Families robbed of a future inside war-ravaged Donetsk

Yulia Checheta was at her elderly mother’s house when she popped out to check on her shop.

- TOM WATLING

Moments later she had a call to say the family’s home had been hit by two Russian missiles. Her brother Volodymyr Radko and his 13-year-old son Mykola had been playing on the swings in the garden when the bombs hit. They had died instantly, buried beneath the rubble. It would be months before their remains could be identified.

Yulia’s 74-year-old mother, Nina, somehow survived, but she was hospitalised for several weeks with severe bruising to her neck and face. Half an hour before the strike, all four had been having breakfast in the kitchen.

The family’s tragedy took place in the small city of Selydove in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, through which Russian forces have been steadily advancing for a year. Russia has captured hundreds of square miles of land since seizing the city of Avdiivka last February, swallowing up town after town, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians in their path to flee or risk a similar fate to that of Yulia’s family.

Selydove was home to a small, tightly knit community. Many of the 20,000 pre-war population declined to leave despite the intermittent Russian missile and drone attacks. Others, like teenager Mykola and his mother, had left at the outset of the war but returned the following year. “Everyone who I cared about was all the same in the vicinity,” Yulia says. “And we didn’t have anywhere to go.”

But that changed the day Volodymyr and Mykola were killed. It was 28 May 2024, the day Vladimir Putin’s army, which he says he sent there to protect Russian-speakers, killed Yulia’s Russianspeaking family. A few months later, in October, when Yulia and her mother had fled 150 miles to the “alien” town of Kamianse in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian forces captured Selydove. “I cannot possibly convey to you the amount of grief Russia has caused my family,” says Yulia.