Ukraine, surviving amidst the ruins
Gaëlle Girbes
Winner of the 2024 Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Award
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, many villages and towns have been wiped from the map. According to a joint report published in February 2025 by the World Bank, the Ukrainian government, the European Commission, and the United Nations, almost 30% of the Ukrainian territory has been left in ruins and mined. An area equivalent to that of Cambodia or six times that of Belgium. According to the same study, the reconstruction of this vast area will cost an estimated 524 billion dollars over the next ten years, though it is impossible to establish an exact figure while the war continues.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Development of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure has recorded 4.6 million people who have lost their homes. This figure only includes those who have fled and have registered as IDPs, but not those who have stayed, been killed or have disappeared.
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Today, there are thousands of ghost towns, both on the front line and in the areas of the country that are no longer occupied. Kam’yanka, a village in Kharkiv Oblast, used to have a population of 863; now, only 47 remain. Siversk, in the Donbass region, used to be home to 11,612 people. Today, only 444 people still live there, sheltering in basements from the incessant bombing. Bohorodychné, a beautiful little village in eastern Ukraine, formerly with a population of 556 souls, only had two people left when it was liberated. Since then, only 35 people have returned. As for the mining town of Vuhledar, which used to have a population of 18,554, there are only 139 people left, who were trapped in September 2024 when the Russian forces managed to capture the town.
Without water, electricity or gas, living on land that has been mined, Ukrainian citizens have decided to stay, or to return after an evacuation that offered them nothing more than a bed in a refuge or in an overpopulated family apartment. They try to survive among the ruins. Some try to rebuild their homes with what is left. Electricity is replaced by solar panels and generators, gas is replaced by stoves, and running water is replaced by wells, when they are lucky enough to have one. Vegetable gardens have become an essential source of food. So, despite the danger due to the presence of mines, people try to cultivate the land. Essential services, such as healthcare, the postal service, banks and shops have disappeared. Access to internet and the phone network, if there is any, is sporadic and unreliable.
In a matter of seconds, amidst the din of the bombs, the war robbed them of everything and sent them from a comfortable, modern era to the Middle Ages. And yet, they are resiliently rebuilding their lives in these sinister no man’s lands.
With the Russian army continuing to ravage the country, and once again dangerously close to the towns and villages that it occupied for the first time in 2022, everyone is worried. Where can they go? Are they going to lose the little that they have been able to rebuild? Will they be killed or forced to leave their native land forever? Leaving behind their only possessions, the fruit of a lifetime of labor and the reconstruction that had barely begun and that had cost them so much hardship?
The war in Ukraine is the biggest conflict that has taken place in Europe since the Second World War. In the last three years, at least 31,867 civilians have been injured and 13,134 have been killed. But the conflict, which really began in 2014, has caused the death of 16,538 civilians in total as of April 2025. This number grows with every day that passes.
Gaëlle Girbes
