Bakhmut: The Invisible Front of Civilians

Translated by Martina Marino

«We had just left Bakhmut when a terrible shelling of the road began», recounts Halyna Nechvoloda in Brovary, a Ukrainian city in the Kyiv oblast, in a 16 January 2024 interview with the “Museum of Civilian Voices,” referring to the events of the Battle of Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Halyna and her husband remained in Bakhmut until October 2022; at that time, essential goods were scarce and the risk of falling victim to shelling was extremely high, as Russian artillery operated incessantly, striking both Ukrainian defenses and residential areas, buildings, and civilian infrastructure, causing the near-total destruction of the city.

Inside the Hell of Bakhmut

The Battle of Bakhmut, which lasted from August 2022 to May 2023, took place in the town of the same name and its surrounding areas in the eastern Donetsk oblast. It was one of the bloodiest and most intense battles of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict; even today, it remains difficult to determine the exact number of civilian and military casualties. NATO estimates suggest between 20,000 and 30,000 killed and wounded on the Russian side, and around 10,000 on the Ukrainian side.

A significant role in Russia’s capture of Bakhmut was played by the Wagner PMC, a private military company led by Prigozhin and widely regarded as a proxy of the Russian government. Its ranks included professional mercenaries, but not only them: starting in July 2022, Wagner began recruiting inmates from Russian prisons. However, these recruits were poorly trained and inadequately equipped, and most of them were used in the Battle of Bakhmut as “cannon fodder” in repeated assaults aimed at breaking through Ukrainian defensive lines, thereby enabling professional Russian forces to advance into the territory.

The Bakhmut front was described as a true “meat grinder,” underscoring the enormous human cost of every single advance.

Living Under the Bombs

It is inevitable that a battle of this kind would have severe repercussions for the city’s residents, forced to survive daily under Russian artillery fire and to cope with the difficulty of accessing basic necessities. Before the war, the city of Bakhmut had a population of 73,000; by early March 2023, only about 6,000 people remained, despite evacuation offers from the Ukrainian government. Electricity, water, and gas were no longer available. One resident, Nina, recounts that around one hundred people were living in her neighborhood and that Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers had provided them with generators. However, these could only be used intermittently, to recharge phones or occasionally do laundry. Some people were forced to gather firewood and survive for days on the little food available. Every single building in Bakhmut bears the marks of months of fighting. Many homes are nothing more than piles of rubble; those still standing have shattered windows, walls riddled with shrapnel, and severely damaged roofs.

As early as spring 2022, when the front line was approaching the city, Bakhmut’s residents thoroughly cleaned out their basements and moved furniture into them. These improvised “shelters” are not strong enough to withstand a rocket strike, but they are at least safer than remaining above ground inside their apartments. The basements are not ventilated, so people regularly go up to the entrance door to get some fresh air; for this reason, they also try to use fewer candles at night. During the day, they spend more time in their apartments, but since the shelling continues throughout the night, they usually go down to sleep in their bunkers. In the basements, every centimeter is precious. Seven-year-old Olena and her parents have been living for months in the basement of their apartment building, sharing the space with neighbors. In the corner reserved for her family, Olena painted a vase with three flowers, and on the ceiling she drew three hands, symbolizing herself, her mother, and her father. Ukrainian volunteers later evacuated them to a safer location, after the family agreed to leave the city when artillery fire struck their apartment.

Hardship and the Refusal to Leave

The civilians who remained in Bakhmut were forced to adapt to the harsh conditions imposed by the war and to help one another survive in a city reduced to rubble. Many were unable to evacuate; others refused to do so. Entire families stayed in Bakhmut, fully aware of the risks, because elderly or ill relatives either did not want to leave or were physically unable to be evacuated. “My daughter fled to Poland. She lives there now. I cannot,” says Liudmyla, who turned down volunteers’ offers to evacuate her, insisting she had to stay because relatives and neighbors had entrusted her with the keys to their apartments. She continues: “At first we left the city and moved to Dnipro; the rent kept rising. That’s why we came back. I worked in an electronics department and earned the money to buy this apartment. And now I’m supposed to leave and go somewhere else?”

According to Ukrainian authorities, by the end of March 2023 around 3,500 residents remained in Bakhmut. Many refused to evacuate, even attempting to hide from police officers and rescue workers tasked with inspecting apartments. Some agreed to leave only after the death of a family member, following injuries they had sustained, or when their home was destroyed by shelling. In such cases, it proved extremely difficult to persuade them to evacuate, as they were unwilling to abandon their homes under any circumstances. Evacuating civilians requires great patience. “This work of ours demands a lot of patience, because there are periods when you cannot evacuate anyone at all: people simply refuse to leave, and you risk your life, as some might say, for nothing,” states Kuba Stasiak, a Polish journalist and volunteer involved in civilian evacuation operations in Bakhmut.

The Invisible Cost of the Front

Bakhmut is not just the name of a battle; it is also a symbol of the human cost that the war has caused and continues to cause today, with the conflict still ongoing. Behind every battle lies the suffering of civilians, and the implications it brings for those who are not combatants but still endure the destructive nature of the conflict: emptied homes, cities reduced to piles of rubble, families displaced, separated, or killed, basements turned into living spaces, and elderly people refusing to leave the place where they were born and raised. Perhaps it is precisely these lives—desperately trying to cling to a sense of normalcy that no longer exists—that remain overshadowed by the military dimension of the war and are the most difficult to tell.

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