Weeks after Ukrainian government forces recaptured Lysychansk from the rebels, the residents of this shell-shocked town near the Russian border say they hope simply to rebuild their former lives — but fear that war could return to their doorstep.
Many homes and entire neighborhoods bear scars from the two-day fight for Lysychansk, a down-on-its-luck industrial town on eastern Ukraine’s largest river. Three weeks after the fighting ended in a rebel defeat, residents still are waiting to regain access to essential utilities in their homes, if they still have any. Hundreds of houses and apartments were gutted, or blown to smithereens, by tank and mortar shells.
“We still don’t have running water or gas. We only have electricity. How are people supposed to live?” said Alexander Tretyakov, 53, who emerged from a basement shelter last month to discover that a tank shell had collapsed the entire top floor of his home.
Many in this predominantly Russian-speaking town of 105,000 are sympathetic to the rebels’ cause but have accepted the Ukrainian army’s victory as the better option because they don’t believe they could live peacefully under rebel rule.
Tretyakov said he expects the Ukrainian government to pay to fix his home, but fears the rebels could recapture the town, rendering any repairs now pointless. He’s keeping his basement windows covered in three layers of bricks, backed by buckets of water, just in case his family finds itself on the front line again.
“We are not going to take these barricades down until this war ends. We don’t know whether it ever will,” he said.
For the time being, scenes of resurgent normality are playing out in Lysychansk alongside street rubble and high-rise residential battle zones.
The ATMs have resumed dispensing Ukrainian hryvni, the national currency, and long lines of customers are forming for what may be their first access to cash in many weeks. Most shops in the town’s five shopping centers have reopened, but prices are punitively high and stocks limited. Many travel on foot with shopping bags, reflecting the theft of cars by the retreating rebels as they escaped toward the Russian border.
One supermarket offered yogurt — lots of it, shelf upon shelf, one brand only. At a pharmacy, a woman seeking heart medicine was told her prescription was out of stock, and was offered an uncertain alternative.
“The people have bought out absolutely everything. What they need as well as what they don’t need. They took any medicine they could, because they did not know when all this will end,” said the pharmacist, who would provide only his first name of Andrei.
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