"There is no life here'

After more than two years of attacks, much of Kupiansk's population has left and the remaining soldiers are stuck in a war that's 'going nowhere'

- By Peter Beaumont

Lyubov Lobunets, 77, left her home in the frontline Ukrainian city of Kupiansk in August when it was hit by a Russian explosive.

"I was in a five-storey building," she explained, speaking from a centre for the displaced in nearby Kharkiv. "I don't know whether it was a missile or bomb that hit the building but it started a fire, and when the flames reached my floor, I couldn't escape."

The Ukrainian military, she said, saved her life. But by then much of Kupiansk, which had a prewar population lation of 27,000, had departed. “In the months before I left there were a few shops open,” she said. “But that last month, almost everything closed. All the social services were evacuated.”

Amid the focus on the Donbas region further south and its cities, including Pokrovsk, Kupiansk in the northern Kharkiv region on the Oskil river has drawn less attention. But the slow death of Kupiansk, dragged out over two years and more, is a metaphor for the cities of Ukraine’s frontline, subject to Russia’s violence.

Gone is the small city centre market selling dried fish, honey and vegetables. Homes that dotted the hillside are wrecked. The fields outside the city are punctuated by craters.

Yet Lobunets explained her reluctance to evacuate. “I worked as a nurse and my pension is very small,” she said. “I was afraid of where I’d live and how I'd manage.”

Even until recently some of her friends had remained despite a compulsory evacuation order and as street fighting encroached on some of the Kupiansk outskirts. Most who do remain in the city centre are clustered close to the sports stadium.

“Some friends rang to tell me they had climbed up to the top floor to get a mobile phone connection,” said Lobunets. “They could see buildings everywhere that had been destroyed and fires across the city.”