Thousands Are Fleeing Ukraine’s Donbas Strongholds as Russia Pushes Closer
While Kyiv’s fortunes have brightened in other
ways in the war, Moscow’s forces are raining bombs and drones on “fortress belt”
cities like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
By Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr
Chubko
Reporting from Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Ukraine ’s Donetsk region, and from the Kharkiv region.
The New York Times, June 22, 2026
Updated 11:57 a.m.
ET
see also BBC
Nadiya Trofimchuk, 79, had lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk
her whole life and never thought about leaving, even as war raged for years not
20 miles away. Yet there she was one recent morning at a makeshift evacuation
center, sitting next to a small folding table with water and tea but touching
neither, just focused on leaving.
“We had a strike,” she explained, eyebrows
raised over purple and gold cat-eye glasses. “A very, very, very big strike.”
In that April attack, Russia dropped a 3,000-pound bomb in the middle of the
city, wiping out almost an entire block. It was a grim omen for Sloviansk and
the rest of the Donetsk region, the Kremlin’s most coveted prize. Ukrainian
forces have spent years fortifying and defending the strategic territory at
immense cost, and it is now under an onslaught that residents fear is the
beginning of the end.
The sense of foreboding in Donetsk is a sobering
development for Ukraine at a moment when it has otherwise received a boost from
a campaign of longer-range strikes and the stalling of Russian forces along most
of the front.
Russia still has superior
numbers and firepower. And after years of grinding warfare in the region, its
forces have been concentrating on the “fortress belt” cities of Sloviansk,
Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka, part of the roughly 20 percent of
Donetsk that Ukraine still controls.
Russian troops have fought their way into
Kostiantynivka. Druzhkivka is a wasteland. That leaves Sloviansk and Kramatorsk
as Ukraine’s last real strongholds in Donetsk.
The two cities are not in
imminent danger of falling. But Moscow’s forces have advanced close enough to
batter them with growing numbers of glide bombs and exploding drones. Thousands
of civilians have fled as life has become more untenable.
Russia’s deployment
of the 3,000-pound bomb in Sloviansk prompted worries that it would increasingly
turn to even more brutal tactics. Moscow has used such weapons to level and
clear out other Ukrainian cities, leaving soldiers to fight for control of
smoking rubble.
Ukraine has resisted Trump administration pressure to hand over
the Donbas region, which includes Donetsk, and grant President Vladimir V. Putin
of Russia his central demand in peace negotiations. While Kyiv insists that it
will keep fighting for the region, there might be little left of its main cities
to defend.
Bakhmut. Avdiivka. Chasiv Yar. Toretsk. All of these cities suffered
that fate, and are front of mind to those now evacuating from Sloviansk,
Kramatorsk and their surroundings.
Source: The Institute for the Study of War
with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.The New York
Times
[article contains a map]
Lena, 71, who was awaiting evacuation farther west, said that her city,
Mykolaivka, was already burning, “erased from life” by explosions.
“Everything
is destroyed, and it’s not even over yet,” she said hoarsely, patting her chest
as if to calm a racing heart. She declined to give her last name.
For years,
Sloviansk and Kramatorsk have hung on as Russian forces inched closer. The
cities are protected by the fortifications that Ukraine constructed after Russia
first began to stir up conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
In December, when
Russian forces seized control of the town of Siversk, which sits on high ground,
the links of the fortress belt began to crack.
Russian troops slowly advanced
to the cities of Lyman and Kostiantynivka. They got close enough to Sloviansk to
start regularly striking it with small exploding drones, prompting what has
become an exodus of civilians.
By April,
about 1,000 people were leaving the city each week, local officials said. The
city’s population has dropped to less than 44,000 from about 50,000 in March.
Battlefield maps show that Russian forces are still creeping forward, east of
Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. At their current rate of advance, it would take them
years to seize those cities and the rest of Donetsk. It took Moscow 18 months to
take Toretsk, and 22 months for Pokrovsk, another city in the region.
But
Russia can devastate the cities without having to seize them.
Senior Lt. Vadym Kostrytskyi, a commander in Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized
Brigade, said Russian forces were trying to get as close as possible so that
they could hammer logistics routes and strangle Kramatorsk and Sloviansk into
submission.
Already, he said, Kramatorsk was “fading away” before his eyes,
emptying more with each strike, as Russia shifts more toward “destroying
populated areas” in that city and in Sloviansk.
Vladyslav Arseniy helps with
the evacuations. When attacks started intensifying about six months ago, he
said, East SOS, the humanitarian organization he works for, started allowing him
to keep a drone detector in his van.
He no longer goes to Druzhkivka because it
is too dangerous. Most of his work is in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, but “there
will come the point where we will not be able to go,” he said over a coffee
before his next pickup.
Just down the road sat the charred wreckage of a Ukrainian
military vehicle, which had been hit by a drone that morning. Firefighters
sprayed down the pavement as teams worked to repair damaged anti-drone netting
above it.
The netting, which is intended to catch Russian drones before they
reach their target and explode, has proliferated across eastern and southern
Ukraine along with the reach of Russian F.P.V.s. It now covers roads in and out
of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, as well as some streets within the cities.
Each
week, Sloviansk’s main hospital treats 10 to 15 civilians with drone-related
injuries, according to its director, Volodymyr Ivanenko.
He said he and his
colleagues were bracing for a time when it becomes too dangerous to move around
the city. The maternity ward closed after sustaining damage in a strike in June.
Preparations are underway to turn the main hospital building into a hub if other
satellite buildings are forced to shut down.
For now, evacuations are mostly voluntary, and
sometimes carried out against a backdrop of explosions.
Yuri Tarasov, 75,
slumped in a chair in the evacuation center one recent morning. The previous
night, a Russian strike had destroyed his home in Mykolaivka.
“There are no
houses, none intact,” he kept repeating, resting an arm on a bag containing
seemingly whatever he had been able to grab: a tablet, undershirts, underwear, a
pillbox and a small angle grinder.
“I didn’t have time to change my shoes,” he
said, weeping. Nor was he able to bring Palma, his dog, and two cats.
Palma was
so smart, he started to say, until an air-raid siren interrupted. Glide bombs
were in flight. Mr. Tarasov hobbled on a crutch down to a shelter, where he
settled into a blue plastic chair and stared into space.
Three days later, a few
miles down the road in Kramatorsk, Pavlo Dyachenko, a regional police official,
was having a busy morning. Glide bombs had hit the city at around 5 a.m. The
explosions woke him, and he immediately drove to the scene. Another wave of
booms came at around 11 a.m. After a quick coffee, he would need to go record
the impact. Two people were trapped under the rubble, presumed dead.
Mr.
Dyachenko came to Kramatorsk by way of some of the war’s worst battles,
evacuating civilians in Bakhmut, then Toretsk, Pokrovsk, Siversk, Avdiivka. So
he has seen how the death of a city begins.
Photographs on his phone cataloged
how life had become more dangerous in Kramatorsk, with images of destroyed
buildings, destroyed homes, a severed foot in the trunk of a car.
“Stores are
closing. People are evacuating and leaving,” Mr. Dyachenko said, adding: “Living
here is frightening.”
Kramatorsk was a ghost town that sunny afternoon. The
park was empty, as were most streets, except for teams repairing netting
alongside men with anti-drone guns keeping eyes on the sky.
It would not be the
end of Mr. Dyachenko’s workday. A few hours later, a third wave of bombs hit
central Kramatorsk.
That was the day Maryna, 35, finally fled the city.
A man had been blown apart in front of her. The market kept
getting hit, as did buildings next to hers, she said in a monotone, barely
blinking. So she had to leave, but wished her mother had come with her.
They
had fled Kramatorsk once before, when war broke out in 2022, but returned in
2024.
“Everyone hoped to God that everything would get better,” said Maryna,
who declined to give her last name. “But it keeps getting worse, worse and
worse.”
The more the front approaches, the more people like Maryna are being
taken west to a hub for displaced people in Lozova.
On this day, a large yellow
bus pulled up, discharging 31 evacuees. Not 15 minutes later, a van pulled up
with 16 more, then a bus with another 30.
Angelina, 4, had just arrived from
Kramatorsk with her family. She was shy when asked about her red sequined
backpack, but lit up when she showed off her stuffed woolly mammoth, Motya.
“My
Motya is beautiful,” she said. As her mother returned from filling out
registration paperwork, Angelina held Motya out for a pet.
“We are leaving for
a new home,” she beamed, waving goodbye.
***
Olha Kotiuzhanska and Denys Denysov
contributed reporting.
***
Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine
--Ukraine Escalates
Attacks in Crimea: To pressure Moscow, Ukraine is stepping up an air campaign to
isolate the peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
--Moscow Refinery: The
dramatic explosion of a fuel storage facility in Moscow may have been caused not
by a Ukrainian drone but instead by a Russian air defense missile, an analysis
of social media videos verified by The New York Times indicates.
--Ukraine’s
Push for Ballistic Missiles: Ukrainian officials have said in recent weeks that
the country is pushing hard to develop ballistic missiles domestically. Kyiv
views them as essential to increase pressure on Moscow and, perhaps, to force it
toward negotiations.
--Trump at G7 Summit: President Trump made it clear at the
summit that the Ukraine conflict, which he once said he could end in 24 hours,
was no longer high on his priority list. “Look, we have nothing to do with it,”
Trump said of the war.
--Cultural Symbol Burned: The latest casualty in the war
is a centuries-old cathedral in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it
“one of the largest Russian crimes against Christian culture.”
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