The Kramatorsk Diaries part 33

Relocating to Kramatorsk...

Paul Conroy – Kramatorsk

After Alaska, Trump blinked into the wreckage of his own vanity. Humiliated. Outplayed. Ukraine — abandoned, traded, forgotten. The peace deal? Dead before it drew breath. Putin flew home smirking. Trump slouched back to Mar-a-Lago, muttering about Nobels and ungrateful Europeans. The only thing solid in the wreckage — Putin’s hunger for Donbas.

Pokrovsk, one of the three main cities in free Donbas, is all but uninhabitable — a hollowed-out ghost town, another casualty in a long line of Ukrainian cities. Only two holdouts remain: Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. I’ve been in Kyiv since May, restless. So I quit my apartment, packed the car, and headed east — to witness the defence of Kramatorsk up close.

The drive east is monotonous. A thick mist hangs low, draining the world of colour. The yellow sunflowers are gone — their bright defiance replaced by miles of black, ploughed earth. Somewhere beyond the haze lies Kramatorsk, the next city earmarked for destruction by Putin’s ravenous war machine.

At the checkpoint in Izium, a soldier checks my papers.
“Where are you going?”
“Kramatorsk.”
He pauses, smirks. “Watch out for FPVs,” he says, dropping his hand like a drone and miming the explosion.

I drive on, his little pantomime looping in my head. The road is ruler-straight, wide open, suicidal. Russian lines sit eighteen miles away. They’ve been picking off cars here all month. Every few kilometres, a burnt-out shell rusts in the grass — the roadside museum of bad luck. I keep my eyes on the sky, drift a little, and almost earn my place in the collection.

Then, finally, sanctuary — a tunnel of anti-drone nets, fine nylon stretched over wooden frames. For a few miles, it’s calm. No sky, no threat, just the hum of the engine. Then, as suddenly as it began, the cover ends, and I’m back in the open. The “now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t” rhythm of the nets turns the drive into a grim game — brief spells of relief followed by foot-to-the-floor terror.

At the final checkpoint before Kramatorsk, the soldiers wave me through. Their smiles say it all — the man’s been through enough.

Inside the city, the silence hits like a wall. I thread through empty streets once crammed with 170 thousand people. Now maybe 80 thousand remain. Kramatorsk has been shelled, bombed, gutted — artillery, missiles, airstrikes, the full repertoire.

And now there’s a new trick in the show. Last week, a Russian fibre-optic drone — un-jammable, precise — flew straight down the main street in daylight and blew a pickup to pieces.

I’m relieved to see the lights are on. Last week, an Iskander missile tore through the power station, wiping it out and plunging most of Donbas into darkness. Somehow, the engineers have the city running again — no spare parts, no sleep, just grit and genius. After the war, someone will write papers about them — the engineers who kept the lights on while the world looked away.

I find the apartment, park up, exhale — the day finally over. Then it hits. Two explosions. A compression wave slams the car, shaking the old Soviet blocks. For a second, the city holds its breath. Then comes the metallic rain — debris clattering on concrete, car alarms wailing into the chaos. And then, slowly, it all settles back to normal. Until the next time.

I haul myself up two flights of stairs, unlock the door, and step straight into 1932. A glitch in the space-time continuum. The décor’s an archaeological treasure — a shrine to the moment USSR scientists perfected the synthetic orange-beige-brown molecule, later adopted by every caravan owner of the 1960s.

I’d been awake for forty-eight hours. My “early night” in Kyiv ended in fire — a combined missile and drone strike that killed the power across half the city. Exhausted, I lay in bed, listening. Then came the whine — that thin, rising buzz of a Russian drone circling overhead. The pitch climbed. An attack dive.

The blast hit hard, slamming the half-open window wide. A shockwave rolled through the room, scattering contents and sleep alike. Five minutes later, another drone arrived, circling, whining, then dropping — same sound, same violence, same outcome.

Saturday morning was for errands. First job — a kettle. Google claimed a shop nearby was open. Hard to believe, but I rolled the dice, memorised the route — GPS is often jammed to confuse Russian missiles — and set off.

To my surprise, the shop was real. Open, even. Five startled assistants stared as I walked in — a rare customer from the outside world. “Електричний чайник,” I said in mangled Ukrainian. A burly man in his fifties led me to a glass case lined with high-tech-looking kettles. I chose the one that best matched my 1930s time-capsule chic — the cheapest.

Paying was an adventure: bill, cashier’s window, receipt, collection. Then — two explosions. The shop trembled, display cases rattled, and everyone froze, eyes fixed on me, silently willing the Russians not to interrupt the sale. I smiled, took the kettle, said my goodbyes one by one, and walked out clutching my treasure.

I like Kramatorsk. After the polished charm of Kyiv, there’s grit here — a kind of hard-edged strength. The Russians are eighteen miles away and closing, but no one’s giving an inch. If they want it, they’ll have to fight for every metre. The battle ahead will be bloody.

For now, Kramatorsk holds the line, but winter is coming. The Russians are already hunting the power grid. Soon it will be dark, cold, merciless.