As Russian forces advanced, the Ukrainians in Donbas must choose to stay or go

The white armored police car is accelerating to the East Ukrainian town of Biluski, a steel cage installed on its body to protect it from Russian drones.

They have already lost one car, which is a direct blow from a drone to the front of the car; The cage, powerful drone jamming devices provide powerful surface, additional protection. But it is still dangerous here: the police, known as white angels, want to spend less time in Biluski.

The beautiful small mining town, just nine miles (14 km) of the confrontation line, is slowly destroyed by Russia’s summer attack. The local hospital and banks have been closed long ago. Plaster buildings are destroyed in the city field from drones, and trees along their broken and predatory paths. Elegant rows of rural homes with wavy surfaces and good gardens that last through the windows of the car. Some of them did not touch, others are burning shells.

An approximate estimate is that 700 people remain in Biluski from the pre -war population of 16,000. But there is little evidence for them – the city looks already deserted.

About 218,000 people need to be evacuated from the Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, including 16,500 children. The region, which is decisive to defend the country, carries the weight of Russia’s invasion, including daily attacks of drones and missiles. Some are unable to leave, others are unwilling. The authorities will help evacuate those in the areas on the front lines, but they cannot restore their home as soon as they are dangerous. Despite the increasing threat of Russian drones, there are those who prefer to take their chances of leaving their homes.

Police is looking for a woman’s house that wants to leave. Their truck cannot make it one of the ways. Therefore, on foot, a policeman goes looking, while he is from a drone and his invisible protection is receded while heading to the bottom of the lane.

In the end, the woman finds under the cuff of her hut, a sign of her door reading “People live here.” It has dozens of bags and dogs. It is a great thing for the police to carry: they have already been evacuated and their property inside the white truck.

Women face an option – leave behind her possessions, or stay. I decided to wait. There will be another evacuation team here soon and will take its property as well.

Surviving or going is to calculate life or death. Civil losses in Ukraine reached the highest level of three years in July this year, according to the latest available numbers from the United Nations, killing or wounding 1674 people. Most of them occur in the cities of the front line. The United Nations said that the same month witnessed the highest number of killing and short -range drones since the beginning of the comprehensive invasion.

The nature of the threat to civilians in the war has changed. Where artillery and missile strikes were once the main threat, they are now facing a chase by the first Russian vision aircraft (FPV), which follow and then the strike.

While the police leave the city, an old man appears to pay a bike. It is the only spirit that I see in the streets that day.

Most of those who remain in the cities of the front lines are the elderly, who make up a non -proportional number of civil losses, according to the United Nations.

Tell me to move next to the road, away from the non -existent traffic. Volodymyr Romaniuk is 73 years old and risk his life on the cooking utensils he collected on the back of his bike. His sister’s house was destroyed in a Russian attack, so it came today to save the utensils.

Not to be afraid of drones, ask. “What will be, as you know, in 73 years, I am no longer afraid anymore. I have already lived my life,” he says.

He is not in a hurry to get off the streets. He is one of the former referees of football, slowly removes a folded card from his jacket and shows me a colegium card from football referees. It is dated April 1986 – the month of Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

He is from West Ukraine and he can return there motivated by harm. “I stayed here for my wife,” he tells me. I have undergone multiple surgeries and will not be able to perform the trip. With this, he leaves, heads home to take care of his wife, a bowl of metal on the back of his bike as he rises along the empty street.

Slovenk returns beyond the front, 25 km away, and faces a different threat to drones. Shahid drones were called “bicycle aircraft” by the Ukrainians because of their turbulent engines. Sanders of them often attack Sloveinsk. There is a change in the insignificance of drones before diving and then exploding.

At night, Nadia and Olih Moroz heard them, but they will not leave Sloveinsk. They poured blood and sweating in this earth – and on the cemetery of their son, and tears as well.

He was twenty -nine years old, a first lieutenant in the army, who was killed by a cluster bomb near Sfatuf in November 2022. He and his father fought for the first time in 2015 against the Russians in Donbas. They worked side by side, as SAPPERS.

Serhii’s grave sits on the shape of a triednt on the side of a hill overlooking Sloveinsk, its image and the Ukraine map on the brushed black stone.

Nadia, 53, often. In the afternoon, I met it, the Russian artillery lands on the side of the nearby hill. But she pays great attention as she stir up the grave and whispered nothing sweet for her dead son.

“How can you lose the place where you were born, where you grew up, where your child grew up, where he found his last comfort?” She told me tears. “Then you live your whole life while feeling that you will not visit this place again – I cannot even imagine that now.”

But her first -year -old husband, 55, admits that they will leave when the fighting approaches. “I will not stay here, the Russians will put a goal on me immediately,” he says. Until then, they will remain under the horror of night drones so that they can stay near the final resting place for their son.

Life challenges do not stop when the war arrives. All Olha Zaiets is time to recover from cancer surgery. Instead, the 53 -year -old girl and her husband Olikander Bonomarinco, 59, had to escape from their home in Olikandervka. The Russians were only 7.5 km away and the bombing became severe. Their city was killed in Russian bombing and the principal as well.

“There was a blow – hit the adjacent house missile. The wave of the explosion shattered our roof tiles, and the doors, windows, gates, and fence were destroyed. We just left, and two days later it hit.

Now they live, temporarily, in a borrowed house in sviatohirsk. Not much better. We can hear the bombing outside, and the edges of the confrontation line are closer every day. But he will have to do it. They have no other place to go.

“Yes, we will have to move away from somewhere, but we do not know how or where,” she says in a room crowded with their property, is still waiting for her to be emptied. The savings of their lives have entered the hospital’s bills and now they are outside the options.

They left the city on Tuesday to collect the results of the first test. The news was good and you will not have to undergo chemotherapy. “We were happy, we felt that we were flying on wings,” she said.

But during their departure, Russia bombed the nearby town of Yarova, 4 km away. It was 11 am, and the elderly left their homes and gathered to collect their pensions. About 24 was killed and 19 were wounded in one of the bloody strikes against civilians in the war so far.

In Telegram, the head of the Donetsk administration, Vadim Villachkin, criticized the attack. “This is not a war – this is pure terrorism.”

He said, “Urging everyone, take care of yourselves. Eliminate safer areas in Ukraine!”

Additional reports by Liopov Schulodco