{"id":198100,"date":"2025-11-24T19:35:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T19:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/198100\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T19:35:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T19:35:17","slug":"a-ukrainian-city-waits-for-a-peace-deal-or-for-russian-troops-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/198100\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ukrainian city waits for a peace deal, or for Russian troops \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until February 2022, eight years of fighting between Kyiv\u2019s forces and Moscow-led<\/a> militants in eastern Ukraine<\/a> had taken the lives of only a handful of Pavlohrad\u2019s men; the combat zone was 150km away and the province of Dnipropetrovsk seemed safe from war.<\/p>\n

Now, more than 3\u00bd years into Russia\u2019s<\/a> all-out invasion, a sliver of the region is occupied, the distance from Pavlohrad<\/a> to the front line has halved, enemy attacks cause long blackouts and there are more than 300 faces on the city\u2019s memorial to its fallen soldiers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey attack Pavlohrad all the time. There was a drone attack last night and another just a couple of hours ago, on our railway infrastructure,\u201d the city\u2019s mayor, Anatoliy Vershyna, says in his office overlooking that growing roll of honour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe attacks have increased many times over \u2013 if earlier in the war it happened once a week, now it is almost every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pavlohrad has become increasingly important to Ukraine\u2019s war effort as Russia\u2019s invasion force has ground forward, despite enormous losses, through most of the Donbas area to the east.<\/p>\n

\"PavlohradPavlohrad mayor Anatoliy Vershyna in his office in the city of about 140,000 people in eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin <\/p>\n

Now they have taken villages on the eastern fringe of Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in 11 years of conflict and are pummelling towns such as Mezhova, which until a few months ago felt relatively safe except for the distant rumble of artillery from the direction of Pokrovsk, a small city in Donetsk region that is being destroyed in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore the war we had 104,000 residents, officially. We think that 15-20,000 left after the full-scale war began, but according to official figures about 22,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) arrived here. When you consider unregistered IDPs too, we think there are at least 140,000 people in Pavlohrad now,\u201d Vershyna says.<\/p>\n

\"AA growing memorial wall for more than 300 residents of Pavlohrad who have been killed in the war with Russia. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a feeling that everyone is waiting. Waiting to see what happens at the front \u2013 either it stops approaching, or there arises a possible need to evacuate,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s not panic, but a sense that sometimes the war is coming close: when there is a heavy strike then people say maybe it\u2019s already time to leave; but then it\u2019s quieter for a day or two and they calm down again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pavlohrad is still well out of range of Russian artillery and the small, remote-controlled and explosive-laden first-person-view (FPV) drones that make simply venturing outside potentially fatal in towns and villages near the front line.<\/p>\n

But the Iranian-made Shahed drones and Russian-made copies called Gerans \u2013 3.5m long, with a 2.5m wingspan and a warhead of up to 90kg \u2013 are a daily threat, along with ballistic missiles that Ukraine\u2019s thinly stretched air defence systems struggles to intercept.<\/p>\n

\"DamageDamage from a Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region. Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

In one hellish night last summer, Russia targeted Pavlohrad with 120 Shaheds and 21 missiles, and earlier this month a strike on the power grid caused a blackout at eight coal mines near the city, trapping nearly 2,600 miners underground.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can seem like people have pretty much got used to the attacks, but then recently many people lost their water supply for something like five or seven days. So that\u2019s another problem, especially for those with small children,\u201d says Tetiana Volkova, founder of the Step (\u201cSteppe\u201d) news website that covers Pavlohrad and the surrounding area.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, for example, the blackout will last for seven or eight hours. My son is 4\u00bd years old, and his kindergarten has to spend practically the whole time in the basement, because of near-constant air-raid alerts,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n

\"JournalistJournalist Tetiana Volkova, founder of the Step (‘Steppe’) news website in Pavlohrad, eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin <\/p>\n

\u201cWe tried to protect him from the war at the start, and when he heard an explosion we said it was fireworks. But now he understands more. The other evening, he saw a flash from his bedroom window \u2013 a drone hit a factory: \u2018I saw something red,\u2019 he said, and I told him it was a drone. \u2018It won\u2019t hit our house will it?\u2019 he asked. It\u2019s terrible to hear that.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018There\u2019s nothing to go back to\u2019: life drains from Pokrovsk as Russia pounds eastern UkraineOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Now people in Pavlohrad face the same dilemmas and hard conversations as compatriots further east faced earlier in the war, weighing up the risk of staying against the cost and upheaval of trying to make a new life somewhere safer.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people have already packed an emergency bag of essentials, some are trying to sell their flat while it\u2019s still possible and leave. But others are staying for work, hoping the front line stays where it is, or putting hope in some kind of negotiations<\/a> \u2013 everyone hopes, what else can they do?\u201d Volkova says.<\/p>\n

\"AA concert hall in a cultural centre in Pavlohrad now serves as a shelter for people displaced by Russia’s invasion. Photograph: Dan McLaughlin <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople understand that the Russians aren\u2019t likely to reach Pavlohrad very soon \u2013 they\u2019re much further away than they are from cities like Kharkiv or Sumy or Zaporizhzhia. But they can still make daily life unbearable by destroying the power grid and water supply and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vershyna, who was Pavlohrad\u2019s police chief before entering politics, says locals increasingly ask him what to do, and whether it is time to evacuate: \u201cI tell them that if the time comes, when I know legally and morally that this is necessary, then I will say so \u2013 but this is not the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until February 2022, eight years of fighting between Kyiv\u2019s forces and Moscow-led militants in eastern Ukraine had taken…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,550,7,8,2264,2263,2267,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-198100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-russia","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-topstories","21":"tag-ukraine-crisis","22":"tag-vladimir-putin","23":"tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy","24":"tag-world","25":"tag-world-news","26":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115606358017847428","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}