How Russia Ruined My City
Now I don’t have a home to go back
I was born in Nikopol, a town in the Dnipro region with a population of 100 thousand people which after the war decreased to only 40 thousand. I used to go to school there and started my first journalism job. Now my town is a topic of reportages of DW and The Guardian.
Nikopol started to be bombed much later when the war started, in July 2023, six months later. All this time our people tried to continue to live a normal life and hoped that the war would bypass them. It was a common experience for us as we were living from 2014 just 4 hours away from Donetsk region. We always thought that the war was “somewhere very very far away.” And, while we ignore what happens just under our noses, the bloody war machine is getting closer to us every day.
I left Nikopol in 2019 when I went to college and thought I would come back there after graduation to celebrate it with my parents, visit the places of my childhood, and meet my ex-classmates. Now, all that remains from those places is dust, and my family, friends, and I are scattered around the world as refugees.
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You probably already have lots of photos of destroyed buildings in Ukraine. However, there are different things when for you they are just scary photos and for me, they were places where I spent my whole life. When I see the pictures of my familiar places ruined, I see much more behind them — the moments when I had fun there, was sad, dreamed, gave up, and started to fight again. Not only the armature but my own past got ruined.
Thus, there was my first school where I studied for eight years, Nikopol Gymnasium #7. On the second floor, you can see the window of my classroom.
This is the photo I took in that classroom in 2015. Here I am 14 y.o.
Here is my classmate Viktoriia. She is a refugee in Germany now together with another 1 million Ukrainians.
After that lunch, we went for a walk to Kakhovsky Reservoir. On the other side, you can see another town, Enerhodar. Now it is occupied by Russia. Also, you cannot anymore go around near to that place because this territory is mined to prevent the Russians from getting into Nikopol by water.
This is the city center where the playground is right behind this tank. I went there for a walk with my classmates after classes.
Here, this is the street where I took my younger sister to a kindergarten.
Just in the opposite site there is a tax office where my grandmother Luda, an accounter, often went.
This is not a screenshot from a horror movie but the market my grandmother went to buy fresh products from farmers.
And, there are houses where Nikopol people live now.
All in all, with this story I do not want to complain. I do not ask for your support and sweet comments. Everything that I want is to ask you to value every second of life as you never know if it will repeat.
Do not forget your close people, and do not prolong visiting your loved places. Do not postpone your dreams until you graduate, find a job, marry, etc. Maybe it will come the day you could never do that anymore.
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