Irina Hrushkovska’s grocery store is now just a hole in the ground, her house is the seventh pile of rubble from the corner, and like the rest of the city of Marinka where she grew up, the whole neighborhood is an eerie grid of empty space.
“When I close my eyes, I remember everything about my old life,” says Hruszkowska, 34. “I can see the front door, I can walk through it, I can go into the beautiful kitchen and look into the cupboards.”
“But when you open your eyes, it’s all gone,” she says.
Few countries since World War II have seen the devastation Ukraine has suffered from more than two years of all-out war, but the damage is so vast that no one can do more than glimpse it. Every battle, every bombing, every missile strike, every burned home has left its mark on multiple fronts.
Using years of detailed analysis of satellite data, The New York Times was able to establish a record of every town, street and building that was attacked, providing the first comprehensive picture of the locations and destruction wrought in the Ukrainian war.
The scale is hard to comprehend. More buildings were destroyed in Ukraine than the number of Manhattan skyscrapers destroyed four times. Hundreds of miles away, parts of Ukraine look like Dresden or London after World War II, or the Gaza Strip after six months of bombing.
To come up with these estimates, The New York Times teamed up with two prominent remote-sensing scientists, Corey Scheer of the City University of New York Graduate School and Jamon van den Hoek of Oregon State University, to analyze data from radar satellites that can detect small changes in the built environment.
The analysis found that more than 900 schools, hospitals, churches and other facilities were damaged or destroyed, even though these facilities are explicitly protected by the Geneva Conventions.
These estimates are conservative; they do not include Crimea or parts of western Ukraine, where accurate data was not available. The actual extent of the destruction is likely much greater and continues to grow. In mid-May, Russian forces bombed several towns in northeastern Ukraine so hard that one resident said streets had disappeared.
Ukrainian forces have also bombed Russian frontline positions and attacked Russian-controlled areas such as Crimea and the city of Donetsk, causing heavy damage. While it is not always possible to determine which side is responsible, the devastation recorded in Russian-controlled areas pales in comparison to what is seen on the Ukrainian side.
The Kremlin referred questions for this article to the Russian Defense Ministry, which did not respond.
Lyudmila Omelicheva, 74, stands inside her home, which was heavily damaged in the latest shelling that local Russian-installed authorities called a Ukrainian attack, amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Russian-held part of Donetsk (Reuters).
Few places have been more devastated than Marinka, a small town in eastern Ukraine.
The No. 1 Comprehensive School, where many young Ukrainians learned their first letters, has been blown away. The Orthodox cathedral where couples were married has collapsed. Landmarks for generations – the chestnut-lined streets where people strolled, the milk factories and cereal factories where they worked, the local museum, the Marinka regional administration building, their favorite shops and cafes – have been reduced to faceless ruins.
Damage estimates are in the billions of dollars, but the real toll is much greater. Marinka was a community, a living history, a source of sustenance for families for nearly 200 years. Its disappearance leaves people devastated.
The life and death of the town
Before everyone fled, as strong winds blew in from the west, the people of Marinka got a little provocative: They tied yellow and blue Ukrainian flags to helium balloons and flew them across the nearby front line to land somewhere in Russian-controlled territory.
“True Ukrainians lived here,” says Hruszkovska’s mother, Hanna Holban. “They worked in the fields and in the factories, creating a future for themselves and their children. They lived under the Ukrainian sky, the sky that is free and ours.”
Her eyes well up when she remembers her hometown, and she says she sometimes sees Marinka in her dreams.
So are many others. A young Ukrainian woman living in Berlin recently opened a photo exhibition of Marinka, and videos posted on social media show photos of Marinka from before the war, accompanied by sad music. Some of the evacuees from Marinka have chosen to stay together in another town, Pavlograd, 100 miles away.
In many ways, the story of this town – its proximity, its vulnerability, its destruction – is the story of this war, and perhaps all wars.
Ukrainian soldiers walk near a destroyed building in the frontline town of Khasiv Yar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region during the Russian offensive into Ukraine. (Reuters)
The Holbans settled in Marinka at least three generations ago. By the early 1970s, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, they built their own house at 102B Blagodatna Street. It was big by Soviet standards, about 1,200 square feet, with three bedrooms and bright red tiles on the front porch. They kept ducks, chickens, two cows and two pigs in the garden, grew all kinds of vegetables, from potatoes to peas, and picked apples, cherries, peaches and apricots from their own trees.
“In the 1990s, this is how we survived,” Hruszkowska says.
Marinka began as a farming village founded in 1843 by adventurous peasants and Cossacks from the Eurasian steppes. Legend has it that the village was named after the founder’s wife, Maria.
By the early 20th century, this part of eastern Ukraine had been transformed: The discovery of iron and coal in what soon became Donbass turned the city of Donetsk into an industrial hub, and Marinka, about 15 miles away, was transformed from a sleepy farming village into a bustling suburb.
By the mid-1960s the town boasted a coal mine, a milk factory, a tire factory and a bakery, and soon a museum, a public sauna and two public swimming pools.
In the spring, the smell of fresh flowers wafted along the backroads, in summer children swam in the Oshkova River, and in the fall workers piled into trucks and headed to the collective farms to harvest huge harvests of wheat before sipping vodka from the bottle and dancing in the mown, grassy fields. The best restaurant in town is Kolos, known for its “Donbas cutlet,” a fine cut of pork breaded and cooked smothered in butter.
“Marinka was blooming,” says Holban, who was also born there.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Marinka was thrown into chaos. State enterprises were closed and Holban’s husband, a veterinarian named Vova, lost his job and, at 40, was forced to dig coal to make a living.
By 2010, the situation had stabilized. Fueled by trade with Russia, Donetsk had developed into one of Ukraine’s most prosperous cities, and Marinka prospered as well, growing to a population of around 10,000.
In the spring of 2014, everything changed again.
“Suddenly, strangers with weapons showed up and started stealing cars,” said Svitlana Moskalevska, another longtime resident.
That was just the beginning. Violent protests broke out, shootings in the streets ensued, Russia was backing the Donetsk rebellion. It was chaotic and frightening.
By mid-2014, after thousands had been killed, including dozens in Marinka, Donetsk became the capital of a new Russian puppet state, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. For several months, Marinka was also occupied.
Ukrainian forces eventually cleared Marinka, but were not strong enough to retake Donetsk, so the front line between Ukraine and Russia now crosses Marinka, less than a mile from the Holbans’ home.
Fearing shelling, people stayed indoors at night and drew their curtains. Basic services collapsed: Marinka once received treated water from Donetsk, but Russia cut the pipes, forcing it to draw water from the Osykova River.
“It was really disgusting,” said Holban’s cousin, Olha Hers. “Fish would come out of the taps and sometimes even little frogs.”
Marinka was one of the first places that Russia attacked when it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This time, the Russian military bombed the town with aircraft and heavy artillery, causing much more damage than in 2014.
Residents carry their belongings near a building destroyed during the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol (Reuters)
Hruszkowska and her daughter Varvara evacuated a few days later. Some older residents, including Herusz’s mother Tetyana, refused to leave. She told everyone she had become an “expert” at identifying the different types of munitions flying all around them: artillery shells, mortars, tank shells, grenades and airplane bombs. She assured the family that she would always know when to take shelter in the vegetable cellar. But deep down, she just didn’t want to leave.
“You have to understand,” Heras explained, “that in Ukraine people don’t like to move from region to region. This is the mentality. We prefer to live in one house for three or four generations.”
On April 25, 2022, Heras’ mother called and uttered two words no one had ever used with her before: “I’m scared.”
An hour later, she was murdered.
The volunteer emergency medical organization “White Angels” evacuated the last residents of Marinka in November 2022.
“Nothing will be left”
Ukrainian forces lost Marinka in December 2023.
They have been fighting for this city since 2014. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of soldiers from both sides have died for it. At the very end, a small group of Ukrainian troops holed up in a maze of tunnels and ruined basements on the western edge of the city. The rest was Russian territory.
When the Ukrainians showed up, they were stunned.
“I saw the pictures from Hiroshima, and Marinka was exactly the same,” said Ukrainian soldier Henady, who, in keeping with military tradition, only gave his first name. “There’s nothing left.”
Another soldier, who asked to be identified by his call sign “Karakurt,” described cars with burnt paint, houses collapsed to their jagged foundations and long, empty roads filled with gleaming glass and the smell of dust, smoke and gunpowder.
“Anything that could burn burned,” he said.
Ukraine is determined to rebuild, and the hope is that with international cooperation Ukraine can seize Russian assets and force Russia to pay for the rebuilding of entire towns like Marinka, but that may be a long way off.
But there may still be a long war ahead. Russian forces have gained the upper hand in recent months, destroying more communities as they advance relentlessly. Ten million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes — one in four of the population.
Last spring, dozens of Marinka people gathered at the relative safety of a school in Pavlograd. The children were dressed in crisply ironed, embroidered shirts, or vyshyvankas. In a large room with big windows, they performed dances and sang patriotic songs that were sent by video to displaced Marinka people around the world. Adults stood by the walls, tears streaming down their cheeks.
“You know the easiest way to make someone cry?” asked Hruszkowska. “By making them remember their city and their hometown.”
She and her 13-year-old daughter, Varvara, live crammed into a tiny two-room apartment in Pavlograd.
“My old kitchen was bigger than this whole house,” she joked.
Then she began to cry.
Hruszkowska grew up in Marinka, married in Marinka, raised Varvara in Marinka. Her grandparents died in Marinka. She knows she can never return to Marinka. She feels she will suffer for the rest of her life from something incurable: eternal homesickness.
She is thinking of moving abroad with her daughter.
“No matter how unpatriotic it may sound, she doesn’t have much of a future in Ukraine,” Hrushkovska said.
“I don’t want to leave,” she quickly adds, but with Marinka gone, “I don’t know where else to go.”
