One Ukrainian City’s Agonizing Year as Russian Army Closed In
June 12, 2026 5:00 pm ET
The tram creaked past deserted factories that once produced mining equipment and porcelain. The driver squinted as the sun blazed through the windshield, cracked months earlier when a Russian bomb exploded near the depot. It was summer, and the crowded tram was a contrast to the emptying city as it fell into the crosshairs of the Russian army, some 10 miles away.
“These days the streetcar is like a relic around here,” said Tetyana Yuriskulova, who has been driving trams since 1994. “We’re hanging on somehow.”
Even as the Russians closed in last summer, the tram remained the artery that kept the city alive—just.
The Russian army is grinding forward slowly, churning up everything in its path. In a band of towns and cities along the 800-mile front, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians face a daily question: When to drop everything and flee?
Lyman
UKRAINE
Slovyansk
Kramatorsk
Druzhkivka
Bakhmut
Chasiv Yar
Kostyantynivka
RUSSIAN FORCES
AS OF FEB. 1, 2025
RUSSIAN FORCES
AS OF JUNE 3
Horlivka
Pokrovsk
Avdiivka
10 miles
10 km
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project
Andrew Barnett/WSJ
Druzhkivka, an industrial city once home to about 68,000 people, is one of them. It is among a handful of cities in eastern Ukraine that are Russia’s main target for 2026. Over the course of a year, The Wall Street Journal followed the town and its people wrestling with leaving their homes as the fabric of their lives is slowly, painfully torn apart.
The pressure creeps up gradually, almost imperceptible day to day, tormenting inhabitants with uncertainty as they watch their city close down around them.
In February last year, the crump of artillery was still distant, but the factories had long since shut down as the city turned into a military camp with restaurants and barbers catering to soldiers. By July, the city began emptying out as explosive drones started to reach its streets, and fishermen were keeping hold of tiddlers they used to throw back. In December, the streets were deserted as a curfew allowed only four hours outside every day, and evacuation teams were overwhelmed with requests to run the gantlet of Russian drones and artillery on roads out of the city.
FEBRUARY
‘WE’RE STRETCHED THIN’
On a frosty February morning last year, fishermen dropped lines through drilled holes in the thin ice as artillery echoed through nearby fields. “Outgoing,” said Oleh Ihnatiyev, one of the fishermen, as the ice emitted a ghostly howl.
Hemmed between two narrow rivers, Druzhkivka, about 245 years old, took its modern shape around coal mines and factories that thrived in the Soviet Union but struggled after its collapse in 1991. The Russian advance has closed large factories producing mining equipment.
Ihnatiyev, a former factory worker, felt the cruel nexus of anxiety and poverty grow as bombardments intensified.
“How do we live here?” he said. “We don’t earn much money, we’re stretched thin.”
Those left in the city were already mostly pensioners, those without means to leave and residents hoping the Russians could be stopped.
Halyna Shekhova, who has lived in the nearby village of Oleksievo-Druzhkivka most of her life, held a hope for some kind of peace deal brokered by President Trump.
The sounds of shelling that kept her and the 20 dogs in her care awake at night told a different story.
“I understand that the front is getting closer,” she said.
But where could she go with her dogs and her monthly pension of 3,400 hryvnias, around $80?
As Russian assault forces converged on nearby Kostyantynivka and Chasiv Yar to the east, the city shrank. Half the population had already fled. Schools were closed for fear of bombardment. An ice rink shut down after it was damaged by a Russian strike.
Gathering in large groups became forbidden in Druzhkivka. Children had to attend school remotely and couldn’t play team sports. Instead, they made their own fun. A group of teenage girls played hide and seek around a World War II monument on a hill. They came to watch the sun as it set over the graveyard and battlefields behind it.
The Ukrainian military installed itself in Druzhkivka, replacing the departed residents. Army vehicles coursed the streets. The influx of Ukrainian soldiers brought with it new cafes and restaurants. A woman who runs a local dry cleaner said most of her business became patching up uniforms. Barbershop seats were taken by soldiers getting haircuts and beard trims.
The new businesses were too expensive for locals and refugees from nearby cities. Many frequented aid distribution sites, some got free haircuts from a charity.
On a sunny February day, a group of a half dozen neighbors lined up for Red Cross parcels of essentials such as food and hygiene products. A Russian bomb had blown out the windows of their apartment block and twisted door frames so they no longer closed.
“I myself can’t understand how it happened,” said one man, who wouldn’t give his name. “The roof lifted and then fell back down.”
Even as the danger of attacks grew, Druzhkivka residents largely ignored frequent air-raid sirens. Soldiers and civilians bundled up against the cold walked briskly along sidewalks in the winter cold. Streetcars delivered residents to their errands across the city, windows fogged with condensation.
JULY
‘NO ONE TO SING’
The windows of the Druzhkivka tram were open on a sweltering summer afternoon as women wearing flowery dresses and men in light shirts made their way to the weekend market.
Before the war, tram workers organized celebrations for children during the holidays. Residents sometimes rented a car out for birthday parties, laying out food and hanging decorations, with guests all boarding at different stops along the route.
Once, after the war had already begun, a soldier’s friends brought him to Druzhkivka just so he could ride the tram for the first time in his life. Yuriskulova, the driver, recalled him grinning broadly the entire way.
“War is war,” she said, “but you still want to feel joy in life.”
By July, the Russians continued to grind forward and bombardments in Druzhkivka increased. Explosive drones were within range, but incidents in the city were still sparse. Military vehicles were decked out with antidrone jammers and protective cages. The army began erecting netting along roads to intercept the craft.
Fishermen still cast their rods along the river’s banks. But there were fewer fish and anglers now than before the war, said one of them, a lifelong fisherman.
“Now we keep the fish we used to throw back,” he said.
Mariya Ostapenko, Druzhkivka’s oldest resident at 101, recalled taking walks along the city’s rivers with her late husband in the 1940s.
As the summer heat swelled in the late afternoon, Druzhkivka residents flocked to the waterways. Local youngsters somersaulted into the water. These days, they are joined by soldiers in search of a moment of carefree joy, respite from the heat—and the fighting.
At dusk, young people gathered in the square in front of the abandoned Soviet-era Youth House building. Alcohol is prohibited across the region, so they brought energy drinks, soda and cigarettes. Some young men rode in on their motorbikes and cars they tricked out themselves. They revved their engines, doing doughnuts in the square and racing short distances. Young women smiled, chatted and recorded videos with cellphones.
The slow pace of the Ukrainian summer masked a harsh reality: The war was getting closer and many Druzhkivka residents were planning their escape.
“I am in despair,” said Shekhova, the dog carer. “Not so much despair—I am in a wild horror.”
Shekhova had started packing, but the costs of moving were prohibitive—and her dogs were an additional encumbrance.
“I didn’t sleep all night,” she said, because of Russian attacks on Druzhkivka. “Then, around 4 a.m., when the mortars started, we all came out to watch.”
Authorities had ordered children in Oleksievo-Druzhkivka evacuated. Many houses were ruined beyond repair. Shekhova’s neighbors, a 43-year-old couple, were recently killed after two bombs hit their homes. The windows in Shekhova’s own house were boarded up with plywood.
She hoped negotiations over the summer would lead to a stop in Russian attacks. Now, with the war at her doorstep, she had lost hope for peace.
“They’re pummeling us every day,” said a woman pensioner sitting among her friends on benches in a leafy courtyard of a Soviet-era apartment block. “But we pensioners, we survive. They choke and choke us, but we survive.”
The women had worked at one of the factories in town, one as a welder, another as a crane operator, and lived in the apartments constructed for its workers since the 1980s. Some hailed from cities in Donbas now occupied and destroyed.
Nearby, their husbands and friends sat around a table playing dominoes. As a man with a booming voice who gave his name only as Sheriff slammed down a piece to the groans of other players, artillery crackled in the distance. They had been gathering here their whole lives, Sheriff said.
“There are fewer people, there are fewer children,” he said of Druzhkivka, “and there’s no one to sing.”
DECEMBER
‘I COULDN’T LOOK BACK’
By winter, Druzhkivka was a ghost town. Its population halved again to 17,000. The government deemed it an “active combat zone,” urging all civilians to leave while they still can. Apartment blocks stood nearly empty. The streets were deserted save for between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., the only break in the curfew. Those who remained in the city rushed to markets and the few working shops. The authorities no longer bothered sounding the air-raid alarms as the Russian bombing was constant.
Even in the worsening atmosphere, Shekhova was packed but still indecisive about evacuating. Her daughter arranged for a soldier to help bring her belongings to a courier. Shekhova met him wearing her house clothes: boots, a pink sweatshirt and an apron. The soldier offered to evacuate Shekhova and her dogs instead.
“Why don’t I give you three minutes to think whether you’re going to leave or not,” he said.
“How?” she said. “There are 20 of them.”
“Let’s try,” the soldier said.
“Let’s,” said Shekhova. The decision to leave, which she had agonized over for months, had come to her in a split second.
She grabbed a backpack with her documents and piled the dogs into the soldier’s jeep, leaving all her belongings behind.
“You can still look back at your house,” the soldier told her.
“I couldn’t look back,” she later recalled.
Now, she lives in a village outside Kyiv where she struggles to sleep, most of her funds are eaten up by rent, and she misses the Donbas sun.
“I want to return but I am increasingly coming to realize that I won’t be able to go back,” she said. “I know that my house there is no Versailles, but it’s home.”
Refugees evacuated by volunteers or authorities usually arrive at a transition center in a school in Lozova, a town about 80 miles west of Druzhkivka, where they are offered a hot meal and temporary beds in classrooms.
Power and water outages in Druzhkivka became constant as Russians targeted utilities. Without electricity, the cellular connection is weak or else altogether absent.
Lilia, a pensioner, recalled giving her infirm husband injections even as her hands and legs trembled during bombardments.
“How can you do it? Without electricity, with a flashlight,” she said.
Russian drone pilots searched for any sign of life in apartments before striking.
“That’s why our windows are quickly closed and hammered shut. So that the light can’t be seen,” said Tetiana Velytkotska, whose windows were blown out in an attack while she was at home.
Velytkotska’s husband, Vasyl, was recently killed at the front, she said. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but neighbors insisted. Later, she stood shivering and silent on the platform waiting for a train to Kyiv where relatives offered her housing.
Ostapenko, Druzhkivka’s oldest resident, fled to the city of Kharkiv with her daughter, leaving her hometown and settling in a cozy first-floor apartment with a leafy courtyard.
The exodus has been massive. There are now only 6,000 people left in the town, according to municipal authorities, less than one-tenth of the prewar number.
Ostapenko recalled her arrival in Druzhkivka in 1948, “Everything was blooming. I loved this city so much.” She and her husband would spend time at the river or else stroll the park where “you could meet the whole city,” she said. Long before cars were common and busses were running, residents still got around on the backs of their horse carts. As decades passed, she watched it change and industrialize, the population grow.
“We really didn’t think we would leave,” she said.
Druzhkivka didn’t officially qualify for a tram line as it was too small, she said, but the mayor campaigned for it, and people took great pride in it.
In late October, a Russian airstrike knocked out the tram’s power supply.
The municipal tram company couldn’t fix it, so the town hall sent requests to regional authorities and private companies. None of them could do it either, given the danger of the front line on the horizon.
So, just shy of 80 years since its launch, the trams of Druzhkivka have creaked their way around the city for the last time.
Photo editing by Marina Vitaglione. Design by Audrey Valbuena.
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Appeared in the June 13, 2026, print edition as 'A Year Inside a Ukraine City As Russia’s Army Closed In'.
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