Yulia Checheta was at her elderly mother’s house when she popped out to check on her shop. Moments later she had a call to say the family’s home had been hit by two Russian missiles.
Her brother Volodymyr Radko and his 13-year-old son Mykola had been playing on the swings in the garden when the bombs hit. They had died instantly, buried beneath the rubble. It would be months before the remains could be identified.
Ms Checheta’s 74-year-old mother, Nina, somehow survived, but she was hospitalised for several weeks with severe bruising on her neck and face.
Half an hour before the strike, all four had been having breakfast in the kitchen.
The family’s tragedy took place in the small city of Selydove in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, through which Russian forces have been steadily advancing for a year. Russia has captured hundreds of square miles of land since seizing the city of Avdiivka last February, swallowing up town after town, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians in their path to flee or risk a similar fate to Ms Checheta’s family.
Selydove was home to a tightly-knit, small community. Many of the 20,000 prewar population had declined to leave despite the intermittent Russian missile and drone attacks. Others, like teenager Mykola and his mother, had left at the outset of the war but returned the following year.
“Everyone who I cared about was all the same in the vicinity,” Ms Checheta says. “And we didn’t have anywhere to go.”
But that changed the day Volodmyr and Mykola were killed. It was 28 May 2024, the day Vladimir Putin’s army, which he says he sent there to protect Russian speakers, killed her Russian-speaking family.
A few months later, in October, with Ms Checheta and her mother having fled 150 miles to the “alien” town of Kamianse in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian forces captured Selydove.
“I cannot possibly convey to you the amount of grief Russia has caused my family,” she says.
Ms Checheta and her mother are desperate to go home. There are few jobs around in Kamianse and the 45-year-old is “struggling to make a living”. There is little recourse to financial support. She is away from all her friends. She is finding it difficult to look after her mother, too.
“If Ukraine were to regain control, we would go back,” she says. “Even if there was no electricity or water, we would go back in an instant because we miss our home.”
But Ukraine is unlikely to achieve this. It has been on the back foot for a year in Donetsk, outnumbered and often outgunned. A Ukrainian attack on the Russian border region of Kursk last August dealt a blow to Mr Putin but it did not force his army to divert its advancing troops in Donetsk up to the border, as had been hoped.
Now, Selydove faces the stark possibility of being trapped behind a more permanently frozen frontline.
