The city that Putin wants, and Trump seems willing to trade
DISPATCH FROM EASTERN UKRAINE
As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin sat down to talk at Elmendorf Air Base in Alaska the fate of a sprawling, unlovely and battered industrial town on the other side of the world was on the agenda.
Kramatorsk is the heart of the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region and the centrepiece of Kyiv’s fortress belt, a line of fortified towns and villages that are the backbone of its defences against the Russian armies attacking from the east.
But Donbas is also the part of Ukraine the Kremlin covets the most. Estimates of the number of casualties the Russians have sustained here since early 2022 are in the hundreds of thousands.
The residents of Kramatorsk, who have now endured 11 years of conflict and three-and-a-half years of full-on war, are, to a certain extent, inured to hardship.
Back in Soviet times wages were high but the local mines were notorious for poor safety standards and many hundreds of miners died in the area after shafts collapsed and pits filled with water or poisonous gas.
When the USSR imploded the well-paying jobs went too and economic decay set in. Kyiv, the national capital was a day’s drive to the west and control of the Donbas fell into the hands of local crooks, mafia bosses and oligarchs.
In 2014, when Russia first grabbed control of parts of eastern Ukraine, Kramatorsk almost went to Moscow. Separatists seized and, for a while, held the city. But the Ukrainian authorities managed to put down the rebellion and retook control.
Then in 2022 Putin tried again. He sent in massed ranks of tanks, helicopters and soldiers, but, against all the odds, the Ukrainian army stopped the Russians a dozen or so miles to the east.
For a settlement that was once a proud workers’ paradise in the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, the city is now in a sorry state.
Most of the windows are covered in chipboard, many buildings have been damaged by Russian bombs, and air raid sirens go off so many times a day that even the young and timid ignore the call to head for a bomb shelter.
The monumental Palace of Culture that dominates the main square in the centre of the city is now boarded up.
A couple of minutes walk away half of an entire building is missing. It was hit by a Russian missile in late July, six of its residents were killed immediately and several more trapped under the rubble.
As I inspected the building this week, and took in the burned out and destroyed roofs of other buildings around the square, a young woman and her beau joined me. They had a small dog in tow and we fell into conversation.
“I am from Kramatorsk but left for Kyiv when the war started,” she said. “My boyfriend here has never been to the city so I brought him to see it for himself.”
I asked what would happen if the city were to fall into Russian hands – either through military conquest or in a land-swap, something that Trump raised as a possibility earlier this week.
“Everyone would leave,” she said. “We can’t live under the Russians after what they have done to us.”
Of a pre-war population of around 150,000, only about 60,000 now remain in Kramatorsk. A few locals who preferred a future in Russia headed east when the war began but most left for western Ukraine or became refugees in Europe.
Ironically, even as the frontlines get ever closer to the city, in the last year some locals have returned.
“We spent five months in the west of Ukraine but eventually our money ran out and we were forced to come back,” said Kristina, a woman in her forties who was selling pillows and cushions in the city’s market.
“Now my two brothers are fighting here in the Ukrainian army. If this becomes Russia we will have to leave again.”
Allegiances in Kramatorsk, nevertheless, are more complex than in much of the rest of Ukraine. The area is largely Russophone, working class, and with a strong local identity. Many say their interests are poorly represented by any of the national politicians.
“It’s not important to me if I am in Ukraine or Russia,” said one lady I spoke to at the market. “What’s important is that we have peace. I’m a woman. I’m not here to fight wars and watch friends die. I have different priorities in life.”
I asked about the talks in Alaska and whether she thought that anything good could come out of them.
“Let them talk,” she said. “There have to be negotiations and they cannot happen over the phone. Maybe nothing will come out of them but there is nothing wrong with talking.”
Back in the centre of town I passed a pizzeria called Ria where I had shared a dinner with colleagues in early 2023. Later that year a local man, recruited by Moscow, sent a message to his handler in the FSB that some soldiers had gathered there for dinner.
The Russians fired two Iskander missiles into the building killing 13 of the diners including a well-known Ukrainian novelist called Victoria Amelina, two 14-year-old twin sisters, and a US Marine Corps veteran.
A few blocks to the south I returned to the Palace of Culture. The square in front of it was abandoned.
Nevertheless two stout women were bent over in the hot midday sun tending to red roses in the municipal gardens. The air raid siren sounded but they continued their work.
An older man was using garden clippers and a screwdriver to rip up weeds that were growing between the paving.
Watching them work meticulously to bring beauty and order amid the destruction of war would have been moving at any time.
But amid all the machismo and posturing as two of the world’s strongmen met in Alaska, it was a poignant reminder of the ordinary lives at stake.