On a sunny afternoon this week the beach in the frontline Ukrainian city of Sloviansk was busy. Bathers paddled in a lake, sunbathed and sipped tea. At 3.30pm there was a sudden thunderclap. An artillery shell had crashed nearby, sending up a plume of twisting grey smoke. Ducks took off in panic. The swimmers glanced nonchalantly upwards and carried on bobbing in the salty water.
“After three years of fighting we’ve got used to booms. They don’t bother us any more,” Alyona, a pensioner in a swimsuit, explained. She pointed to a concrete box beyond a row of wooden changing cabins and outdoor showers. “If the bombs are close we’ve got a shelter,” she said. Alyona and her friend waded into the shallows. A man selling grapes sat engrossed reading a book.
Sloviansk’s residents have lived with explosions since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first began his imperial campaign to conquer Ukraine. Recently the war has become harder to ignore. Earlier this month Russian kamikaze drones reached the M-03 highway, 2km [1.2 miles] outside the city for the first time. They have swooped on buses and cars. One person has been killed and 10 injured.
On Friday workers were hanging nets between slender pine trunks and installing electronic warfare systems. This anti-drone corridor will cover the road connecting four cities in the northern part of Donetsk oblast: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka. If Ukraine were to lose this hilly fortress belt, Russian forces could race across a flat steppe landscape, north to Kharkiv and west to the capital, Kyiv.
Sloviansk’s mayor, Vadym Liakh, said those who predicted a Kremlin breakthrough in eastern Ukraine were wrong. In August, Russian soldiers seized a string of villages around the town of Dobropillia, advancing 10 miles [15km] in two perpendicular lines. Ukrainian forces have since retaken most of these settlements, killing and capturing enemy troops – proof, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, that Moscow isn’t winning. In other parts of the frontline the Russians are making gains.
Liakh said: “If they carry on at this pace it will take a year and a half to reach Sloviansk. Maybe longer. After that we will see what happens.” He described himself as an optimist, despite the fact the Russians are 15 miles [25km] away. “Of course we have a future,” he said. He pointed out that Moscow launched a big offensive last year to capture the city of Pokrovsk, still the scene of intense fighting. So far it has been unable to do so.
The mayor didn’t put much faith in Donald Trump’s latest apparent pivot towards Ukraine, made after talks with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York. “How can you take it seriously when Trump changes his mind every day?” he wondered. He said Sloviansk needed missiles and long-range weapons to shoot down hostile drones and to knock out oil refineries deep inside Russia. “It’s about results, about our own objectives, and not what they say over there.”
During his Alaska summit with Trump, Putin reportedly agreed to stop fighting if Ukraine surrendered all of Donetsk oblast including Sloviansk. The mayor said the offer was a KGB information operation to demoralise Ukraine’s defenders. In reality, Putin would take concessions and keep going, he said. “No one is going to give up Sloviansk. Not me, not our soldiers. Since when has Putin kept his word about anything?”
Liakh acknowledged that a small number of civilians – known as zhduni or those who wait – support Putin. They include some of the 6,000-odd residents who remain in Kostyantynivka, which Russia is trying to encircle, living under withering fire. Many are poor and uneducated. Some collaborate and betray Ukrainian positions, the mayor said. Others refuse to leave their homes because they are elderly and have nowhere to go.
This month Sloviansk celebrated its 380th anniversary. The city – known since the 17th century as a producer of salt and surrounded by ancient oak forests – is a symbolic Russian target. In 2014, a Russian militia occupied Sloviansk for nearly three violent and chaotic months. It murdered local politicians and kidnapped foreigners, before eventually retreating to the oblast capital of Donetsk after a Ukrainian counterattack.
Some believe Moscow wants to recapture Sloviansk for propaganda purposes: to avenge the defeat of its earlier covert invasion. There are practical reasons as well. Occupied Donetsk has run out of water. The Kremlin’s long military campaign to annex the industrial Donbas region – “historical” Russia, according to Putin – damaged a Soviet-era canal network. It connects the Siverskyi Donets river with urban settlements.
Water continues to flow in Ukrainian-controlled areas. The mayor said the Russians could fix their self-created problem by repairing pumping stations in wrecked cities such as Bakhmut, which they took in 2023, and by investing in infrastructure. “They don’t rebuild anything. They just smash everything up and plant a Russian flag on top of piles of rubble,” he said.
Residents left Sloviansk after Putin’s full-scale invasion. Many later came back. Today’s population is 50,000. The number is swollen by soldiers and people displaced from nearby areas swallowed up by fighting. The city has the region’s last maternity hospital, where 40 to 50 babies are born each month. Schools remain shut, working online. The authorities have not yet ordered families with children to leave. “Life goes on,” the mayor said.
The local economy is booming, thanks to an influx of well-paid military personnel. Real estate agents rent two-bedroom flats to soldiers for $35 (£26) a day. They hire them for when wives and girlfriends come to visit. New shops and cafes have opened up. Sloviansk boasts a bakery and an Italian restaurant, Palermo, serving pasta and Milanese soup.
There are even weddings. In Sloviansk’s park, a wartime couple, Petro and Olena, posed for photos on a picturesque bridge and under a willow tree. Petro, a soldier, said he and his new bride had dated for a year. “I have a week’s leave. Then I go back to the front,” he said. Nearby, small children played on a slide. A football match was under way in a five-a-side pitch, with six players. Teenagers strolled down an avenue of white mulberries.
The park has a rusting ferris wheel, a collection of parrots and a petting zoo. Sofia Karasova said she had come to feed carrots to the donkeys with her soldier boyfriend Oleksandr. “I believe in my country and my people. We have right on our side. The Russians are bad,” she said. She added: ‘I’m hopeful. Mostly they occupy smaller places than Sloviansk. For sure they are trying to squeeze us. We need more help from western countries.”
Parts of the city have been badly damaged. In Polyova Street, a Russian airdropped bomb flattened two houses. Inna Valentinovna said she was at home with her dog on 14 August when the strike took place. Several cottages burned down. “There was a ginormous bang. My windows blew in. For now I don’t want to leave,” she said. Down the road was school number 18, boarded up after a previous rocket attack.
In July two bombs demolished Sloviansk’s cake factory, killing 17-year-old Gleb Plokhoi who lived in the house next door. His mother was badly injured. Another missile struck Sloviansk’s Hotel Ukraine. The city was once home to eight sanatoriums, offering therapeutic mud treatments. All have been hit. The Slovianskyi spa complex has been shredded. An ambulance minus wheels is propped up outside its mangled entrance. A woman was injured in this week’s strike near the lake.
In between bombardments, Sloviansk enjoys moments of magical calm. At night residents switch off lamps to avoid attention from marauding drones. With no light pollution millions of stars illuminate a dark velvet sky. Dawn begins with the cooing of collared doves; dusk brings a pulsing symphony of cicadas and a choir of doleful yapping dogs. In summer, sand martins flit above the city’s lakes, framed by an old salt factory and a tall brick chimney.
The war has become so routine that nobody pays attention to air raid sirens. Alarms are broadcast from speakers on the roof of Sloviansk’s city administration building, once – in 2014 – the redoubt of trigger-happy Russian gunmen. It is unclear if they will return. Svitlana Vunichenko, an adviser to the mayor, said in the meantime people had to work, bring up their families and enjoy themselves. “You have to live,” she said.
