He is in the destroyed New York, where the war is taking place. It is in Donbas (reportage)

Z Ňju York, Pantelejmonivky a Torecka in the Donetsk region from our co-worker Braň Ondrášik

He’s in New York. However, there are no skyscrapers, night clubs, theaters, restaurants or millions of people anywhere to be seen. Tento New York is actually in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. The Russian-occupied authorities of Donbas, such as Horlivka, are therefore lazy.

The New York name is used in its daily news about the development of the General Staff as an English translation of the ukrainian name of York, in Cyrillic. Náží obce comes from immigrants from the west, apparently.

Before the invasion, the village had a little less than 10,000 inhabitants, but today only a few hundred remained. Z pýchy obce – chemikej favryne – sú už iba trosky. As with many homes, schools, and museums. Obľúbeným aj strategickým terčom ruských síl sú benzinové pumpy.

In these places, we didn’t see a single one actually open but undamaged or completely destroyed. But the bridge in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, which is the gateway to the raging hell, stands here. Shooting and explosions, the sounds of artillery shells with a distance of a few kilometers, but sometimes even directly in the village, you can hear them every few minutes.

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In this region, there are almost no military checkpoints, which are common a few tens of kilometers away from the front, but where Ukrainian soldiers control, because we are coming to this region. Especially military vehicles, ambulances, some of which have honks on, whose sound is mixed with the noise of explosions, are visible on the roads when they are carrying the injured. Here and there we meet civilian vehicles or civilians on bicycles.

Everything is bordered already by the brown winter fields and the trees on the background of the dark overcast sky. But the face of the destroyed houses is different: the farmer still has his tractor, but the cow rests on the unspoiled pastures.

New York Bakery in the middle of the scorched earth

A small shop, a local bakery, is open here. It’s called New York Bakery. In its few square meters, you can easily get the feeling that you have already found yourself in an American sitcom, but not in a place whose scorched earth looks like it’s from another planet.

Taťjana Doncová, a 47-year-old local lecturer, hands out fresh and non-perishable food to the two customers in front of us. Fortunately, there are no problems with the supply, around five hundred people have access to food from mobile tanks and drinking water.

“I’ve lived here in New York since I was born,” the lecturer boasts. “Tieto dni tu odkej máme ostrelování kádzie jeden deň.” Before, when this village still had a post office, it was a postman.