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Agence France-Presse

“It barely exists any more,” 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 5km (three miles) from the Russian border, drone footage from the Ukrainian military this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for kilometres.
And it has got worse since.
“Ninety per cent of the centre is flattened,” said mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, 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 destroyed, with 18 per cent 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 levelled north of the Vovcha River.
Agence France-Presse 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 said.
“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.


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 100km to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.
“We spotted two Russian armoured troop carriers that had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who was leading the unit.
They were the advance guard of one of the most intense Russian offensives since the beginning of the war, with Moscow throwing several thousand soldiers at the city.
“There were no fortifications, no mines” to slow down their advance, Yaroslavsky said, still furious at the “negligence or corruption” that allowed this to happen.

Some “17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because someone didn’t build fortifications,” fumed the 42-year-old officer.
“We control the city today, but what we control is a pile of rubble,” he added bitterly.
President Volodymyr Zelensky cancelled an overseas trip to rush to Kharkiv, admitting that the Russian army had pushed between five and 10 kilometres into Ukraine.
The people of Vovchansk, meanwhile, were living a nightmare.
“The Russians started bombing,” said Galyna Zharova, who lived at 16A Stepova Street – an apartment building now reduced to ruins, as images analysed by Bellingcat and Agence France-Presse confirmed.
“We were right on the front line. No one could come and get us out,” added the 50-year-old, who now lives with her family in a university dormitory in Kharkiv.

“We went down to the cellar. All the buildings were burning. We were crammed into basements (for nearly four weeks) until June 3,” her husband Viktor, 65, added.
Eventually, the couple decided to flee on foot. “Drones were flying around us like wasps, like mosquitoes,” Galyna remembered. They walked for several kilometres before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.
“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything,” sighed librarian Stryzhakova. “No one could have imagined that in just five days, we would be wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The Russian defence ministry did not respond to questions asking for its account of what happened in the city.
Mayor Gambarashvili, who was hit in the leg by shrapnel as he oversaw the city’s evacuation, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.
Dozens, no doubt. Perhaps more.
Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70, is among the missing. On May 16, he decided to flee the bombardment in a car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raisa, and a neighbour. Zymovsky and his mother were both shot dead, “most likely by a Russian sniper”, Raisa said.
Amid the hail of bullets, the 59-year-old paediatric nurse had barely got out of the car when she was grabbed by Russian soldiers and held for two days. She managed to escape, hid in a neighbour’s cellar for a night, and eventually fled through the forest.
She recounted her harrowing odyssey in a calm, measured voice. One thing alone seems to matter to her now: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a proper burial.
A rumour has circulated among survivors that the bodies that littered the streets of Vovchansk for days were thrown into a mass grave. Where and by whom, no one knows.


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The ruins of the Ukrainian town of Vovchansk, in the Kharkiv region, in September. Photo: Armed Forces of Ukraine via AFP

 Vovchansk Mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili. Photo: AFP

The ruins of the Ukrainian town of Vovchansk in September. Photo: Armed Forces of Ukraine via AFP

A police officer runs in front on burning house in Vovchansk, Ukraine, in May. File photo: AP

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Russian soldiers patrol a village in the Russian-Ukrainian border area in   the Kursk region, Russia. Photo: Russian Defence Ministry Press Service via AP

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Photo: Reuters

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Russia’s relentless assault on Vovchansk has dwarfed that of Bakhmut, observers say


Russia’s relentless assault on Vovchansk has dwarfed that of Bakhmut, observers say.


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