In her elderly mother’s timber-frame summer kitchen, Ludmilla, 69, was chatting with her brother Victor, 72, who passed Vitya last week in the eastern city of Lysychansk. Despite the almost continuous bombardment by Russian troops just a few kilometers away, they had stayed at their parents’ house since the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February.
“My brother and I were talking,” said Ludmilla, who asked CNN to only use her first name for privacy reasons. “All of a sudden, Grads started falling down one by one.” The windows were blown out of their frames. “Everything cracked.”
She remembered the initial shock and confusion. “We stand there – my brother makes the sign of the cross and I scream. I turned away from him to look at the house and then another explosion went off and I was trapped under the rubble.”
Ludmilla was momentarily blinded. Blood flowed from her face and from wounds on her hands and feet, but she lived. She felt the touch of a neighbor who brought her to safety in her basement. Luckily, her 96-year-old mother was unharmed.
“I ask: ‘How is my brother, how is Vitya?’ And the neighbor closes his eyes and says: ‘Everything is fine.’
“I said to him: ‘Vova, I don’t believe it. If it were okay, he would have come to see us.’
“He says: ‘Everything is fine, sit down’ and goes out. And his wife sits next to me and says: ‘Luda, he doesn’t know how to tell you. Vitya is dead.’
“That’s it. And my brother would have been 73 on May 6th. And that’s it.”
Death and loss are far from the only traumas in this Russian-speaking region. For many, the war turned any remaining communion with Russia upside down. According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology last year, 43% of Ukrainians say they have relatives in Russia.
Even in the Russian-speaking east, that camaraderie had already waned since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatist movements. This war is bringing to light a tale of pain: of millions dead from starvation and forced Soviet collectivization, and of decades of attempts to wipe out Ukrainian culture and language.
It’s hard to identify with someone who believes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda – that the military is conducting a small and targeted operation that avoids civilian casualties. It may be even more difficult to tell if you don’t believe your neighbors, brothers and friends will be killed.
Ludmilla’s son and sister and their families all live in Russia.
“My granddaughter had a fight with my own sister’s granddaughter,” Ludmilla explained. “She said, ‘What are you making up?
“That’s Putin’s policy. Zombification,” Ludmilla said.
Whether Russia can conquer the entire Donbass – the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk – is an unanswered question after the overwhelming performance of its military in the first months of the war.
However, the devastation that Russia will wreak in this attempt is certain. Ukrainian officials say the attackers will bombard urban centers with their substantial artillery reserves until Ukrainians have nothing left to defend. And it will leave unspeakable vitias and ludmillas: dead, homeless or bereaved.
Serhiy Hayday, head of the military administration of the Lugansk region, said that Russian forces are destroying every frontline settlement in the region.
“Strategically, they (the Russians) can advance only in the areas that they have completely destroyed,” he told Ukrainian television on Monday. “So they destroyed the whole of Novotoshkivka, there was no place to hold the defense – and they occupied it.” The village of Novotoshkivka in Luhansk fell on April 25, according to Ukrainian reports.
However, Hayday does not believe his enemy will be able to fully capture Lysychansk’s low-lying sister city of Severodonetsk, located across the Siverskyi Donets River.
“They definitely need this win. But they will not attack Severodonetsk directly. They’ll try to encircle it,” he told CNN, standing on a tree-lined street in comparatively quiet Bakhmut.
“In two months they realized that they cannot break through the defenses. So they try to bypass or cut off the direction of Popasna and Rubizhne. And then the Luhansk region will be encircled. And then they don’t have to.” the soldiers lose, they will just shoot all the areas.”
These tactics aren’t just playing out on the eastern fringes of what’s left of the Ukrainian-controlled Luhansk region. It also applies to the south along the line of contact that has existed since the formation of the breakaway rump states in 2014-15; and in the north, as Russia advances south from Izium and west towards Lyman.
If successful, it would trap a devastating portion of the Ukrainian military. The main population centers of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk – so far largely unscathed by enemy artillery – would find themselves behind enemy lines.
Every day, backhoes are digging more defensive trenches in the fertile fields, and trucks are piling concrete and earth chicanes onto the highways. Last week a major railway bridge between Sloviansk and Lyman was destroyed; whether by Russian strike or Ukrainian sabotage is still unclear.
Hayday is convinced that the Ukrainian military can hold off the Russians for another two to three weeks. The Western powers’ small, maneuverable anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons are helping, he said. But only when the promised heavy artillery actually reaches the front can the tide be turned.
“Unfortunately, that’s not there yet,” he said. “And it could completely change the whole war.”
Ludmilla now spends her days with her mother and a stranger in a small hospital room more than an hour west in Bakhmut. Her face is pockmarked with wounds from the debris blasted in her face.
Most of their neighbors left for safer countries long ago. But many others have stayed – because they don’t have the means to leave, because they want to protect their homes, or because they deny that this war will be any different than the long-raged battles of this region since 2014.
“Until greed and avarice are overcome in mankind, these wars will never end,” said Ludmilla. “No matter how much a person has, there is always not enough.”