Attack on clinic in Selydove
After the fall of Avdiivka, the next city in Donetsk is worried
February 20, 2024, 9:43 a.m
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Last Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces had to admit defeat in Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine – with their withdrawal the city fell to the Russians. Around 30 kilometers to the east, the residents of Selydowe are faced with a difficult decision: stay or flee?
Days after the attack, the acrid smell of charred concrete still lingers in the cold winter air in Selydove. “It was a nightmare,” says Olena Obodez when she describes the shelling of the clinic last week. The war is moving closer to the eastern Ukrainian city again. And since neighboring Avdiivka fell to Russian attackers at the weekend, many people in Selydove have been thinking about fleeing.
“They’re talking about whether they should evacuate or not,” says Obodez as the artillery roars dully in the distance. “People are afraid. My daughter asks me to leave every day.” But the 42-year-old still wants to stay – even though she experienced the attack up close on Wednesday. Obodez has been working in the hospital now under fire for eight years. When the rocket hit the maternity ward in the middle of the night, she rushed to the clinic to bring the patients to safety. Help came too late for a pregnant woman and a mother and her nine-year-old son. When Obodez talks about the collapsed roof and the clinic in flames, she tears up.
Now city workers are boarding up the hospital’s broken windows, and inside, amid broken glass and twisted metal, hospital workers are collecting medical supplies in shopping bags that are still usable after the attack. Selydove is located around 30 kilometers east of the industrial city of Avdiivka, from which Ukrainian troops withdrew on Saturday after months of heavy fighting. The defeat raises agonizing questions for the residents of the surrounding towns and villages: Do they have to flee now? Or can they still hope that their soldiers will protect them?
“We evacuate killed civilians more often”
It is the police’s job to evacuate civilians from areas that are becoming increasingly dangerous. Some officials fled themselves – from regions now occupied by Russia. Because of the Russian air strikes and advances, more and more people are leaving the area, says Oleksandra Gawrylko, spokeswoman for the regional police, without giving any figures. Actually, people should have left a year ago, she says. “Now we more often evacuate killed civilians so their families can bury them.”
Next to the Soviet World War II memorial in Selydove, a few people venture back into the still-smoldering houses that were hit an hour before the hospital. They try to save what can still be saved from their homes. In a panic, a woman drags bags full of belongings out of the house. She says she will still stay in Selydove. Her daughter, on the other hand, just wants to leave.
Olena Osadtscha, a 40-year-old public prosecutor, also decided to flee. It is her second, because she actually comes from the regional capital Donetsk, which pro-Russian separatists took over ten years ago. The authorities offered Osadcha work in Dnipro, further west. “But I don’t want to go to Dnipro. It’s not safe there either,” she says.
Nearly two dozen of the 350 employees wanted to leave the city after the latest attack, said Oleg Kiatschko, the head of the destroyed hospital. “We’re all thinking about where we could find refuge. But if it’s necessary for us to be here now, then we’ll stay here. I’m not going anywhere for the time being,” says the 46-year-old. Other residents also seem determined to stay in Selydove no matter what – for example those who reopened a sushi restaurant this month.