2025-06-27Woman rebuilds life as sole resident of abandoned Donetsk town
STORY: Galina Nevinnaya says she was the last resident to leave the town of Maryinka during shelling in September 2022.The assault gave her concussion and she was trapped inside her basement before being dragged out by military rescuers.Almost three years later, she tells Reuters she is the first and only resident to have returned."Of course, I had a lot of relatives here before the fighting started; aunts, uncles, cousins. They all left, each were saving their own lives as best they could. // My mother was killed in 2022, on April 15."Maryinka, in the Donetsk region, had a pre-war population of about 10,000 people.Now, Nevinnaya cuts a lonely figure among destroyed houses and charred trees in the all but abandoned town.She spends her days restoring her home, which was heavily damaged by shelling.Some damage, she says, was caused by NATO-made missiles, a claim Reuters could not verify."All the windows blew out in one go, the whole roof came down at once, naturally. Well, at least somehow it was possible to live. We survived. There is water in the well but as for food, we came up with what we could."Asked why she would want to return as the town's only inhabitant, Nevinnaya replied only with a proverb."He who lives in his own home, lives well," she says.In December 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Maryinka had fallen under full Russian control.Donetsk is one of four regions of Ukraine that Russia partly controls and claimed as its own in 2022 in a move condemned as illegal by most countries.