With Russia on its doorstep, Ukrainian town packs its bags

POKROVSK, Ukraine — Placards on the train bluntly listed its purpose: “Evacuation.”

With hugs and teary goodbyes, families bundled children and the elderly aboard coaches at the central train station in the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. They stood and waved through the windows as they departed.

With the Russian army at its doorstep and closing in quickly, Pokrovsk is a town bowing to reality. Police drive around with loudspeakers blaring instructions to leave now. Municipal workers have shipped out library books, elementary school desks and statues from parks and squares.

By late afternoon, with a curfew in effect, the streets were eerily deserted last week, except for military vehicles zipping about.

The Ukrainian military’s surprise attack into Russia last month came as one of Ukraine’s boldest gambles of the war, bringing swift gains in land and prisoners captured. But hundreds of miles away, inside Ukraine, the wholesale evacuation of Pokrovsk is evidence of the operation’s risks.

Ukraine was calculating that its incursion over the border would force Russia to divert troops to defend there. Instead, Moscow has carried on with its relentless advance in eastern Ukraine, and Pokrovsk, a key logistics and transit hub, is in the path of destruction.

“It didn’t go as planned,” Mykyta Pohorelyi, a 19-year-old evacuating with his mother and sister, said of the Ukrainian army’s move into Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his top military commander have conceded that the offensive into Russia, which began Aug. 6, fell short of the objective of forcing Moscow to redeploy forces from the Donbas region of Ukraine.

Now, it is too late to ensure that Pokrovsk will be protected from artillery bombardment, the town’s military administrator said.

In the fast-moving fighting in fields and villages nearby, the Ukrainian military has retreated in places by more than 1 mile a day, soldiers fighting in the area said. The Russians are now 6 miles outside the town.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is “still thinking of how to keep the occupied territories and does not think about how to protect his people,” Zelenskyy said of Moscow’s response to Ukraine’s incursion.

Ukraine’s military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Russia had redeployed 30,000 troops to defend against the Kursk operation, but not from the offensive in the Donbas, the region of coal mines and sunflower fields that has been a principal Russian target in its 2 1/2-year-old invasion.

Russian forces since April have ground through five defensive lines east of Pokrovsk, said Serhiy Dobryak, the town’s military administrator. With only two more lines remaining, the incursion into Russia, and the potential diversion it might cause, was essentially a last hope.

The town for now is not at risk of imminent capture, he said, but officials expect a sustained artillery bombardment that is likely to leave it in ruins. That has been the fate of other Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut and Avdiivka that Russia pummeled into rubble before forcing Ukraine to pull back.

“They will bring the artillery nearby and they will destroy the town,” Dobryak said. “That will happen.”

With that prospect looming, the town’s population has dropped from about 62,000 inhabitants at the beginning of August to 36,000 today. Signs of people fleeing are everywhere.

At the train station, coaches rattled and clanged. Brakes were released with a hissing noise, signaling an imminent departure.

A mother watched her daughter’s teary goodbye to the daughter’s husband, who would be staying to continue working in a coal mine. “Don’t cry,” she said, “let me cry for you.”

Grocery stores have closed. Moving vans parked along leafy back streets. Sidewalks are cluttered with bed frames, flat-screen televisions and plastic bags packed with clothes.

A curfew is now in effect, except for four hours in the late morning and afternoon.

“The enemy is close and getting closer,” said Ihor Kopytsya, the owner of a stationery store who was trying to unload the last of his notebooks, pens and backpacks before the bombing began.

Asked about the military’s gamble that an attack into Russia would slow the advance toward his town, he called it a worthy attempt. “They hoped it would work but it didn’t,” he said.

Volodymyr Porosyuk, 20, was evacuating with his grandmother, Zoya Porosyuk, 88. “When we push them out, we will come back,” he said. “If there’s anything to come back to.”

At a school repurposed for registering internally displaced people, volunteers with an aid group, Light of Donbas, handed stuffed geese to children as they boarded buses, to ease the trip. “People realize they will have to leave forever,” said Alyona Fyodorova, a volunteer. “It’s painful to see.”

Nina Mashtikhina, 71, who was moving to live with her daughter in western Ukraine, said the army did its best, even if the town will not be saved.

“I thank them. They are good guys,” she said. “I believe in them. I believe in our victory.”

But other residents questioned why valuable troops were sent into Russia when they might have served better protecting their town in the trenches just east of Pokrovsk.

“They should have defended here,” said Iryna Sekreteva, 39, who was evacuating with her 15-year-old son, Bohdan. “Now, they will retreat. That is what we fear. That is the opinion in the town.”

At the entrance to Jubilee Park, municipal workers were dismantling a statue of Mykola Leontovych, a local musician who a century ago composed in Pokrovsk one of Ukraine’s most recognizable Christmas songs, “Carol of the Bells.” Cobblestones had been torn up around the statue’s feet.

A short drive outside town, a Ukrainian artillery commander watched video streaming in from reconnaissance drones. It showed Russian soldiers filtering through backyards in the village of Mykhailivka, swathed in smoke from fires.

The fighting has come in a flurry of small movements. The Russian army relies largely on infantry units. Soldiers dash forward and hide in trees or abandoned houses near Ukrainian positions, then attack. The Ukrainian military reported 58 such engagements near Pokrovsk on Thursday.

Nearby in a field, sweaty, dust-covered soldiers with the 15th Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard firing a howitzer said they were aiming for a Russian position near a coal mine’s slag that only five days earlier had been a Ukrainian stronghold. “We just don’t have the people,” said the commander, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Doker, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol.

Russia’s slow response to the Kursk incursion could reflect disorganization in its military, said Johan Norberg, a military analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, or alternatively it could be a strategic trade-off — capturing more territory in Ukraine while leaving its own lightly guarded.

“They had momentum in Donbas, so why not carry that through?” he said of the possible Russian calculation, with an intention to turn to Kursk later. “Russia can easily trade territory for time,” he said. The incursion bore a cost for Putin domestically and abroad by signaling an inability to defend the border, he said.

It has not, though, slowed the advance in the Donbas, forcing a sad reckoning for those now leaving Pokrovsk.

Vitalia Trusova, 37, an economist for the national railway company, sat on a chair on the sidewalk hugging her daughter, watching the contents of her home loaded onto a moving truck.

“We are leaving forever,” she said. “We and the kids will build a new life somewhere quiet.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.