By CARA ANNA
POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — The missile impact threw the young woman against the fence so hard that she broke. Her mother found her dying on the bench under the pear tree where she had spent the afternoon. By the time her father arrived, she was gone.
Anna Protsenko was killed two days after returning home. The 35-year-old woman had done what the authorities wanted: she evacuated the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. as Russian forces close in. But starting a new life elsewhere had been uncomfortable and costly.
Like Protsenko, tens of thousands of people have returned to rural or industrial communities close to the region’s frontline at considerable risk because they cannot afford to live in safer places.
Protsenko had tried it for two months, then returned home to take a job in the small town of Pokrovsk. On Monday, his friends and family fondled his face and cried before his coffin was hammered beside his grave.
“We cannot win. They don’t hire us elsewhere and you still have to pay rent,” said friend and neighbor Anastasia Rusanova. There is nowhere to go, she says, but here in Donetsk, “everything is ours”.
The Pokrovsk mayor’s office estimated that 70% of evacuees have returned home. In the big city of Kramatorskan hour’s drive closer to the front line, officials said the population had fallen to around 50,000 from the normal 220,000 in the weeks following the Russian invasion, but has since risen to 68 000.
This is frustrating for the Ukrainian authorities as some civilians remain on the warpath, but residents of the Donetsk region are also frustrated. Some described feeling unwelcome as Russian speakers among Ukrainian speakers in some parts of the country.
But more often than not, lack of money was the problem. In Kramatorsk, some people queuing to receive humanitarian aid boxes said they were too poor to evacuate. Donetsk and its economy have been embroiled in conflict since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began fighting the Ukrainian government.
“Who will take care of us? asked Karina Smulska, who returned to Pokrovsk a month after her evacuation. Now, at 18, she is her family’s main earner as a waitress.
Volunteers have been scouring the Donetsk region for months since the Russian invasion to help vulnerable people evacuate, but such efforts may end in failure.
In a damp house in the village of Malotaranivka on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, speckled twists of fly paper hung from the living room ceiling. Pieces of cloth were stuffed into window cracks to keep out drafts.
Tamara Markova, 82, and her son Mykola Riaskov said they spent just five days as evacuees in the central city of Dnipro this month before deciding to try their luck back home.
“We would have been separated,” Markova said.
The temporary shelter where they stayed said she would be moved to a nursing home and her son, immobilized on the left side after a stroke, would go to a home for the disabled. They found this unacceptable. In their haste to leave, they abandoned his wheelchair. It was too big to take on the bus.
Now they go with it. If the air raid siren sounded, Markova took refuge with neighbors “until the shelling stopped”. Humanitarian aid is delivered once a month. Markova calls it pretty good. When winter comes, neighbors will cover their windows with cling film for basic insulation and clean the chimney of soot. Maybe they will have gas for heating, maybe not.
“It was much easier under the Soviet Union,” she said of their lack of state support, but she was even more unhappy with Russian President Vladimir Putin and what its soldiers do to the communities around it.
“He’s old,” she said of Putin. “He must be retired.
Homesickness and uncertainty are also driving returns to Donetsk. A daily evacuation train leaves Pokrovsk for relatively safer western Ukraine, but another train also arrives daily with people who have decided to return home. While the evacuation train is free, the return train is not.
Oksana Tserkovnyi took the train home with her 10-year-old daughter two days after the deadly July 15 attack in Dnipro, where they had been for more than two months. While the attack was the spark to come back, Tserkovnyi had struggled to find work. Now she plans to return to her old job in a coal mine.
Costs in Dnipro, already full of evacuees, were another concern. “We stayed with relatives, but if we had to rent it would have cost a lot more,” Tserkovnyi said. “It starts at 6,000 hryvnia ($200) a month for a studio, and you won’t be able to find it.”
Taxi drivers waiting in Pokrovsk for the train to arrive said many people were giving up trying to relocate elsewhere.
“Of course half my job is to take these people away,” said driver Vitalii Anikieiev. “Because there is no more money.”
In mid-July, he said, he picked up a woman who was returning from Poland after feeling uncomfortable there. When they reached his village near the front line, there was a crater where his house was.
“She cried,” Anikieiev said. “But she decided to stay.”
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Associated Press reporter Inna Varenytsia contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the fighting in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine