World
What Ukraine Has Lost
Few countries since World War II have experienced this level of devastation. But it’s been impossible for anybody to see more than glimpses of it. It’s too vast. Every battle, every bombing, every missile strike, every house burned down, has left its mark across multiple front lines, back and forth over more than two years.
This is the first comprehensive picture of where the Ukraine war has been fought and the totality of the destruction. Using detailed analysis of years of satellite data, we developed a record of each town, each street, each building that has been blown apart.
The scale is hard to comprehend. More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over. Parts of Ukraine hundreds of miles apart look like Dresden or London after World War II, or Gaza after half a year of bombardment.
To produce these estimates, The New York Times worked with two leading remote sensing scientists, Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, to analyze data from radar satellites that can detect small changes in the built environment.
More than 900 schools, hospitals, churches and other institutions have been damaged or destroyed, the analysis shows, even though these sites are explicitly protected under the Geneva Conventions.
These estimates are conservative. They don’t include Crimea or parts of western Ukraine where accurate data was unavailable. The true scope of destruction is likely to be even greater — and it keeps growing. In mid-May, the Russians bombed some towns in northeastern Ukraine so ferociously that one resident said they were erasing streets.
Ukrainian forces have caused major damage, too, by bombing frontline Russian positions and attacking Russian-held territory like Crimea and Donetsk City. While it is not always possible to determine which side is responsible, the devastation recorded in Russian-held areas pales in comparison to what is seen on the Ukrainian side.
The Kremlin referred questions about this article to Russia’s Defense Ministry, which did not respond.
Few places have been as devastated as Marinka, a small town in eastern Ukraine.
Comprehensive School No. 1, where so many young Ukrainians learned to write their first letters, has been blown apart. The Orthodox Cathedral, where couples were married, has been toppled. The chestnut-lined streets where generations strolled, the milk plant and cereal factory where people worked, the Museum of Local Lore, the Marinka Region Administration Building, go-to shops and cafes — all landmarks for generations — have been reduced to faceless ruins.
The damage runs into the billions, but the true cost is much higher. Marinka was a community. Marinka was living history. Marinka was a wellspring for families for nearly 200 years. Its erasure has left people feeling lost.
“If I shut my eyes, I can see everything from my old life,” said Iryna Hrushkovksa, 34, who was born and raised in Marinka. “I can see the front gate. I can walk through the front door. I can step into our beautiful kitchen and look into the cupboards.”
“But if I open my eyes,” she said, “it’s all gone.”
Before everyone fled, when a strong wind came from the west, the people in Marinka used to do something slightly provocative: They would tie a yellow and blue Ukrainian flag to a helium balloon and float it across the nearby frontline to land somewhere in Russia-controlled territory.
“True Ukrainians lived here,” said Ms. Hrushkovska’s mother, Hanna Horban. “They worked in the fields and factories, they created their future and the future of their children. They lived under a Ukrainian sky, free and our sky.”
Reminiscing about her old town makes her eyes well up. Sometimes, she says, she sees Marinka in her dreams.
It’s the same for many others. A young Ukrainian woman in Berlin recently opened a photo exhibition on Marinka. Videos have surfaced on social media featuring photos of pre-war Marinka with sad music playing in the background. Some of Marinka’s displaced people have chosen to hang together, in another town, Pavlograd, a hundred miles away.
In many ways, the story of this one town — its closeness, its vulnerability and its ruin — is the story of this war and perhaps all wars.
The Horbans settled down in Marinka at least three generations ago. By the early 1970s, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, they had built their own house at 102B Blagodatna Street. It was large, by Soviet standards: around 1,200 square feet, with three bedrooms and bright red tiles leading to the front door. In the yard, they raised ducks, chickens, two cows and two pigs; they grew all kinds of vegetables, from potatoes to peas; and they plucked apples, cherries, peaches and apricots from their own trees.
“In the 1990s,” Ms. Hrushkovska said, “we survived off this.”
Marinka started out as a farming hamlet, founded in 1843 by adventurous peasants and Cossacks from the Eurasian steppe. Legend has it that it took its name from the founder’s wife, a friendly Mariia.
By the early 20th century, this entire swath of eastern Ukraine transformed. Iron and coal were discovered, in a region soon to be called the Donbas, and the city of Donetsk became an industrial hub. Marinka, about 15 miles away, shifted from a quiet farming town to a busy suburb.
By the mid-1960s, it had a coal mine, a milk factory, a tire factory, a bread factory and soon a museum, a public sauna and two public swimming pools.
In the spring, the back lanes smelled of fresh flowers. In the summer, kids swam in the Osykova River. In the fall, workers piled into trucks heading for the collective farms and harvested immense amounts of wheat, afterwards swigging vodka straight from the bottle and dancing in the stubbly fields. The best restaurant in town was Kolos, known for its “Donbas cutlet,” a cut of high-quality pork, breaded and cooked with a hunk of butter.
“Marinka was blooming,” said Ms. Horban, who was also born here.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Marinka sank into disorder. State-owned enterprises shut down and Ms. Horban’s husband, Vova, a veterinarian, lost his job and had to dig coal for a living, at age 40.
Things stabilized by 2010, and bolstered by trade with Russia, Donetsk developed into one of Ukraine’s swankier cities. Marinka prospered by extension and grew to around 10,000 people.
In the spring of 2014, everything changed, again.
“All of a sudden strange men appeared with weapons and started stealing cars,” said Svitlana Moskalevska, another longtime resident.
That was just the beginning. Violent protests broke out. Then shooting in the streets. The Russians were backing an insurgency in Donetsk. It was confusing. And terrifying.
By mid-2014 — after thousands were killed, including dozens in Marinka — Donetsk had become the capital of a new Russian puppet state, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. For several months, Marinka was occupied as well.
The Ukrainian Army eventually cleared Marinka, but it wasn’t strong enough to take back Donetsk. So the front line between Ukraine and Russia cut right through Marinka, less than a mile from the Horbans’ home.
People shut themselves in at night and drew their curtains, fearful of being shelled. Basic services collapsed. Marinka used to get treated water from Donetsk but the Russians cut off the pipes, leaving it no choice but to hook up to the Osykova River.
“It was disgusting,” said Olha Herus, Ms. Horban’s cousin. “Fish came out of the faucet, sometimes even little frogs.”
On Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the first places it attacked was Marinka. This time, the Russians bombed the town with aircraft and heavy artillery, causing far greater damage than in 2014.
Ms. Hrushkovska and her daughter, Varvara, evacuated a few days later. Some older residents, like Ms. Herus’s mother, Tetiana, refused to leave. She told everyone that she had become an “expert” at identifying the different types of munitions flying around — artillery, mortars, tank rounds, hand grenades, airplane bombs. She assured her family that she always knew when to seek shelter in the vegetable cellar. But at a deep level, it seems she simply didn’t want to leave.
“You have to understand,” Ms. Herus explained. “In Ukraine, people don’t like to move from one region to another. This is the mentality. We like living in one house for three to four generations.”
On April 25, 2022, Ms. Herus’s mom called and uttered two words no one could recall her using before: “I’m scared.”
An hour later she was killed.
The White Angels, a volunteer paramedic group, evacuated Marinka’s last residents in November 2022.
The Devastation Grows
In the early months of the war, the Russians quickly captured several cities in eastern Ukraine. They almost captured Kyiv. Since then, the conflict has largely settled into a war of attrition, which favors the Russians with vastly more men and ammunition. The spikes on the following map show the heavy damage since the initial Russian invasion.
The Ukrainian military lost Marinka in December 2023.
They had been fighting for the city since 2014. Hundreds if not thousands of men from both sides died for it. At the very end, a small group of Ukrainian soldiers were holed up on the western edge of town in a warren of tunnels and pulverized basements. The rest was Russian territory.
When the Ukrainians peeked their heads out, they were stunned.
“I saw a picture of Hiroshima, and Marinka is absolutely the same,” said one Ukrainian soldier, Henadiy. “Nothing remains.” Following military protocol, he provided only his given name.
Another soldier, who asked to be identified by his call sign, Karakurt, described cars with the paint scorched off, houses cut down to their jagged foundations and long, empty roads that sparkled with glass and smelled of dust, smoke and gunpowder.
“Whatever could burn, burned,” he said.
Ukraine is determined to rebuild. The hope, however distant, is that with international cooperation Ukraine will seize Russian assets and force Russia to foot the bill for the reconstruction of entire cities like Marinka.
But a long war may still stretch ahead. In recent months, the Russians have had the upper hand, destroying more communities as their army seems to stagger inexorably forward. Ten million Ukrainians have fled from their homes — one in four people.
Last spring, a few dozen people from Marinka gathered at a school in Pavlograd, which is considered reasonably safe. The children wore crisply ironed embroidered shirts called vyshyvankas. In a large room with big windows, they performed dances and sang patriotic songs that were beamed by video to displaced Marinka people around the world. Adults stood along the wall, tears dripping down their faces.
“You know the simplest way to make a person cry?” Ms. Hrushkovska asked. “Make them remember their city and their home.”
She and her daughter, Vavara, 13, are now squeezed into a small, two-room apartment in Pavlograd.
“My old kitchen was bigger than this whole place,” she joked.
Then she broke into tears.
Ms. Hrushkovska grew up in Marinka. She was married in Marinka. She raised Vavara in Marinka. Her grandparents died in Marinka. She knows she can never go back to Marinka. She senses that for the rest of her days, she will suffer from something that has no cure: everlasting homesickness.
She is considering moving abroad with her daughter.
“No matter how unpatriotic it may sound, there’s not much future for her in Ukraine,” Ms. Hrushkovska said.
“It’s not that we want to leave,” she quickly added. But with Marinka gone, she said, “we don’t know where else to go.”
World
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World
Kenyan police confront protesters day after president withdraws tax increase bill
- Protests have continued across Kenya despite President William Ruto’s withdrawal of a controversial tax hike bill.
- Kenyan police on Thursday fired teargas at protesters in Nairobi and blocked roads to the presidential palace.
- Crowds in Mombasa, Kisumu and other cities have demanded President Ruto’s resignation.
Kenyan police fired teargas at dozens of protesters in Nairobi and blocked off roads to the presidential palace on Thursday as crowds took to the streets again nationwide, even after the president bowed to pressure to withdraw a tax hike bill.
Crowds called for President William Ruto to go further and step down in the capital, Mombasa, Kisumu and other centers, though the turnout was well down from the height of the mass rallies sparked by the tax measures over the past week.
Ruto withdrew the legislation including new taxes and hikes on Wednesday, a day after at least 23 people were killed in clashes at protests sparked by his plans, and parliament was briefly stormed and set alight.
KENYA’S PRESIDENT BACKTRACKS ON CONTROVERSIAL TAX INCREASES AFTER DEADLY PROTESTS SHAKE NATION
He is grappling with the most serious crisis of his two-year-old presidency as the youth-led protest movement has grown rapidly from online condemnations of the tax hikes into mass rallies demanding a political overhaul.
Dropping the bill has also hit plans to reduce the budget deficit and borrowing, as demanded by lenders including the International Monetary Fund.
Seven people were rushed to hospital with gunshot wounds in the town of Homa Bay in western Kenya on Thursday, Citizen TV reported, without going into further detail. Police commander Hassan Barua said he had sent officers to check on the report.
In Nairobi, police and soldiers patrolled the streets and blocked access to State House. Police fired teargas to disperse several dozen people who had gathered in the center of the city.
UN-BACKED CONTINGENT OF FOREIGN POLICE ARRIVES IN HAITI AS KENYA-LED FORCE PREPARES TO FACE GANGS
Doctors volunteer group Medics for Kenya said its staff at the Jamia Mosque/Crescent hospital had been hit by teargas, and that it condemned in “the strongest terms possible violence meted out on our volunteer medical teams”.
Reuters reporters saw army vehicles on the streets after the government deployed the military to help police.
Elsewhere, hundreds of protesters gathered in the port city of Mombasa and in the western city of Kisumu, local television footage showed, although those gatherings appeared peaceful.
“We are only coming here so that our voice can be heard, us as Gen Z, us as Kenyans, we are one,” said Berryl Nelima in Mombasa. “So the police should stop killing us, we are just peaceful protesters, we are unarmed.”
The protest movement has no formal leadership structure and has largely responded to messages, banners and slogans on social media. Posts on Thursday suggested protest supporters were divided on how far to carry the demonstrations.
“Let’s not be foolish as we fight for a better Kenya,” Boniface Mwangi, a prominent social justice activist, said in an Instagram post.
He voiced support for demonstrations on Thursday but opposed calls to invade State House, the president’s formal offices and residence, a move that he said could spur more violence and be used to justify a crackdown.
KENYAN PROTESTERS VOW TO CONTINUE DEMONSTRATIONS AFTER VIOLENT CLASHES LEAVE 23 DEAD
While some protest supporters said they would not demonstrate on Thursday as the finance bill had been scrapped, others pledged to press on, saying only Ruto’s resignation would satisfy them.
“Right now is not about just the finance bill but about #RutoMustGo,” political activist and protester Davis Tafari told Reuters in a text message. “We have to make sure that Ruto and his MPs have resigned and fresh elections are held … We occupy State House for dignity and justice.”
Eli Owuor, 34, from Kibera, an informal settlement and a traditional hotbed of protests, also said he was prepared to join a push on to State House.
“We may just need to visit Zakayo today in his house to prove that after parliament we can occupy State House,” he said, using a nickname protesters have given to Ruto that references a biblical tax collector viewed as corrupt.
DIALOGUE, AUSTERITY ARE NEXT STEPS
In a speech on Wednesday, Ruto defended his push to raise taxes on items such as bread, cooking oil and diapers, saying it was justified by the need to cut Kenya’s high debt, which has made borrowing difficult and squeezed the currency.
But he acknowledged that the public had overwhelmingly rejected the finance bill. He said he would now start a dialogue with Kenyan youth and work on austerity measures, beginning with cuts to the budget of the presidency.
The International Monetary Fund, which has been urging the government to cut its deficit to obtain more funding, said it was closely monitoring the situation in Kenya.
“We are deeply concerned about the tragic events in Kenya in recent days,” the IMF said in a statement. “Our main goal in supporting Kenya is to help it overcome the difficult economic challenges it faces and improve its economic prospects and the well-being of its people.”
Ratings agency Moody’s said the shift in focus to cutting spending rather than boosting revenue will complicate the disbursement of future IMF funding and slow the pace of fiscal consolidation.
Analysts at JPMorgan said they had maintained their forecasts for a deficit of 4.5% of GDP in FY2024/2025, but acknowledged the government and IMF targets could be revised in light of recent developments.
They said the Central Bank of Kenya was unlikely to begin cutting rates until the final quarter of this year.
World
The Take: How is Argentina faring under Javier Milei?
PodcastPodcast, The Take
Argentina’s lower house votes on Javier Milei’s package of economic reforms. How will this affect ordinary Argentinians?
Argentina’s lower legislative house is set to approve President Javier Milei’s package of economic reforms. Despite signs of economic improvement on the macro level, the consequences of Milei’s spending cuts for the average person have been profound. How have everyday Argentinians been faring under Javier Milei?
In this episode:
- Teresa Bo (@TeresaBo), Al Jazeera correspondent
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Tamara Khandaker, Chloe K. Li, and Sonia Bhagat with Amy Walters, Duha Mosaad, Manahil Naveed, Veronique Eshaya, and our host Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our lead of audience development and engagement is Aya Elmileik. Munera Al Dosari and Adam Abou-Gad are our engagement producers.
Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
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