Today the fiercest fighting in the war in Ukraine is happening on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar. This is a small town in the Donetsk Oblast, about 10 kilometers from Bakhmut, which stands between the Russians and the pathway to the strategic cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Surgeon Evgeniy Tkachev is a native and resident of Chasiv Yar. He has been delivering humanitarian aid and evacuating people in the Donetsk region since 2014. His work has followed a series of political eruptions in Ukraine: the Euromaidan protests that began in late 2013 and ended in violence in Kyiv’s Independence Square in early 2014; the Russian annexation of Crimea in February 2014; and finally the separatist pro-Russian coup in April of that year, which sparked the ongoing Donbas war.
CHASIV YAR — I was born, baptized and married all in Chasiv Yar. Two of my children and four grandchildren were born here. We are a family of believers, Pentecostal Christians, and it is important for us to help others. I chose this profession. I worked as a veterinarian. I then retrained in human purulent surgery and went on humanitarian missions in Kenya and Rwanda.
I spent thousands of dollars to go to Africa to help people, but in 2014 what was happening in Africa came to us in the East of Ukraine. I evacuated my family to Kyiv and began to transport the wounded from front-line zones.
When the Russians captured Sloviansk, I delivered food, water and medicine to the city every morning and evacuated people in the evening. One guy from the church, also from Sloviansk, helped me. A month and a half later, separatists arrested us, took away our cars and put us in a cell at the city police station. When the soldiers saw African and European visas in my passport, they decided we must have been some important. They even offered to feed us twice a day, which did not happen with other prisoners.
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The next day we were brought to a cell where, as we later joked among ourselves, “Stalin’s troika” was seated at the table: The shield, a retired military colonel; a lawyer who claimed to be the owner of a law firm; and a factory engineer, whose nickname was Capone, for some reason. They said that we were taking people out of the city, and this was wrong. But since we were from the Donetsk Oblast, we would be given 30 days for re-education — sent to dig trenches.
Captured in Sloviansk
Three days later, an old man with a flashlight opened the door to our cell and declared: “There is no one here, leave.”
We thought that it was a trick, and that they wanted to shoot us while we were trying to escape, but we still decided to leave. It was dark, and we could hear someone shooting somewhere — somewhere a mortar was going off – the whole time, we were expecting a shot in the back.
The full-scale invasion was just another round of what I had lived with for eight years.
We reached a Ukrainian checkpoint at dawn. They recognized us, so as we approached, we heard: “Commander, come out, our taxi drivers are coming by foot.”
We went to visit my family in Kyiv for a couple of days. It turned out that four believers had been arrested right in the church. Everyone thought that they were in captivity, and the Russians would ask for a ransom. But it turned out that they had been taken to the forest by car, shot and burned.
On February 15, 2015, I joined up with the Ukrainian military and slipped into Debaltseve. As I drove up to the village of Lohvynove, there were cars burning, corpses on the ground and Russians walking around with white bandages on their shoulders.
They slowed me down, but I had on a white T-shirt with a red cross, and there were also medical stickers on my car. The Russians asked me: “Are you from the Red Cross?” I mumbled something incomprehensible, they opened the car and inside there were wounded, sick and disabled people. A soldier waved his hand and said: “Go on and get through quickly!”
Somewhere in the second half of 2015, things became quieter in the Donetsk region, and my family returned to Chasiv Yar. We opened a help center for refugees, distributed humanitarian aid there, and then built a farm – we had several thousand chickens, cows, pigs and turkeys.
Another round
At the beginning of 2022, American intelligence began to actively write that the Russians were preparing for a new round of war. We celebrated Christmas and began to prepare ourselves. With all the family money and donations, we bought generators, gasoline, food, medicine, and diapers. That is, we did everything we could so that our hospice could exist in an isolated state for several months.
A full-scale invasion began. The front closed in on us, and shelling of the city began. My wife and her elderly mother were evacuated to Switzerland, and we moved the hospice to the Khmelnytskyi Oblast in March and April of 2022. They gave us an abandoned school, we renovated it and moved 41 of our residents. My son and his wife are taking care of the hospice during the evacuation.
For me, the full-scale invasion was just another round of what I had lived with for eight years. That’s why I stayed in Chasiv Yar: God placed me here, so I am responsible for this place and these people.
I started working with the humanitarian mission “Proliska,” which cooperates with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I began to travel to villages that were on the front line, evacuating the bedridden, the disabled, and the wounded.
At first, I took them from the villages around Seversk, but as the front approached, I moved a little farther out – to Bakhmut, to Soledar.
Witnessing the deterioration
At first the shelling was rare but destructive in Chasiv Yar. Life was more or less like it was in any place in Ukraine at that time: there were big hits. But this had also happened in 2014 and 2015, and we got used to it.
The situation began to worsen when the fighting for Bakhmut started to intensify. In the winter of 2023, the city was already constantly under fire. Other volunteers and I set up a humanitarian center, drilled a well there so people would have water, and brought food, hygiene kits and medicine. A lot of military personnel and equipment arrived in the city, and it became clear that because of this they would start shelling even harder.
One day in March 2023, I arrived at the humanitarian center and saw that there had been a night bombing – there were no windows, the roof was full of holes, everything was in ruins. I realized that it was unsafe to stay in the city and moved to Druzhkivka [about 50 minutes by car from Chasiv Yar]. I spent the night there, then went to Chasiv Yar for the evacuation and distributed humanitarian aid. On weekends, I spent four hours in Kostyantynivka (the nearest big city) as a veterinarian.
By the end of May 2023, a shelling of such great intensity began in Chasiv Yar that it was impossible to restore the work of public services: there was no longer any water or heating, mobile networks disappeared, almost all the doctors evacuated, and later the police. People began leaving en masse. By July, about 10% of the city’s residents remained.
Chasiv Yar today
In January and February of this year, quite a lot of Russian drones began to fly into Chasiv Yar, and the shelling became even heavier. Drones attacked everything: civilian cars, military equipment, people on bicycles, and even people who were simply walking.
In January, I myself became the target of a drone. He clearly saw the UN humanitarian emblems, and me, in a vest with the very same identifying marks, and nevertheless hit the car.
Despite daily shelling, people continue to stay [in Chasiv Yar]. This happens in all front-line cities: 5 to 7% of the population always remains. These are not necessarily “waiters” (this is what they call people on the territory of Ukraine who are waiting for the arrival of the Russian military), although there are those, too.
There are also draft dodgers who come here intentionally from other cities: they know that no military commissars will go to Chasiv Yar. But mostly, it is people who have never traveled anywhere in their lives who stay, those who have been to Donetsk (about 50 miles away) a couple of times at most. They cannot imagine life outside their village.
There are about 700 people left in the city now, and absolutely all of them live in basements.
About two weeks ago, the front came very close to the city. Technically, the Russians are not in Chasiv Yar yet, but in reality, they are already near the outskirts of the homes, about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the center. The Russians are now also hitting the city with huge aerial bombs, as they did in Mariupol, Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Drones haven’t disappeared either, only now they can fly even closer.
In the past few weeks, Chasiv Yar has looked like this: you drive in, there is dust everywhere from military vehicles driving at breakneck speed, every day there are new craters or new broken homes, burnt-out cars stand on the side of the road, explosions are heard everywhere.
You come to the center, where the only operating store is, and where soldiers sit on benches nearby and drink coffee and Coca-Cola. This store is run by my friends. They bought Starlink, so it’s the third millennium there, and you can pay by credit card.
Residents have enough humanitarian aid (there is a huge amount of it in the city). They come to the store for cigarettes, to drink coffee and to buy fresh vegetables. I noticed that on the day they receive their pension, old people buy themselves something special: the most expensive sausage, some holiday chocolates, Swiss cheeses or shrimp. As if they understand that this may be the last delicacy of their lives.
About 99% of the houses in the city are damaged, and somewhere between 60 and 70% are completely destroyed. None of the houses have windows, and in some places the window holes are covered with film. There are about 700 people left in the city now, and absolutely all of them – both in private houses and in high-rise buildings – live in basements.
Only one family doctor
For a year now, there has been no water in the city for washing. People are used to it; they collect rainwater for their showers and do laundry the same way. Plus, they use wet body wipes from hygiene humanitarian kits. Mobile phone service is available in some areas of the city, and people know these places, go there and try to call their relatives.
There is only one family doctor left in the city (a woman who is over 80), two nurses and reserve of medicine, but there are no other medical services. If someone is seriously wounded, you need to find soldiers; they call military doctors, who provide emergency assistance by radio.
The local government organizes the public utility work – they dig graves and make coffins, but they cannot go everywhere. If someone in a village under active shelling dies, neighbors or relatives bury them under an apple tree on their own.
The military administration divided the city into several sectors, each with its own point for issuing humanitarian aid. All necessary information is there: who to leave with, our phone numbers posted. This was done so that people did not have to walk far from home while under shelling. All the same, these points are shelled, and people die there while receiving humanitarian aid.
A conveyor belt
I can’t even tell you how many people I have evacuated over 10 years. Thousands? Tens of thousands? From the very beginning I came to a decision for myself, and I continue to do this thanks to that decision. For me, evacuation is a conveyor belt; I don’t remember people’s stories and try not to maintain personal contact with those I get out. Pick up, drop off – that’s it. If I let everything pass through myself, I would probably go crazy.
But seeing your hometown like this and knowing that it could be captured hurts. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I never allowed myself to even think that Chasiv Yar could be occupied, and I firmly held the position that we must recapture our territories to the last. I have since changed my mind.
If Chasiv Yar is captured by the Russians, I will continue to do what I have been doing for 10 years. If not in Chasiv Yar, then in Kostyantynivka; if not in Kostyantynivka, then in Druzhkivka, and so on. I will not leave my native Donetsk region for anywhere else, and I will help until we win.
My family is used to my eccentricities, but they still worry. Every time I call my wife, she asks me to go to her. But what can I say? I just remind her that I love her very much.
