Source: PostPravda.info 20.10.2025
Life under shelling. Opytnе 2015. Scene of a woman's death in her own apartment. Photo: author's archive
War constantly changes its nature, and so does the life of people living under shelling. Only one thing remains unchanged – the constant threat of losing one’s home, being maimed, or killed. As an eyewitness, Nikolai Karpitsky gives an account of life in the Donbas frontline zone over the course of ten years.
The War in Donbas: Avdiivka, Opytne, and Maryinka Under Fire
How do people survive under shelling? – I tried to imagine that thirty years ago, when I joined protests against the war in Chechnya. Ten years ago, I saw it with my own eyes in frontline Avdiivka.
April 2015, Avdiivka. A relative lull compared to the shelling during the battles for Donetsk Airport. The first shelling began in July 2014 and reached its greatest intensity at the end of January to mid-February 2015. There was no electricity, no water. Now the fighting is mainly taking place in the industrial zone, yet artillery shells and Grad rockets still sporadically hit the city.
The Baptist church, where I stayed, is located on the very edge of the city – beyond it lie fields, Donetsk Airport, and the positions of the pro-Russian militants. The church porch is pockmarked with tiny shrapnel holes. I had to sleep to the sound of artillery cannonade. The first night, my imagination painted scenes of a shell flying into my room, but soon I, like all Avdiivka residents, stopped paying attention to the roar of artillery.
There are many young people in the church. One of them was injured by shrapnel.
“Because he crouched instead of lying down,” – explained an older man. – “Mud, puddle – it doesn’t matter, you must drop to the ground right away. A shell exploded very close to me too, but I managed to lie down, and all the fragments flew over me. If I had crouched – the blast wave would’ve torn my head off. …It’s good they don’t use aircraft,” – he continued, – “we’re still lucky. Airstrikes are real horror – you can’t hide from aerial bombs.”
A few years later, in 2023, Russian aviation destroyed Avdiivka with guided aerial bombs (GBUs).
Wieś Opytnе (między Awdijiwką a lotniskiem w Doniecku), styczeń 2016.
January 2016, the village of Opytne, near Donetsk Airport. Seventy people remain in the village. Not a single undamaged building. It seems the “hot phase” of the war ended long ago, yet the village is shelled constantly – artillery, mortars, tanks, and even reconnaissance and sabotage groups sneak in…
“And Grads?” – I ask.
“Haven’t seen Grads since autumn,” – says a local.
People live in the basement of an apartment building – civilians and soldiers together, like in a communal dormitory. A pipe sticks out from the basement: the residents have made an improvised stove there. Near the entrance, there’s a log used for chopping firewood. On the side of the building, a huge hole gapes in the wall from a direct shell hit – the place where a woman was killed in her apartment.
June 2017, Maryinka. A clean, beautiful town. It is constantly under shelling, yet the debris is immediately cleared away. What stands out are the well-kept lawns with flowers. Half-ruined houses; a few hundred meters away – the occupiers’ positions. The street is within range not only of artillery but even small arms fire – and yet people still take care of the flowers. I turned onto a parallel street where no one lives – ripe apricots hung from the trees. The locals said that while I was eating apricots, the militants could probably see the color of my eyes through their scopes.
Now this town no longer exists – the Russians have destroyed it completely.
Life Under Shelling. Marjinka 2017. A destroyed building next to well-kept lawns with flowers. Photo: author’s archive.
The First Months of the Full-Scale Invasion
February 24, 2022, Kyiv. Sirens wail. People don’t know how to react or what awaits them. Many try to settle in the metro, as if one could wait out the war there. A colleague wanted to go with her friends to Bucha – she thought they could take shelter there while the fighting raged in Kyiv. Fortunately, she didn’t make it – the road had already been closed.
February 25, 2022, Sloviansk. The city is living an ordinary life – the war hasn’t reached it yet. But people who have already experienced occupation know what it means, and calmly prepare for the trials ahead.
March 2022, Sloviansk. The city has found itself in the very eye of the hurricane – a deceptive calm inside the storm of war. Fierce battles rage in the Kyiv region (we have yet to learn about the occupiers’ atrocities there), and terrifying news comes from Mariupol. A powerful explosion nearby – right as I was about to start a class with students – turned out to be the first echo of the war in Sloviansk. The news later reported that a cruise missile had been shot down above us.
It was already dark when I first heard the rising whistle of a ballistic missile – one that is almost impossible to intercept. I braced for the impact, knowing there was no shelter from it. A massive explosion followed, but the windows held. I went outside to look – a field was burning in the distance. For now, such attacks on our city were only occasional. I thought of Mariupol, where people were enduring horrors beyond imagination.
Many have equipped basements where they can take shelter during shelling, but not everyone does. My “basement” is a large pit inside a flimsy shed – if it collapses, it would bury anyone inside. So, it’s more dangerous to hide there than to stay indoors. Besides, a missile strike always comes without warning.
April – May 2022, Sloviansk. The cannonade becomes constant and gradually moves closer to the city. Izyum has fallen, then Lyman. From time to time, missile strikes hit Sloviansk, and damage in the city becomes visible. More frightening than the rockets is the fiery wall of artillery that annihilates everything in its path – but even worse are the Russian soldiers who come to rape, torture, and kill. No one knows where, or if, they will be stopped.
Summer 2022, Sloviansk. The city came under regular shelling from multiple rocket launchers and became almost completely deserted. The enemy was already ten kilometers away but couldn’t cross the Siverskyi Donets River. If they managed to deploy tube artillery against Sloviansk, the city would be entirely destroyed – but Ukrainian forces prevented that from happening. There was no gas, no water, and electricity often went out for long stretches.
Another night of shelling – I’ve lost count of how many in a row. Explosions, sometimes closer, sometimes farther from my house – I keep guessing whether this time they’ll hit me or not. It can go on for over an hour.
July 3, 2022, Sloviansk. There was no electricity at home, so I was working online in the Pentecostal Good News Church. Suddenly, a series of loud explosions – probably around ten – rang out. People in the lobby moved away from the window; some ran to the basement, others into the yard to see where it had hit. I went out too. Nearby, plumes of smoke were rising from residential buildings – to the right, to the left, and straight ahead. A second series of explosions followed, even closer.
“Everyone to the basement!” – shouted the church attendant, waving his hands.
I went back to the table, packed up my laptop, and went down as well. The intense bombing stopped, followed by three more single explosions – no one paid attention to those anymore. Oleksandr Reshetnyk came over. Someone had already sent him a video showing a panoramic view of the shelling of Sloviansk: columns of smoke rising all along the length of the city. We counted a couple of dozen, though there may have been more. Oleksandr said the attack had been carried out either by a Uragan or a Smerch system. Later, I read in the news that six people had died and fifteen had been injured.
Shelling of Slavyansk on July 3, 2022.
Autumn 2022, Sloviansk. A successful counteroffensive pushed the enemy away from the city, marking the start of a long period of relative calm. Once or twice a week, a missile strike could still be heard in Sloviansk, and sometimes people were killed – but compared to the summer of 2022, it felt like a lull, and residents began returning. Now, about half of the prewar population lives in Sloviansk again. Still, when I speak of calm, I’m not objective – I live alone. It’s hard to tell a mother that attacks are “not that frequent” when at any moment a Russian missile could kill or maim her child.
2025 – The War Has Changed Its Nature
Summer 2025, Sloviansk. Guided aerial bombs (GBUs) have started hitting the city – rarely, but their impact is catastrophic. An artillery shell can destroy a room; a missile, an entire building entrance; but a GBU obliterates the whole structure. Enemy drones have gradually become part of everyday life. At first, they came singly and infrequently; later – in entire swarms. Aerial battles with drones are especially visible on clear nights, when the sky is full of stars and the Milky Way is shining. The sky is sliced by the tracer lines of anti-aircraft fire, flashes flicker overhead. The thought that a drone might fall straight onto your house is deeply unsettling.
Sometimes the buzzing of drones is long and monotonous – like mosquitoes circling endlessly above you. It can go on for more than an hour. Sometimes the buzzing suddenly intensifies and ends with an explosion – that’s when the drones dive from high altitude, giving anti-aircraft guns no time to react.
July 13, 2025, Sloviansk. A quiet morning. Nothing suggests danger. Suddenly – the rapid, rising sound of air being torn apart. A second later – a powerful explosion nearby. A guided bomb (GBU). I don’t yet know the consequences of the strike – perhaps someone’s life has already been cut short.
August 2, 2025, Sloviansk. At the train station market – a loud blast somewhere very close. A Lancet strike. A single hit – no air raid siren was sounded. People calmly went on with their business. A shopkeeper stepped out of her kiosk and asked matter-of-factly:
“From which direction did it hit?”
I waved my hand:
“From that side. The echo came from here.”
While I was biking home, there was another blast. Everyday life.
Now Kyiv is being bombed just as much, but there’s a difference in how residents of Kyiv and those of Donbas experience air raids. The flight time of missiles to Kyiv allows people to track Russian attacks through social media and decide whether to go down to a shelter, hide in a bathroom, or ignore the alert. In Donbas, the flight time is so short that people don’t even try to track or hide – they accept what happens as it is and continue with their daily routines.
August 15, 2025, Sloviansk. The night before, there was heavy shelling – one strike landed very close, making the windows rattle. Luckily, I managed to cook dinner before the power went out. In the morning, I checked the news – a private house had been hit, just a few hundred meters from me. I went to look – fire trucks were there, and the air smelled of burning. The house was destroyed down to the foundation; trees were felled, and all nearby buildings were damaged.
There’s a huge difference between sporadic shelling, like we have here, and systematic bombardment. Here, firefighters and repair crews keep working – by morning, the electricity was already restored. These isolated terrorist attacks have no real impact on the city’s life. The market was crowded with people; life goes on as usual. It would be a different story if the shelling became systematic – turning the city into ruins.
September 2025, Sloviansk. The shelling has intensified. It’s easier for me – I have a calm job: writing, teaching online. But what about repair workers who have to work in any weather, under shelling… or surgeons performing operations instead of hiding in bomb shelters? And they do keep working – they don’t try to leave the frontline city, even though they know the shelling will only grow worse, and hospitals are in the highest-risk zone.
I talked with people in the surgical ward. Explosions go off one after another – very close by. Many patients have just had surgery and can’t walk, yet they calmly discuss the attack. Moving an entire surgical department to a bomb shelter each time is absolutely impossible, so everyone stays where they are. That’s the kind of “Russian roulette” people live with here. They know they could die at any moment. And not necessarily in Sloviansk: recently there was news about a young family who had moved from Sloviansk to Kyiv – and were all killed there in a missile strike.
September 2025, Kramatorsk. I observe how ordinary residents talk with one another – everyday conversations about household matters now naturally include the topic of shelling. Many have relatives in different cities of Donbas, so everyone is concerned about where the bombs fell yesterday and who was killed. I met a witness to the horrific strike on the village of Yarova, not far from here. On the morning of September 9, 2025, the Russians dropped an aerial bomb on a group of pensioners standing in line to receive their pensions. Twenty-five people aged between 53 and 87 were killed, and nineteen more were wounded. A woman told me that at the epicenter of the explosion, body parts – arms, legs – were mixed with soil, while those on the periphery were simply blown apart. She said that people hadn’t received their pensions for two months and had finally come to collect them. Naturally, she also blamed the local authorities for failing to ensure safety.
The Kramatorsk City Hospital is a place where you can meet people from across Donbas. An elderly man had just been discharged; his daughter had come to take him by car to Druzhkivka, a nearby town. They were sitting and waiting – it wasn’t safe to leave yet, as drones were circling above the hospital.
“Reconnaissance drones?” – asked a man in the next bed.
“No, combat ones,” – the daughter replied. The sound of anti-aircraft guns rattled outside.
“My relative was also driving from Druzhkivka,” – said the man in the next bed, – “and a drone started following him after the checkpoint.”
I imagined what it must feel like – driving while knowing that at any moment the drone hovering above could strike your car. The man himself was also staying with relatives in Druzhkivka – his own home was in Kostiantynivka, which Russian forces are systematically destroying.
Druzhkivka lies between Kostiantynivka and Kramatorsk and is shelled very often, though repair crews quickly fix the damage after each attack. In Kostiantynivka, however, nothing works anymore – there is no electricity, no water, and only about six thousand residents remain. Before taking a city, the Russians first destroy it completely – they know no other tactic.
Life Under Shelling. Kramatorsk 2025. People are treated here. Photo: author’s archive.
I also spoke with a retired officer who said that even in Chasiv Yar, of which almost nothing is left, there are still people living – maybe three or so. Even in conditions of mortal danger, elderly people are extremely reluctant to leave their homes. Ukrainian soldiers once tried to evacuate an old woman from Chasiv Yar, but she managed to reach their command and complain, and the soldiers were reprimanded for “rough treatment” of the local population.
The difference in how Ukrainian and Russian soldiers treat local residents is reflected in his remark:
“Toretsk and Horlivka are twin cities, like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The Russians are grinding Toretsk into rubble, while in Horlivka there’s still electricity and water – Russian soldiers can rest comfortably there before battle. I understand that striking residential areas is forbidden, but at least we could target the power supply system. This is a war for survival, yet our forces are prohibited from hitting critical infrastructure. I don’t understand it.”
October 2025, Ukraine. What we are experiencing in Donbas is only the beginning of a great drone war. Soon there will be no rear and no front – only a war of drones that can no longer be contained within the borders of Russia and Ukraine.
