“It almost doesn’t exist anymore,” said the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial city destroyed by a Russian attack that was shocking even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.

Vovchansk does not have a great history, but its geography could not be more tragic. Just five kilometers (three miles) from the Russian border, Ukrainian military drone footage this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.

And the situation has only gotten worse since then.

“Ninety percent of the center has been flattened,” said Tamaz Gambarashvili, the tall, uniformed mayor who runs what remains of Vovchansk from the regional capital Kharkiv, an hour and a half drive away.

“The enemy continues its intense bombardment,” he added.

Six out of 10 buildings in Vovchansk were completely destroyed, and 18 percent were partially destroyed, according to an analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence community Bellingcat. But the devastation in the city centre, which was leveled north of the Vovcha River, is much worse.

AFP and Bellingcat joined forces to tell the story of how an entire city was wiped off the map, building by building, in just a few weeks, and to show the human cost.

The pace of destruction dwarfed even that of the “meat grinder” Donbas region city of Bakhmut, where some of the war’s most brutal killings took place, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP.

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“I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles took place there,” Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky insisted.

“What happened in Bakhmut in two or three months happened in Vovchansk in just two or three weeks.”

– Occupied, then released –

The population of Vovchansk before the war was approximately 20,000. It now lives only in the memories of those survivors who managed to escape.

Beyond the factories, the city includes a “medical school, a technical college, seven schools and many kindergartens”, library head Nelia Stryzhakova told AFP in Kharkiv.

“There was even a workshop that made cars for period films. We were even interesting in our own way,” Stryzhakova, 61, insisted.

Add to this a regional hospital rebuilt in 2017 with about 10 million euros ($10.8 million) in German aid, a church filled for religious holidays, and a vast hydraulic machinery factory. Both armies are now fighting over the ruins that were once the economic lifeblood of the town.

Vovchansk was quickly occupied by the Russian army after invading Ukraine in February 2022, but was retaken by Kiev in a lightning counteroffensive that autumn.

Despite regular Russian bombardment, things were relatively quiet. Then on May 10, something very different happened.

– Poorly defended –

Tired Ukraine’s 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk after weeks of tough fighting 100 kilometers to the south, when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.

“We detected two Russian armored troop carriers that had just crossed the border,” recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who led the unit.

They were the advance guard of one of the most intense Russian offensives since the start of the war, in which Moscow threw several thousand troops into the city.

Yaroslavsky said there were “no fortifications or mines” that would slow their advance, and he was still angry at the “neglect or corruption” that allowed this to happen.

“17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because some people didn’t build walls,” the 42-year-old civil servant said.

“Today we control the city, but what we control is a pile of rubble,” he added bitterly.

President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled his trip abroad to go to Kharkiv, acknowledging that the Russian army had advanced five to 10 kilometers into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the people of Vovchansk were living a nightmare.

– ‘Drones like mosquitoes’ –

“The Russians started bombing,” said Galyna Zharova, who lives at 16A Stepova Street, a now-ruined apartment building, as confirmed by footage analyzed by Bellingcat and AFP.

“We were right on the front lines. No one could come and take us out,” added the 50-year-old, who now lives with his family in a university dormitory in Kharkiv.

“We went down to the basements. All the buildings were burning. We were stuck in the basements until June 3 (for about four weeks),” added her husband, Viktor, 65.

The couple eventually decided to escape on foot. “Drones were flying around us like wasps, mosquitoes,” Galyna recalled. They walked for kilometers before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.

“The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything,” sighed the librarian Stryzhakova. “No one could have imagined that we would be wiped off the face of the Earth in just five days.”

125,000 books in the library he ran at number 8 Tokhova Street were reduced to ashes.

More than half of the families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. In Vovchansk, before the war in the Donbas region began in 2014, people crossed the border every day to shop, and Russians flocked to the city’s markets.

“There are a lot of blended families,” Stryzhakova said. “Parents, children, we’re all connected. And now we’ve become enemies. There’s no other way to put it.”

The Russian defense ministry did not respond to AFP’s questions about what happened in the city.

Mayor Gambarashvili, who was struck by shrapnel in his leg while overseeing the evacuation of the city, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.

Dozens, no doubt. Maybe more. There were approximately 4,000 people in Vovchansk on May 10, mostly elderly, as most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.

– Families divided by war –

Kira Dzhafarova, 57, believes that her mother, Valentina Radionova, who lives in a small house with a charming garden at number 40 Dukhovna Street, is probably dead.

Their last phone conversation took place on May 17. “I’m 85 years old and I’m not going anywhere,” his mother insisted. Satellite images and eyewitnesses confirmed that the house was completely destroyed.

“I’ve known it’s over since then,” sighed Kira, who provided DNA for identification in case the conflict ended.

In a particularly cruel irony, his mother, a Russian citizen, had moved to Vovchansk to be equidistant between her two estranged children.

Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and officially became a Ukrainian two years ago. His older brother, who he believed supported Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family’s hometown and the first major Russian city on the other side of the border.

Kira, a psychiatrist, now refers to him only as her “ex-brother.”

AFP was unable to contact him directly.

70-year-old Volodymyr Zymovsky is also missing. On May 16, he decided to escape the bombardment by car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raisa and a neighbor. Zymovsky and his mother were shot and killed “most likely by a Russian sniper,” Raisa said.

Under the rain of bullets, the 59-year-old pediatric nurse was caught by Russian soldiers before she even got out of the car and was detained for two days. He managed to escape, hiding in his neighbor’s basement one night and eventually escaping through the woods.

In a calm and measured voice, he described his harrowing journey. There’s only one thing that matters to her now: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a proper funeral.

-‘They took my son’-

A rumor circulated among the survivors for days that the bodies strewn on the streets of Vovchansk had been thrown into a mass grave. No one knows where and by whom.

A handful of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandre Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at least three people when he returned to his old apartment on a bicycle in mid-September to collect his belongings.

Garlychev lived at 10A Rubezhanskaya Street, in the relatively protected southern part of the city. He left only on August 10th.

Survivors of Vovchansk and even a few officials quietly wonder whether it will be rebuilt, given its proximity to the border, no matter how the war ends.

Raisa Zymovska remained silent for a long time when asked whether she could forgive her husband’s murderer. Then he replied in a whisper: “I don’t know, actually I don’t know. As a Christian, yes, but as a human being… What can I say?”

As for the librarian Stryzhakova, she can no longer open a Russian book, even a classic, because her only son Pavlo was killed in the Battle of Bakhmut.

“I know literature is not a crime, but Russia, all of this disgusts me. They took my son, this is personal.”