Bbefore Bakhmut became famous internationally like a fieldit was known within the Ukraine for salt, sparkling wine fermented in an old alabaster mine, and the roses that lined its roads. That physical town is gone now, with its buildings destroyed, its streets no man’s land, and its cemeteries strewn with metal. Russian forces destroyed it as they claimed, inch by inch, in a slow campaign between the summers of 2022 and 2023.
Ukrainian resistance he turned this town of Donbas into a legend of virtue. The last few bottles sold online by the winery are more than snatched French vintages, their prices driven by nostalgia and invective towards the country.
That report is a source of pride, but of little practical help to its 80,000 inhabitants, who scattered the Westerners to other cities and towns, raging in battle. For more than a year in their new homes they struggled with the question of the growing numbers of Ukrainians. What happens in a community that can never return home?
As Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, pledging to end the war24 hours”, Ukraine’s dreams of recovering and rebuilding areas occupied by Russia are fading. Any deal is expected to include conceding territory.
For many Bakhmutians now living in exile, the answer is not – or not only – to “move”. It rises on the outskirts of a small provincial town, freezing in winter and hot in summer, nevertheless it inspires ardent faith.
They replaced the rose bushes that had been driven to safety as Russian forces advanced, the city’s festivities celebrated in public, and their hostel – equipped with evacuation equipment – in the Kyiv satellite town of Irpin.
They still flock to Bakhmut “singing” across the country, painted in the city’s colors and dressed with their flags, where local officials dispense help and advice in cramped rooms and read the secular paper. Vperedor He foresaw.
“Bakhmut is not buildings or walls, Bakhmut is the people. Although the town has ceased to be a physical form, it lives on in the community, on our paper,” he said Vpered editor Svitlana Ovcharenko.
After an eight-month standstill at the beginning of the war, they are now printing 6,000 copies a week for forward distribution. Ukraine.
Both editions embrace memory, mourning and an attempt at hope. Bakhmut’s past is celebrated with a recent popular history column and a dead memory section, but the paper also urges readers not to let all of them be lost in grief.
“Time is passing. People are becoming more and more delusional, desperate,” he said. “One of our main goals is to inspire people, to encourage them, to wait to return home and start living.”
His articles often focus on people from Bakhmut, who rebuilt their businesses elsewhere, took up sports or made a success of a new life, in ordinary and extraordinary ways during three years, such as a seamstress who moved to Kyiv and opened a shop in a store. the central shopping area of the city.
Ovcharenko sees a contradiction by telling readers to forget that individual houses are separated by holding tight to the community formed there. But the love of Bakhmut rescued her, and she renewed the paper during the first months of her exile.
He left shortly after the 2022 invasion of Russia, as Bakhmut had been briefly occupied by Russian proxy forces in 2014 and was now near the frontline again. In preparation for the occupation, he stored the most important papers of the instrument in the garage and took a few important documents, expecting to return in a few weeks.
but the weeks stretched into months. From Odesa, he saw the destruction of his home on social media as drone footage captured shelling around his apartment block, first the building’s collapse, then its final collapse.
VperedThe offices in Peace Street, its carefully hidden equipment and century-old archives were reduced to rubble and ashes; exposed to both readers and reporters. The destruction of Bakhmut was supposed to bury his newspaper too.
But in the autumn of 2022, when the town was near the peak of its international reputation as a Russian target, Ovcharenko was seized with a new urgency.
There were still about 20,000 civilians living in barracks inside Bakhmut, as volunteers gave their lives to deliver food and offer evacuations. Without electricity or a mobile phone, these men were dangerously isolated, and many who were caught at the front seemed to have had no other choice.
Ovcharenko thought he could persuade some to leave. “Bakhmutians trust” He foresawso I thought I needed to produce at least one edition of the paper where I could report everything, everything that happened in the last eight months,” he said.
“We need to tell them: ‘The world knows about Bakhmut, buses can evacuate you, the government of Ukraine is still here and you will be helped – you can even go abroad.’ I waited for people who had already left who could share their stories.
She wrote most of the articles herself, and persuaded the Japanese embassy to pay for three printed editions. Major Bakhmut gave his first war conference. Astounded residents received paper returns and volunteers begged for more.
Ovcharenko found further support from the initiative to resist Russian propaganda through journalism from the Fondation Hirondelle and the Ukrainian Institute for Regional Media and Information.
“People on the frontline don’t have the confidence they have in Telegram.” [the social media platform]but they know the team in their local paper, and they trust it,” said Sabra Ayres, a foreign correspondent in Ukraine and at the center of the Oracle initiative.
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“If the local media disappears, what can take its place is Russian distortion, and we’ve seen how it divides communities.”
They support 23 issues across the South and East, and two-thirds of the print editions feature “come hell or high water” front pages, as well as. Vpered was received in Bakhmut, Ay. Many others were driven out of occupied cities by means of transport.
Last issue of Vpered entering Bakhmut was distributed by the military in March 2023. The fighting became so dangerous that civilian groups were no longer allowed to help, but the soldiers still wanted to get a few of the population’s papers.
At last the battle snarled, and they considered a certain soldier guessing a very bloody battle of 21St* at the end of the century When Russia claimed control of the lost Bakhmut, a symbolic victory rather than a major strategic victory, Ovcharenko prepared a new task.
“His newspaper is a link to so many people who have been expelled. It keeps that sense of belonging for people who have lost everything,” Ayres said. Local papers are also the police of democracy, following local officials who national papers do not have the resources to cover.
Vpered Bakhmut has witnessed life since the 1920s, going through different names, languages and domains; through wars and invasions from the east and the west; and shifts in power between Kyiv and Moscow.
Founded as a Russian-speaking “Proletarian Artyomovsk” town named after a Soviet hero – it was privatized in 2000. The latest Russian-language edition was published on February 23, 2022, on the eve of the invasion.
The subscriptions and advertising that kept the paper going were then no longer viable, and Ovcharenko’s current fund quickly ran out. A well-known question about the paper’s future echoes larger questions about the town and the people it serves.
“We don’t want to dissolve and disappear without a paper and a community sign,” he said. The future of the town, even if freed from Russian control, is complex and a cause for concern even for the most loving people.
it was to be heavily shelled and they determined that the defense should take ten years, and perhaps another decade in rebuilding, counting the refugees. Some believe that the battle that turned Bakhmut into a vast graveyard drenched the ground with too much blood for them to ever return.
“Perhaps it is appropriate to build another town, a new Bakhmut, somewhere else,” Ovcharnenko said. “On the other hand, if they somehow rebuild Bakhmut in an ancient place, let’s go back because it is unique and special.”
Nor again can the people make up for lost houses elsewhere; One of the many unique challenges for the people located at the front and the occupied areas is to compensate for the Russian attack.
Ukrainian inspectors are supposed to visit the affected property to assess the amount of damage, but because Bakhmut is remote, they cannot make those trips or sign off. Already the paper and the republic are fighting.
Ovcharenko said that her work is to ensure that she and the readers “don’t lose the sense of being Bakhmutian, don’t forget who you are”, although she often struggles to find happiness or even reason. “We all live one day at a time – you don’t think much about the future. And this is wrong, but this is our reality.