Before Bakhmut became famous internationally as a battleground, it was known inside Ukraine for salt, sparkling wine fermented in an old alabaster mine and roses that lined its streets. That physical town is gone now, its buildings in ruins, its streets a no man’s land of makeshift cemeteries laced with mines. Russian troops destroyed it as they claimed it, inch by inch, in a slow campaign between the summers of 2022 and 2023.
Ukrainian resistance turned this Donbas town into a byword for courage. The last few bottles rescued from the winery sell online for more than French vintages, their prices charged by nostalgia and patriotism.
That reputation is a source of pride but little practical help to its 80,000 residents who scattered west to other cities and town as the fighting raged. For more than a year, in their new homes, they have been grappling with a question facing increasing numbers of Ukrainians. What happens to a community that may never be able to go home?
As Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, promising to end the war in “24 hours”, Ukrainian dreams of recovering and rebuilding areas occupied by Russia are fading. Any deal is expected to include conceding territory.
For many Bakhmutians now living in exile, the answer is not – or not only – “move on”. A small provincial town on the edges of the steppe, freezing in winter and boiling in summer, it nonetheless inspires passionate loyalty.
They have replanted the rose bushes that were driven to safety as Russian forces advanced, celebrated town festivals in public and reopened their hospital – equipped with evacuated equipment – in the Kyiv satellite town of Irpin.
They still gather at Bakhmut “hubs” across the country, painted in town colours and draped with its flag, where local government officials dispense aid and advice in cramped rooms, and read the century-old paper Vpered, or Ahead.
“Bakhmut is not buildings or bricks, Bakhmut is people. Even though the town ceased to exist in physical form, it lives on in the community, in our paper,” said Vpered editor Svitlana Ovcharenko.
After an eight-month halt at the start of the war, they now print 6,000 copies a week for distribution across Ukraine.
Each edition juggles memory, mourning and an attempt at hope. Bakhmut’s past is celebrated with a newly popular history column, and its dead in a remembrance section, but the paper also urges readers not to get lost in grief for everything taken from them.
“Time is passing. People are getting more and more disappointed, losing hope,” she said. “One of our main aims is to inspire people, encourage them, to stop waiting to return home and start living.”
Her articles often focus on people from Bakhmut who restarted their businesses elsewhere, took up sports or made a success of a new life in ordinary and extraordinary ways in the last three years, such as the seamstress who moved to Kyiv and opened a shop in the city’s fashionable central shopping area.
Ovcharenko sees the contradiction in telling readers to forget shattered individual homes while holding tight to the community formed there. But that love for Bakhmut rescued her, and revived the paper, during the early months of her own painful exile.
She left soon after Russia’s 2022 invasion, because Bakhmut had been briefly occupied by Russian proxy forces in 2014 and was near the frontline again now. Preparing for occupation, she stored the paper’s heavy equipment in a garage and took a few key documents, expecting to be back in a few weeks.
Instead, weeks stretched into months. From Odesa she watched the destruction of her home on social media as drone footage captured shelling near her apartment block, the first hits on the building and then its final collapse.
Vpered’s offices on Peace Street, its carefully hidden equipment and century-old archive were reduced to rubble and ashes; both its readers and reporters were displaced. The destruction of Bakhmut looked set to bury its newspaper too.
But in autumn 2022, when the town was near the peak of its grim international fame as a Russian target, Ovcharenko was seized by a new urgency.
There were still about 20,000 civilians sheltering in freezing basements inside Bakhmut, according to volunteers risking their lives to deliver food and offer evacuations. Without electricity or mobile phone coverage, these people were dangerously isolated, and many seemed trapped on the frontline through the that conviction they had no other option.
Ovcharenko thought she might be able to persuade some to leave. “Bakhmutians trust Ahead, so I thought I needed to produce at least one edition of the paper where I could put in all the information, everything that happened over the last eight months,” she said.
“I needed to tell them: ‘The world knows about Bakhmut, buses can evacuate you, the Ukrainian government still exists and you will be helped – you can even go abroad.’ I looked for people who had already left who could share their stories.”
She wrote most of the articles herself, and persuaded the Japanese embassy to pay for three print editions. The Bakhmut mayor gave his first interview of the war. Astonished residents welcomed the paper’s return and volunteers begged for more.
Ovcharenko found longer-term support from a project to counter Russian propaganda through journalism managed by Fondation Hirondelle and Ukraine’s Institute for Regional Media and Information.
“People in frontline areas don’t trust things on Telegram [the social media platform], but they do know the team at their local paper, and they trust it,” said Sabra Ayres, a foreign correspondent based in Ukraine and media mentor on the project.
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“If local media disappear, what can come in to take their place is Russian disinformation, and we have seen how that divides communities.”
They support 23 outlets throughout the south and east, and two-thirds produce print editions delivered to frontline areas “come hell or high water”, just as Vpered was taken into Bakhmut, Ayres said. Several others are exiled media from occupied cities.
The last issue of Vpered that went into Bakhmut was distributed in March 2023 by the military. The battle had become so dangerous that civilian aid groups were no longer allowed in, but soldiers still wanted the handful of remaining residents to get their paper.
Eventually a grinding fight that some military analysts consider the bloodiest battle of the 21st century drew to a close. As Russia claimed control of Bakhmut’s ruined remains, more a symbolic victory than a major strategic win, Ovcharenko prepared for a new role.
“Her newspaper is the link for so many people who have been displaced. It brings back that sense of belonging for people who have lost everything,” Ayres said. Local papers are also watchdogs for democracy, following local officials who national papers don’t have resources to cover.
Vpered has documented Bakhmut life since 1920, cycling through different names, languages and ownership; across wars and invasions from the east and west; and shifts in power between Kyiv and Moscow.
Founded as the Russian-language “Proletarian of Artyomovsk” – the town had been renamed for a Soviet hero – it became private in 2000. The last Russian-language edition was published on 23 February 2022, the eve of the invasion.
The subscriptions and advertising that kept the paper going then are no longer viable, and Ovcharenko’s current funding runs out soon. The question mark over the paper’s future echoes the bigger questions about the town and people it serves.
“We don’t want to be dissolved and disappear without a sign as a paper and as a community,” she said. The town’s future, even if it is liberated from Russian control, is a complicated and emotional issue even for the people who love it most.
It was so heavily shelled and mined that clearing it would take 10 years, and rebuilding it perhaps another decade, exiles reckon. Some think the battle that turned Bakhmut into a vast cemetery soaked the ground with too much blood for them to ever return.
“Maybe it does make sense to build another town, call it a new Bakhmut, elsewhere,” Ovcharnenko said. “On the other hand if they somehow rebuild Bakhmut in the old place, we would go back because it’s unique and special.”
Nor can its people get compensation for their destroyed homes to start again elsewhere; one of the many particular challenges for people from frontline and occupied areas relates to compensation for Russian attacks.
Ukrainian inspectors must visit property affected to assess the extent of damage, but because Bakhmut is out of reach, they can’t make those trips or sign off payouts. For now, the paper and the community are fighting.
Ovcharenko said her aim is to ensure that she and readers “do not lose the feeling of being a Bakhmutian, do not forget who you are”, although she often struggles to find happiness or even motivation. “We all live one day at a time – you don’t plan much for the future. And this is wrong, but this is our reality.”
