AVDIYIVKA, Ukraine – Yury Shevchenko hasn’t left Avdiyivka for more than two years, even though the Donetsk Oblast city of 35,000 people is battered by shelling almost every month and often cut off from water, heating and transport.
Just one thing stopped this 63-year-old man from leaving one of the hottest spots of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine: his passion for pigeons.
Every day Shevchenko feeds 50 pigeons that he keeps in a metal hut in the yard of his apartment building.
“How can I leave them? I’ve been devoted to them all my life,” Shevchenko said, cradling a small pigeon chick in his hand.
Fighting rages every day not far off in the industrial suburbs of Avdiyivka, 780 kilometers southeast of Kyiv and 22 kilometers away from separatist-held Donetsk.
The locals no longer pay much attention to the daily din of gunfire and shelling, but animals in the city cannot ignore the sounds of war. When they hear shelling, Shevchenko’s pigeons get scared and try to hide, the man said.
Toll of war
Traces of damage from shelling can be seen on almost every building, and every resident knows someone who was killed in the war.
By Avdiyivka’s city hall there is a big black slab with a pile of shell fragments and flowers underneath. There are nine photos of city residents, men and women, glued to the slab, which bears the words: “Dedicated to those killed in this ‘undeclared war.’”
But these nine represent only a small fraction of the number of war victims here.
As of mid-June, the police had recorded the deaths by shelling of 48 residents of Avdiyivka since the beginning of the war in April of 2014. Another 460 have been wounded – nine children among them. The fighting has only intensified of late: the United Nations has described this June as the bloodiest month in terms of the number of civilian casualties in the Ukrainian war zone since August 2015.
“Sometimes you look at it and recognize people you knew,” said Shevchenko’s friend Oleksandr Zakharchenko, 55, speaking of the monument to the city’s killed residents.
He is not related to the Donetsk-based separatist leader with the same name.
“And then you wonder if you’ll get killed as well, or not,” he added.
Forced to return
Unlike Shevchenko, Zakharchenko left Avdiyivka with his family for a while. But life in his place of refuge – Pavlograd in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast – turned out to be difficult. As an internally displaced person, Zakharchenko received only $32 per month in state aid, but had to pay $160 per month in rent for a house.
So he returned to Avdiyivka and resumed work at Avdiyivka Coke Plant, the main employer in the city. The plant is owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.
Despite being shelled several times, the plant is again working at full capacity, providing jobs for thousands of people, but also keeping them in a dangerous city.
Hanna Velychko, 33, also works at Avdiyivka Coke Plant, as do many other residents of her nine-story apartment house, which was constructed as a dormitory for plant workers.
One side of the building is a ruin of broken windows and chipped concrete walls, pocked by shell shrapnel. On the other side, freshly laundered clothes are hanged out to dry.
The building was damaged on July 18, 2015, when a separatist tank sped away from Donetsk airport and started firing at the building. A tank shell killed an old lady and her disabled grandson. Most people left the building, but 16 families are still there. They say they were not given any suitable alternative accommodation.
“We won’t leave this house, because otherwise nothing will remain of it,” Velychko said, sitting by the entrance door of her house and stroking a black stray dog. The dog becomes aggressive when it sees a person in military uniform.
Soldiers guard the checkpoint outside Avdiyivka, Donetsk Oblast on July 11. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Neighbors in uniform
And the military are not far off. A heavily damaged nine-story building next to Velychko’s now mostly serves as the housing for soldiers and military medics. There is an observation point on its roof, from where parts of the separatist-controlled cities of Donetsk and Yasynuvata are visible.
Closer by, black smoke rises from the industrial zone of Avdiyivka, which is frequently attacked by the separatists.
“You can see almost the whole of the front line from here,” said Denys Naumov, the press officer of the 58th army brigade, as his eyes swept over the view from the observation point. His is one of the several military units now defending Avdiyivka. In early February, the brigade took over the strategically important Avdiyivka industrial zone, previously no-man’s land, which strengthened the positions of the Ukrainian army but also provoked an intensification of shelling from the separatists. Almost every day soldiers are killed and wounded in this area.
Billeted in Avdiyivka’s dangerous district of summer houses, or dachas, the soldiers of the brigade believe the separatists’ side includes professional Russian army soldiers.
“The snipers shoot so well that it’s clear they’re professionals,” said one 20-year-old soldier, Denys Krylov.
Pigeon fan Yury Shevchenko shows two pigeons out of 50 birds that he keeps in a metal hut in the yard of his apartment house in Avdiyivka on July 10. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Mixed moods
Several locals live among the soldiers in the summer house area. The soldiers say they have mixed relations with the residents. Sometimes they help each other with food, but sometimes they only exchange bitter words.
Some residents accuse the military of provoking shelling, while the soldiers say those locals who took part in the separatist referendum in May 2014 are the cause of the war.
“However, I know it’s unfair that because of those 10,000 who voted in the referendum, some four million residents of the Donbas are now suffering,” said another soldier, Dmytro Shkoda, 24. Although he was born in Cherkasy, Shkoda knows Donetsk Oblast well, as he used to work in the city of Donetsk before the war.
Shevchenko, the pigeon fancier, said he doesn’t care anymore which side is in control of Avdiyivka.
“All of the authorities have always humiliated us,” he said.
The only thing he really wants is for the shelling to stop.
He spends almost all of his meager pension on feeding himself and his pigeons. And he recently lost a good supplementary source of food – fishing on the local river, the Kamyanka. A local newspaper wrote that fishing is unsafe: People on the river are an easy target for missiles.
