She’s 98, and walked through a battlefield in slippers to escape Russian attacks

The Russian advances have been slow and bloody. With each step forward, another town, village or settlement is invariably left in ruins.

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

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

“People don’t even have the opportunity to take anything with them – they only take one bag with their belongings or a small purse,” he said.

At the moment, the Russians are mostly laying siege to relatively small villages and towns, many already largely empty.

But as the front line shifts, hundreds of thousands of civilians in towns and cities still under Ukrainian control in the Donbas region are watching nervously.

In February, Ukrainian officials said that during the course of the war at least 1852 civilians had been killed in the Donetsk region, part of the Donbas, and another 4550 injured.

By May 10, that toll had risen to 1955 killed and 4885 injured, local authorities said.

Those numbers are likely to vastly understate the full death toll, according to Ukrainian officials, human rights investigators and UN observers. There is still no internationally recognised accounting of the civilians killed in areas under Russian occupation.

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

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

Over the months in which the front line remained relatively static, many people who fled near the beginning of the full-scale war returned in the belief that the risks were manageable and outweighed by a deep attachment to their homes.

The most dangerous place in Ukraine is the zone that falls within range of the artillery and drones of both armies. It extends roughly 20 miles in either direction from the front line, with the violence increasing exponentially closer to the point of contact between the two armies.

The earth is cratered like some tortured moonscape, corpses go uncollected for months amid constant shelling, and the prospect of death hovers in the skies above, where drones stalk all those who move. Mortars, mines, missiles, bombs explode day and night.

Even small shifts in the front open new villages to destruction.

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

“In 2022, a bomb hit my house, and we miraculously survived in the basement,” he said. “It was terrifying. 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 have come back.

There is no electricity or running water. Miles of dragons’ teeth, pyramid-shaped concrete spikes meant to ensnare tanks, stretch over the rolling hills beyond the battered homes. The people there survive largely by relying on small, carefully tended gardens and on volunteers bringing food, water and medicine as well as a sanitary trailer donated by an American member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to shower and wash clothes.

Still, Bahrii said, people were hopeful that the delivery of US weapons would prevent the arrival of the Russians in the area a second time.

“Hope,” he said, “but not certainty.”

Many of those who fled did not go far, choosing to stay in the nearby cities of the Donbas to be close to their land. If the Russians were to manage major advances, he said, those new homes in those cites would come under threat.

“It is unlikely that anyone will stay,” he said. “These people already know what bombings, explosions and death are like.”

Lomikovska, the 98-year-old, had not wanted to leave. Even as fighting intensified around her home, she tried to keep tending to her garden – planting potatoes, onions, garlic and herbs.

Born in 1926 – a few years before famine ravaged the land – she knew what it was like to be without food. No matter the dangers around her, her family said, her plot of fertile soil was a lifeline she tended with care.

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

By the time the Germans occupied her village in 1941, she was a teenager.

“I wasn’t afraid then,” she said. Even though German soldiers slept in the family home, she said, “they didn’t touch anything”.

She and her husband raised two sons in the home they built in Ocheretyne, and she spent long periods working on the railways as a cabin conductor, tending to passengers. Her husband and her youngest son died before the current war once again upended her world.

She recalled the horror of the final sleepless nights before the Russians seized her town in April.

“I didn’t lie down lengthwise on the bed, but crosswise,” she said. “I pulled my legs toward me. My bed was by the window, and there was nothing left on the window at all. If we barricade the window with something, they’ll just break it. And the wind was strong. It was very cold. I lie there and hear gunshots.”

She is now staying with her granddaughter in a small house about a dozen miles from Chasiv Yar, a hilltop town that is being razed as Russian forces try to capture it.

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If the Russians manage to take Chasiv Yar – which currently prevents Russia from laying siege to the major population centres in the Donetsk region – Lomikovska knows she might have to flee once again.

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

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.