by Even a few kilometers away, the death rattle of another Ukrainian city echoed through the fog and mist. Russian warplanes were dropping more thousand-pound bombs on Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, reducing an already battered city to rubble and ash.
Since Jan. 1, President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have dropped about a million pounds of aerial bombs on an area spanning just 12 square miles, according to estimates by Ukrainian officials and british intelligence.
Avdiivka fell to the Russians on Saturday, after some of the most horrific and destructive fighting of the two-year war. In the end, Russia’s superiority in firepower and personnel overwhelmed Ukrainian forces for many months, even as Russia suffered staggering numbers of casualties.
The Ukrainians retreated under withering bombardment, fighting intense battles through ruined streets to escape Russian attempts to encircle them. Russian warplanes bombed the massive coke processing plant on the northern outskirts of Avdiivka, using incendiary munitions to blow up fuel tanks at the plant, unleashing a smog, according to Ukrainian soldiers fighting at the plant.
“Avdiivka is a constant bombardment of aerial bombs,” Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Special Assault Brigade, said Friday. “It feels like the largest number of aerial bombs on such a stretch of land in all of human history. These bombs completely destroy any position. “All buildings and structures, after a single airstrike, turn into craters.”
Surprisingly, more than 900 civilians had remained in the city, according to city administrators and police (out of a pre-war population of 30,000), living underground lives and surviving on food and supplies brought by aid workers.
After Ukraine’s withdrawal, its fate was unknown.
“I haven’t been able to locate anyone for the last two days,” said Ihor Fir, a mechanic at the coke plant before its destruction, who regularly risked his life to bring food, water and medicine to civilians still living in Avdiivka and surrounding towns.
The last messages he received were from people desperate to escape, but unable to move under the constant bombardment. Any survivors in the city, he said, would likely be stranded. “There’s no way they’re getting out,” he said by phone Saturday. “The road is under bombardment.”
In an interview last week, Fir called the conditions in Avdiivka “simply horrible” and shared videos and photos of the devastation from his last trip to the city earlier this month. “There are ruins everywhere,” he said. “Not a single house remains intact.”
Vitalii Barabash, head of the Avdiivka military administration, said multi-story buildings “collapse like houses of cards,” adding: “Very often people remain under the rubble and, unfortunately, we cannot reach them.”
It estimated earlier this month that at least 800 guided bombs, each weighing between 550 and 3,300 pounds, had been dropped within the city limits this year. His claim could not be independently confirmed, but the British intelligence agency reported that in just four weeks, Russian warplanes dropped some 600 guided bombs on Avdiivka, with up to 50 recorded in a single day.
Russian tactics in Avdiivka were “a textbook punishment campaign, which they have orchestrated in Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine and even Afghanistan,” Seth said. G. Jones, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is designed,” he said, “to increase the social costs of continued resistance and force the adversary and its population to surrender.” Putin hailed the capture of Avdiivka as “an important victory,” the Kremlin said on Saturday.
There are no reliable statistics on the number of soldiers or civilians killed in the bombings.
Fir shared photos of the ruins of a supermarket hit by a bomb last week while 15 people took shelter in the basement. At least 10 of them died and were buried under rubble, he said.
“A person goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up,” he said as he traveled to bring food and water to refugees in a village about five kilometers from Avdiivka. As the Russians advanced north and west, they also razed that village. At least half of the houses where the refugees took refuge were bombed.
Avdiivka has been on the front lines for a decade, since Russia’s first attempt to break up a part of eastern Ukraine in 2014. The constant skirmishes often took a backseat. Life for the 30,000 residents could be difficult, but manageable.
The city was then known for the brilliant blue lakes that filled the old quarries. The residents were proud and determined to stay and live an active life despite being on the front line. At the annual festival to celebrate the city’s founding in 1956, loud music drowned out distant shelling.
“Avdivka was a good, beautiful city,” said Victoria, 52, who was one of the last civilians to escape from Avdiivka earlier this month and asked that her last name not be used because she feared for her life. “We live. We work. Everything was fine for us.”
That all ended on February 24, 2022, when the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion.
The Kremlin immediately set its sights on Avdiivka, bombing from a distance and skirmishing in industrial zones, but failed again and again to breach the Ukrainian fortifications.
After his house was destroyed last May, Mr. Fir fled with his wife. As of June, there were fewer than 2,000 civilians in Avdiivka, most of them living largely underground.
The massive industrial plant with its labyrinth of Soviet-era nuclear shelters offered shelter to people as the fighting intensified. But eventually the civilians were evacuated and the plant became a fortress for the Ukrainian army. The civilians who remained in Avdiivka mostly took refuge in basements.
Victoria refused to evacuate. “My husband died from a bomb on July 15, 2022,” she said. He was drawing water from a well when he was blown to pieces, she said. When her mother also died, she only had her dog and her mother’s dog to keep her company.
“I didn’t want to leave because my relatives’ graves were still here,” he said.
Dozens of interviews conducted over the past two years show that the reasons civilians remain in war zones are complicated.
“I just endured it,” Victoria said. “I thought that sooner or later this had to end somehow. She didn’t stop, she just got worse and worse.”
In early October, Russia launched the first in a series of large-scale offensives aimed at widely encircling Avdiivka.
According to Ukrainian and Western officials, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed and wounded in repeated waves of attacks. Ukraine, despite suffering its own losses, held out.
The Russians came up with a new plan this winter, using a two-mile-long drainage tunnel to burrow under Ukrainian fortifications, infiltrate a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city, and ambush the Ukrainians.
As the Russians advanced, some civilians escaped on foot to the city center, where they were met by a special police unit, known as the White Helmets, for evacuation.
Ukrainian police shared video of an evacuation last month, in which civilians described the chaos and bloodshed as the Russians entered their neighborhood.
“When the Russian troops came in, it wasn’t just a nightmare, it was a kind of Armageddon,” said one elderly man. “Blood, deaths, looting. “Thirty-four years in the mines and everything I did for my family is all destroyed.”
Their accounts could not be independently verified.
But dozens of horror stories were relayed by residents who managed to get out as Russian forces pushed their way deeper into the city.
Viktor Hrydin, 87, who helped build the coke plant that has long been Avdiivka’s economic engine, refused to go even as his world burned around him. A neighbor, Tetiana, 52, came to take care of him.
On Christmas Day, a bomb exploded in their house.
“I was covered in blood,” Viktor said in an interview at a hospital where he was recovering. “And his blood flowed like a river.”
Tetiana’s leg was shattered and a bullet had gone through her arm. Still, she was able to get her to safety. She was recovering in a room with seven other seriously injured women. They were alive, but their lives were shattered.
“In old age I was left with nothing,” said Viktor.
Even after two years of unfathomable violence, Victoria was unprepared for Russia’s final attempt to annihilate her city.
Residents of Chernyshevskoho Street, near the city entrance, he said, “were shelled so intensely that people simply wrapped themselves in white sheets” and wandered outdoors, hoping to find a volunteer to carry them out.
“People were dying there every day,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to escape, no basement, nothing.”
“I realized that if I didn’t leave,” she said, “I would go crazy.”
She was one of the last people to leave Avdiivka, on February 2, before evacuation became impossible.
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from outside Avdiivka. Nataliia Novosolova and Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed reports.
