For months he had feared a heavy attack, but only on Thursday, 73-year-old Vladislav Victorovych first considered fleeing his home near Ukraine’s front lines.
Before dawn, a Russian missile hit the apartment block next to where he lived with his wife and son. If it landed just 50 meters (160 feet) north, the house would be a pile of rubble and broken glass.
“After entering today, we started thinking seriously that we have to leave,” Victorovych told AFP as residents of the damaged building rushed inside to save what they could.
“His wife said, ‘It’s time to get ready.'”
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However, during the day, Victorovych had thought and decided to stay, overwhelmed by the prospect of moving his wife, who suffered from heart disease and other ailments.
Like many towns in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Chasiv Yar has seen a steep population decline in recent weeks. Those left behind are mainly “elderly people and people with limited mobility”, according to the United Nations.
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Those who persist cite various reasons for doing so: from simple defiance to the need to care for sick relatives – or simply the lack of better options.
But the situation grew desperate, due to the intense fighting and worsening winter conditions. Temperatures here are forecast to drop below zero by the end of the week.
“Now we’re under a lot of stress, and it’s causing disease,” Victorovych said.
“People have limitations… People who live in normal conditions cannot understand this.”
– ‘All the young people in Ukraine are leaving’ –
Across the street, 88-year-old Yulia Tuskova, dressed in a down coat and pink beanie hat, waited in line to receive a sheet of clear plastic tarp provided by city authorities – a temporary fix for a broken window.
As he tried to walk home with the help of a cane, he cried when asked who would put up a tarp for him.
“We don’t have men, only grandmothers,” said Tuskova, who lives alone. “All the young people left and only the old people were left.
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“No one grabbed the polyethylene, all the windows were broken, no one helped.”
Olena, 64, told AFP she had no choice but to stay and care for her mother and three dogs.
“My mother, who is 85, is ill,” Olena said.
“He was walking around the garden at night, and we were afraid he was going to be shot.”
In the industrial town of Kostiantynivka, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the heaviest fighting in Bakhmut, an 89-year-old woman surnamed Praskoviya told AFP that the situation was tough, she decided to ride.
“I was 10 years old when World War II happened, and now there’s another war at my age,” he said.
“When we suffer from hunger and cold – we face everything. We have survived before, and we will survive now.”
– Fight loneliness –
But even elderly Ukrainians like Praskoviya, though not directly threatened by the war, face challenges, especially loneliness.
In the town of Lyman, which was retaken from Russia in September, 60-year-old Anatoly Gysenko once welcomed up to 30 people into a basement shelter filled with mattress pads and flimsy wooden chairs.
But as the temperature began to drop and Lyman’s population dwindled, the basement, heated by Gysenko’s wood stove, made of brick and mud, began to receive fewer visitors.
In the end he was left with three dogs.
He recently invited his friend Sergiy Tarasenko, who lives alone in a different part of the city, to move to at least.
“It’s more fun to stay together,” Tarasenko, 58, told AFP this week as temperatures neared zero.
“Maybe more people will come if it’s a little cooler.”
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He especially hopes that a woman will come to take over the cooking so he can focus on tasks like chopping wood.
They now live in a repertoire of pasta, porridge and mushrooms selected from the mine forest behind the building.
“Now, when we are alone, we must do the work of men and women,” he said.
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