People who stayed through last year’s occupation are now abandoning the city amid fears of a ‘Bakhmut 2.0’
Antonina Sanina, 75, had spent the last two nights hiding in the basement of her apartment block in Kupiansk. She had endured six and a half months of Russian occupation last year, but now the renewed shelling of the city had prompted her to abandon her home. “I couldn’t take it any more,” she said a few minutes after local volunteers had driven her to safety.
She said eight neighbours hid in the cellar with her as the Russians targeted what they thought, wrongly, was a barracks nearby. “You could barely sleep. It would be on and off. Then you’d just wake up and you wouldn’t know – was that an actual hit or was it a dream?” A day before she took flight, one civilian was killed and 11 injured in a daytime artillery strike on the city centre.
About Author
More Stories
Psychiatrists warn new mental health unit at Westmead could be an ‘empty shell’ as workforce dispute drags on
Inside Taganrog: beatings, electrocution and starvation at prison where Ukrainians were tortured
Aston Martin limits imports to US because of Trump tariffs