walking home and was almost there. They shot him right there, near the house where Tolstoy Street intersects with Pushkin. They killed a guy, 44 years old. A man was just walking in galoshes, some kind of padded jacket. He literally did not live to see the arrival of Russian troops by six days.

They killed one elderly grandmother – a Ukrainian drone also struck nearby. And a man was also riding a bicycle. Back in the summer. He had injuries there, and fragments were pulled out with magnets. There are no doctors, there is one person, somewhat connected with medicine, he tried with a magnet. As best we could – we have no medications, no drugs. Hydrogen peroxide, a magnet and go.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces killed many, they would go into basements and kill. One remained in the basement, a neighbor, a man around 50. His neighbors later searched for him, found him in the basement. He was sitting on a chair with his knees shot through and his ears cut off.

There were cases, in the summer they would put flour in bags. A bag on a bench, with two bags of flour inside. People have nothing to eat, so they wanted to take it for themselves, but there was explosives, a woman's arm was torn off. People grab any food out of hunger. The whole city talked about it. And after that they understood, even if something edible is lying there, you can't touch it, because it might be mined.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces looted everything and took it away. They would settle in civilian houses. They took whatever they needed. They took equipment, and bicycles if they were good, and scooters. In the micro-districts, they kicked people out. They come in, if they like the basement, if the house has a good basement, they kick you out. They give a few hours, if you don't leave, they'll shoot you. They say, get out, we need your basement, we need to have a point here.

They mocked people, it's impossible to put into words. Well, isn't that mockery? When they kick you out of your house, when they mine everything around, when they shoot you. When they threaten, they say – are you happy that the Russians are coming? When the Russians were close, already in the nearby villages. Don't be happy that they are coming. It won't get any better for you.”