She is 98 and walked past corpses to escape Russian attacks

When a Russian soldier appeared in front of the destroyed house of 98-year-old Lidiia Lomikovska in eastern Ukraine at the end of April, the first thing he did was shoot the family dog.

“What have you done?” her daughter-in-law Olha, 66, shouted at the Russian. “He was protecting me.”

“Now I will protect you,” he told her, Olha recalled in an interview.

Having lived through a famine orchestrated by Stalin in the 1930s that killed millions of people, and the German occupation of her town of Ocheretyne in World War II, Ms Lomikovska says she does not know why her life has been overshadowed by grief.

But when war was once again on her doorstep, she knew that she did not want to live under the “protection” of Russia.

As shells exploded around the city, she was separated from her family in the chaos. So she set out on foot alone. For hours, in slippers and without food or water, she walked past the bodies of dead soldiers, stumbling over bomb craters, not sure if her next step would be her last.

“I walked all the way and there was no one there, just gunshots, and I wondered if they were shooting at me,” she said in an interview. “I walked, crossing myself and thinking, if only this war would end, if only everything would stop.”

But the war is not over yet, and Russia’s relentless attacks on the Donetsk region threaten to subject half a million civilians in Ukrainian-controlled areas to even heavier bombardment.

At the same time, Russian forces have recently pushed new lines of attack in the northeast, outside Kharkiv, and Ukrainian officials warn that Moscow may try to open another front in the north by crossing the border toward the city of Sumy. More than 20,000 people have been evacuated from the Sumy and Kharkiv regions in recent weeks, Ukrainian officials reported in late May.

The Russian advance was slow and bloody. With every step forward, another town, village or settlement lay in ruins.

“It’s terrible, it’s like hell when you come to a settlement where everything is burning, where these guided aerial bombs have completely destroyed houses, multi-storey buildings and private homes,” said Pavlo Diachenko, 40, a police officer with the White Angels, a group dedicated to evacuating civilians from the most at-risk areas.

Last month, the group worked every day to help 10 to 20 people in the Donetsk region.

“People don’t even have the option to take anything with them – they just take a bag with their things or a small handbag,” he said.

At present, the Russians are mainly besieging smaller villages and towns, many of which are already largely deserted.

But hundreds of thousands of civilians in the cities in Donbass that are still under Ukrainian control are nervously watching the shift in the front line.

In February, Ukrainian officials said at least 1,852 civilians had been killed and another 4,550 injured in the Donetsk region of Donbass during the war.

By May 10, the number of dead and 4,885 injured had risen to 1,955, local authorities said.

These figures are likely to significantly underestimate the true number of deaths, say Ukrainian government officials, human rights activists and United Nations observers. There is still no internationally recognized count of civilians killed in the Russian-occupied territories.

For Mr Diachenko, persuading people to evacuate is often a challenge and sometimes it ends tragically.

“When you come to people and tell them about the need for evacuation, and unfortunately the next day you come to take them away and they are already dead from the artillery shelling,” Diachenko said. “That is probably the most painful thing for each of us.”

During the months when the front line remained relatively unchanged, many people who had fled just before the start of the full-scale war returned home, believing that the risks were manageable and outweighed by a deep attachment to their homeland.

The most dangerous place in Ukraine is the zone within range of the artillery and drones of both armies, stretching about 32 kilometers from the front line in both directions, with violence increasing exponentially near the point of contact between the two armies.

The earth is cratered like a battered lunar landscape, bodies go uncollected for months despite constant artillery fire, and the threat of death hangs in the sky as drones pursue anyone who moves. Mortars, mines, rockets and bombs explode day and night.

Even small shifts on the front line result in new villages being exposed to destruction.

Serhii Bahrii, the village head of Bohorodychne in Donetsk region, knows exactly what happens when the fighting reaches a new town.

“In 2022, a bomb hit my house and miraculously we survived in the basement,” he said. “It was terrible. Everything was burning. Everything was red. I remember there was no oxygen. I tried to breathe it in, but there was none.”

In Bohorodychne, he said, only 29 of the 700 residents had returned.

There is no electricity or running water. Dragon’s teeth, pyramid-shaped concrete spikes designed to hold tanks, stretch for miles across the hills behind the destroyed houses. People there survive mostly on small, carefully tended gardens and on volunteers who bring food, water and medicine, as well as a sanitation trailer donated by an American Mormon for showers and laundry.

Nevertheless, Bahrii said there is hope that the delivery of American weapons will prevent a second Russian advance into the area.

“Hope,” he said, “but no certainty.”

Many of the refugees did not move far and preferred to stay in the nearby towns of Donbass to be close to their country. If the Russians succeed in making major advances, the new houses in these towns would be threatened, he said.

“It’s unlikely that anyone will stay,” he said. “These people already know what bombings, explosions and death mean.”

Lomikovska, 98, did not want to leave. Even as the fighting over her house became more intense, she tried to continue tending her garden – planting potatoes, onions, garlic and herbs.

Born in 1926, just a few years before famine ravaged the country, she knew what it meant to have nothing to eat. No matter what dangers loomed around her, her family said, her piece of fertile land was a lifeline that she nurtured with care.

“During my childhood, times were very hard and there was nothing to eat,” said Ms. Lomikovska. “We survived on what we grew in the garden.”

She was a teenager when the Germans occupied her village in 1941.

“I wasn’t afraid then,” she said. Although German soldiers slept in the family’s house, “they didn’t touch anything,” she said.

She and her husband raised two sons in the house they built in Ocheretyne. She also worked for a long time as a train conductor on the railway, taking care of passengers. Her husband and youngest son died before the current war turned her world upside down again.

She remembered the horror of the last sleepless nights before the Russians took her city in April.

“I didn’t lie down lengthways on the bed, I lay across it,” she said. “I pulled my legs up. My bed was next to the window, and there was nothing at the window. If we barricade the window with something, they’ll just break it. And the wind was strong. It was very cold. I’m lying there and I hear gunshots.”

She now lives with her granddaughter in a small house about 20 kilometers from Chasiv Yar, a mountain town that was razed to the ground in an attempt by Russian forces to take it.

If the Russians manage to take Chasiv Yar – which is currently preventing Russia from besieging the main population centres in the Donetsk region – Ms Lomikovska knows she may have to flee again.

“And now,” she said, “I don’t know where else to go.”