The slow, heartbreaking death of Kramatorsk, Ukraine

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Kateryna has scouted out a potential new site in Kharkiv too, a place where she could move her whole team when the time comes to finally leave. “It’s complicated,” she says. “My father works for the city authority here, so he cannot leave, or he loses his job. So I plan on staying with him until the last moment.”

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Kateryna Seledtsova outside her Coffee House Bakery in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Photo by Felicity Spector

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Snezhana, her pastry chef, points out her creations on the counter; I pay for a slice of baked cheesecake, a prettily glazed strawberry tart and a meringue crowned with a flourish of cream.

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“It is scary to live here,” Snezhana admits, “but every morning I wake up and come into the bakery to make my desserts and it warms my heart. It was always my passion to work in pastry, and I never imagined I would have my dream job at the age of just 20.”

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Up the road we find Olga, who at 61 is one of the city’s most beloved volunteers. Since 2014, when the Russians invaded Crimea, she has been helping those who defend the city, and has turned her Garage-Cafe into a hub for the community, where her regulars have become lifelong friends.

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On an otherwise ordinary afternoon in early May, three 250 kg guided air bombs exploded nearby, one by one, in the heart of the city centre.

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The blast wave threw her to the cafe’s floor, and turned the buildings on either side into jagged piles of brick and twisted metal. Six people were killed, including Svitlana, one of Olga’s closest friends. Her grief was so strong that she thought she might never recover.

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A few weeks after the attack, Olga was back at work, immaculate in a sequinned top and pristine white jeans, making a cappuccino for a taxi driver who tells her it is his birthday. But the garage cafe is now in an especially risky part of town.

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“Hardly anyone comes here anymore,” she says. ”I don’t know how to make ends meet. I’ve never been a very good businesswoman, because I always treat everyone to coffee. But now, when I do the books, everything is in the red.” The shelves are still lined with mechanical parts for sale, but there are few buyers.

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“I am torn in two over whether to leave,” Olga says, close to tears: “this cafe is my child, this city is my child.”

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Russian forces claim to have captured territory just 14 kilometres from Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Photo by Felicity Spector

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The latest threat of fibre optic drones has created yet another new nightmare. “You have to move as if you were really on the front line — always looking at the sky, always listening for drones, looking for a place to run or hide. I cry a lot,” she says. “Inside I just want to hope everything will be fine. But now people are saying there will be nowhere to return to. The Russians will just destroy everything.”

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The local news channels report that two more restaurants are about to close their doors. We walk past one, a popular sushi place called Woka, surrounded by a canopy of trees. On its final day of operation, music is playing defiantly at the deserted outdoor terrace.

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Up the road is Rodina, a former cinema containing a maze of different dining rooms and a vast entertainment space upstairs which echoes with the memory of celebrations past. The menu contains everything from pancakes to burgers and a range of pizzas which the local volunteers insist are the best in all of Donetsk region. By the end of July, they would also be closed.

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Oleksiy Bliznyuk had already left town, shuttering his Milati Cafe a fortnight earlier, prompted by both the lack of customers and safety concerns. At one stage, he had run three sites, including a production facility with 15 staff who prided themselves on using the best ingredients.

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By 2026, he was down to two full-time employees, occasionally four. They tried their best to hold on.

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“Then one day, one of my team members told me she’d had to run and hide from an FPV drone, and another girl said a KAB (aerial bomb) had landed in the yard behind her home. It was a really tough moment, but I thought — what are we waiting for? We need to stop.”