SLOVIANSK, Ukraine -- A bullet-riddled, blue and yellow entrance sign welcomes visitors to Sloviansk, a stark reminder of its three-month occupation etched into the Cyrillic lettering.
Sloviansk, a Donetsk Oblast city with a pre-war population of 115,000 people some 670 kilometers east of Kyiv, and was among the first cities in eastern Ukraine to be captured by Russian-backed insurgents on April 12, 2014.
That’s when armed men stormed the city and seized the police and security headquarters before spreading the chaos to nearby Kramatorsk, with a pre-war population of 160,000 people.
Russia’s war against Ukraine’s Donbas is in its third year but, to date, the recapture of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk by Ukrainian forces on July 5, 2014, has remained the most significant victory for President Petro Poroshenko’s government.
Touted as a moment of “huge symbolic importance,” the day will now be celebrated nationally, after parliament voted to add July 5 to Ukraine’s list of memorable dates and anniversaries.
But recovery has proven to be hard and difficult for locals who returned home — or to what remains of home.
In Sloviansk, a sense of normalcy has returned to the streets, but pockets of the city are still reeling from the war.
The heart of the city’s tourism industry, Sloviansk’s renowned health and rehabilitation resort, now largely serves as the living headquarters for the Ukrainian military guarding the city.
Natasha Matvienko, who has worked at the resort in various roles since 1982, said many employees had been forced to take prolonged leave and reduced hours while the center was at limited capacity.
One of its three sanatoriums – the Sloviansk sanatorium – reopened last month but the resort as a whole will be unable to run at full capacity while the military is based there.
“The Anniversary sanatorium is closed, Donbas (sanatorium) is also closed because the soldiers are there,” Matvienko said. “If the soldiers are occupying the sanatorium, how can they open it?”
Like the city’s tourism industry, the housing sector also took a heavy hit.
In the private sector, 124 homes were destroyed while more than 2,000 houses suffered varying degrees of damage. And those were only the cases registered with the local council.
None of the recovery projects in the private housing sector have been government-funded to date, with the Ukrainian parliament so far only adopting a system of funding for the public sector.
Sloviansk Mayor Vadim Lyah said the rebuilding effort was driven by a combination of humanitarian aid, volunteers and residents undertaking their own repairs.
He said that, thanks to the Red Cross and religious organizations, 20 houses in the private sector have been rebuilt while another 20 are expected to be repaired this year.
In the public housing sector, 25 apartment blocks were damaged.
“Thanks to the regional and local council budgets, these buildings have been restored, except for three buildings that were completely razed and were not subject to rebuilding,” Lyah said.
It left 24 families displaced.
“It’s unlikely that we will get government funding for the restoration of those three buildings so this year, with council funding, we will acquire housing for them,” Lyah said.
A stone’s throw from the city, in the small village of Semyonovka, some residents are still awaiting financial help to repair their homes.
Anna, a retiree who refused to give her last name, has been living next the ruins of her Semyonovka home for nearly two years. Explosives struck her house twice during the occupation and little more than a cookhouse has survived.
Desperately clinging to the remains of the life she has built, the 75-year-old sleeps on a bullet-riddled couch in the cramped cookhouse during the warmer months.
“In the summer I work in the garden,” she said. “Sometimes my nephew comes to visit.”
Without heating or bathing facilities, she is forced to leave her home when the temperatures drop below zero to lodge with relatives who live in Nikolaevka.
Further along Anna’s street, homes are in various stages of repair.
Contractors are patching up a roof two houses down and, across the road, the neighbors are painting newly plastered walls.
A 20-minute drive into Kramatorsk shows evidence of the war also streaked across aged buildings.
Patches of new brickwork stand out on old houses caught in the shelling.
Elena Szimble and her husband Alexander were getting ready for bed one early June night when the impact hit their apartment block.
“It was as if a wave had suddenly hit- all the frames, the windows shattered and shards flew into the house,” she recalled.“We took a coat and bottle of water and fled to the basement.“
There was about 15 of us…we sat there and trembled. The men were smoking.
”They emerged at four in the morning to find shards of glass and debris littered across the yard. When we walked back into our apartment there was glass everywhere- as if it was minced in a meat grinder,” Szimble said. “It took a us a week to clean up.”
But where the war created destruction, it also planted the seed for social development in the Donbas.
Ksenіya Parkhomenko, 21, remembers spending the month of May confined to her Kramatorsk home before her parents sent her to Kharkiv early that summer.
“I was not allowed to leave the house because it was dangerous,” she said.
When she returned, it was to a growing volunteer movement within the city.
“At first the representatives of the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ threatened to come back and when you hear that, it gives you the chills,” Parkhomenko said. “Because you already know what that means- that nothing will be working and you will be cut off from life.
“That’s why we’re all now trying to take part in the community.”
Parkhomenko said her parents and friends have been collecting supplies to help familiar faces who joined the Ukrainian government’s anti-terrorist operation against the pro-Russian militia.
Volunteering hasn’t been the only movement to flourish in the past two years. Civic activism and patriotism – recent phenomenons in the post-Soviet world – have also been on the rise in the Donbas.
Less than six months following the liberation of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the activist group Stronger Communities of Donetsk was up and running, with branches in cities across the region.
For the past two year, the nongovernmental organization has been lobbying for a number of changes, from more government transparency to European integration for Ukraine.
Group coordinator Valentyn Krasnoperov said such demonstrations, which promote pro-European and pro-Ukrainian views, could have resulted in beatings and even killings during the occupation.
“Today people can express such views freely,” he said.
When Ukrainian forces recaptured Sloviansk and Kramatorsk two years ago, Sloviansk resident Lyudmila Skoropisova was among the thousands of people who returned.
Her daughter-in-law and grandchildren left the city shortly after the shooting started in May, when her granddaughter started exhibiting signs of trauma at the sound of gunfire.“She was so scared she would collapse on the floor and cry,” Skoropisova recalled.
She soon followed with her husband and son, after the two men were caught in a crossfire on the way to buy water from the shops.
“They hid behind a metal garage and survived but near that house, two babushkas sat on a bench… one was killed and one was injured,” she said. “They came home and we decided to leave.”
Skoropisova remembers looking back at her home and wondering if they would ever return, before getting in the car with her husband and son and driving away. “I understood that at my age, I will never be able to earn all that I had,” she explained. “July 5 meant a lot to us. It meant we could come home.”
