In Ukraine’s front-line city of Kramatorsk, couples separated by war risk brief reunions as Russian forces close in.
“No, we don’t do that here,” Iryna recalls him saying after she arrived to visit on a bright, sunny fall day back in September 2025. A seat belt in Kramatorsk is less likely to save a life than cost one—it would stop a passenger or driver from being able to escape the vehicle quickly if it got caught in the crosshairs of a small but deadly Russian first-person-view drone.
“The rules here,” Iryna remembers thinking, “are something else.” Volodymyr enlisted in the Ukrainian armed forces in May 2025, leaving his wife and now two-year-old daughter behind in Kyiv. The couple had tied the knot just two days before Russian tanks rolled over the border intoVolodymyr now serves with Phoenix, a drone regiment under Ukraine’s state border guard service. One of the very few chances Iryna has to see her husband is through a few stolen, sporadic days in Kramatorsk, a familiar experience for many Ukrainian women.Kramatorsk is a longtime front-line settlement, brimming with cold, hard strategic value. It is one vertebra of Ukraine’s defensive spine in the east; it’s now around nine miles from the first Russian positions and staring down the slow creep forward of Moscow’s troops, according to calculations by the Institute for the Study of War think tank. It has taken nearly four years for Russia to advance 18 miles closer to Kramatorsk. While Ukrainian cities are no strangers to explosions in the dead of night, Kramatorsk is described by its visitors as a different story entirely. Drones swoop down toward the streets, the sound of artillery drifting on the breeze. The force of the nearby blasts shoves open apartment doors. Against the macabre soundtrack, couples prized apart by military service dine on sushi in restaurants bathed in candlelight or sit with their faces to the sun on outdoor patios, sipping hot drinks in the morning rays. Alcohol in the soldier-dominated city is banned, and the curfew stretches longer through the night than elsewhere in Ukraine. The candles are not just romantic, but often a necessity in an area without a reliable electricity supply. “We were all drinking juices, and tea and coffee, but nothing stronger,” recounts Lesia Orobets, a former Ukrainian member of parliament whose work now focuses on lobbying for support for Ukraine’s air defenses. She first visited Kramatorsk years before the war, but says the damage inflicted since has rendered the city unrecognizable.Kramatorsk in April 2022 , still within the initial weeks of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion, left 61 people dead and more than 120 others injured. Ukrainian officials said the area was packed with some 4,000 civilians trying to evacuate to the west. Burned-out cars, torched by the strike, squatted outside the main entrance and the remains of a missile lay on a patch of the green grass the city is known for. But in the long years since, the station was still the end of the line for travelers heading toward the booms and shaking earth of the front lines, as well as their loved ones. “Kramatorsk railway station is a place of love, pain and tears all at once,” says Natalya Fesyk, a 29-year-old native of Cherkasy in central Ukraine. Her twice-monthly treks to Kramatorsk from Kyiv—a 380-mile journey—started in May last year after her husband was transferred to fight close to the city. “It is where soldiers meet their wives, and where they see them off on the train and say goodbye,” she says. “You don’t know if it’s your last meeting or not, but you pray to all the higher powers that it’s not.” Another traveler to the city is 33-year-old Maryna Orobets. On her most recent visit, in May 2025, she watched women settled into seats close by fuss with their hair and smooth down wrinkles in their clothes. She would later glimpse the same women, fingers woven with their partners’ hands, on Kramatorsk’s blossom-littered springtime streets. But some goodbyes are more bittersweet than others. Lesia’s husband, Alex, an officer commanding a unit of Western volunteers, has only made it to the station to wish her farewell once. More often than not, he was called back to his unit instead. She would stand there without him, as others said their goodbyes.‘Unbearable’ To Lose Kramatorsk Back in 2017, at just 17 years old, Zaporizhzhia-born Daria sang traditional Ukrainian Christmas carols in front of the railway station. Snow stuck to the ground and people quietly applauded as they shuffled past. Kramatorsk was a typical, wintry eastern city. Fast-forward to fall 2024 and Daria, who preferred not to give her last name, hopped off the bus a few stops early to pass by a park, walking through the piles of orange leaves the rest of the way to the station. Now in her mid-twenties, she had been visiting her husband, Yevhen. She noted what she thought was a surprising amount of children swarm around the station. She caught a bus for roughly an hour from Kramatorsk to Dobropillia. A year later, Ukrainian officials declared Dobropillia the site of a successful counteroffensive against Russia, making the journey to and from Kramatorsk much more difficult. Ukraine’s national train operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, temporarily cut off direct rail access to Kramatorsk and nearby Sloviansk, another “fortress city” critical for Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk. The connection has not yet been reinstated. Trains were stopping at Barvinkove, a city in the neighboring Kharkiv region, 13 miles from the front line, as of late January, but they are now being diverted to Lozova. Determined Kramatorsk-bound travelers can hitch an onward two-hour drive with others heading toward the fighting or catch one of the buses circulating around the area and its net-covered roads. Buses from major cities like Kyiv toward Kramatorsk almost double the previous journey time.But still, family members, lovers and friends make the trip. Ukrainian conversation has supplanted the prewar Russian-language chatter, military uniforms now much more common than civilian garb. Makeshift concrete shelters have popped up next to bus stops, but the avocado toast rivals any eatery in Kyiv, says 34-year-old Margo Koldanova. Her boyfriend, Eduard, serves with Ukraine’s Azov Brigade and their first date was in Sloviansk after the war broke out. Their nascent relationship brought Margo repeatedly to Kramatorsk. By summer 2025, Eduard had stopped agreeing to Margo’s trips. More wooden planks stretched over holes in shell-blasted buildings, and the loud clashes of war had inched closer to the streets crowded with second-hand foreign vehicles colloquially dubbed “.” These cars are battered and throwaway. There’s no space for them in the Ukrainian military’s stretched budget; they’re just fodder for Russian drones and deliberately only barely up to the task. Yet they would also be used to whisk civilians and soldiers alike away from Kramatorsk if the city fell to Russia. And in recent, publicly available drafts of a possible peace deal, this could become a reality. Russia is thought to be unbending in its desire to control all of Ukraine’s former industrial heartland, theThis would include a sizable chunk of Donetsk still held by Ukrainian forces. Kyiv has balked at the idea of effectively gifting Russia unconquered territory despite reported pressure from the White House, frustrated with the slow pace of drawn-out negotiations and apparently unwilling to really turn the screws on the Kremlin. Western analysts say it would take Russia several more years of brutal, attritional fighting to seize all of Donetsk and its fortified cities, like Kramatorsk, by force. Kramatorsk’s visitors often say the huge Ukrainian flag unfurled in the city is one of its most memorable features.“Every time, when Russia takes a city, a village, or a town I’ve visited in my life, it feels like someone came to your home and tore out a couple of pages from your family album,” Daria says. To give up Kramatorsk, Natalya says, would make each Ukrainian death a life lost in vain.For now, though, the city’s perilous streets are still a lifeline for couples. A Venice with guns, rather than gondolas. The fear of being within the reach of flying artillery shells is soothed by the balm of visible Ukrainian military might. “Kramatorsk is freedom,” says Natalya. “I felt calm there because my husband was nearby, and with him I wasn’t afraid to endure the round-the-clock shelling.” “Bolstered by the military protection, you can pretend that everything around is just a big nightmare,” Daria says. For accommodation, some, like Iryna, opt to use a still-functioning Booking.com. Others, Lesia included, prefer a Craigslist-style or Airbnb approach, ringing up the owners of apartments put up for rent. Ukrainian speakers are preferred in this haphazard security vetting process. You can never be sure that the person on the end of the phone is reliable, and that you’ll be safe on your romantic getaway, Lesia says. “You just rely on your intuition, on your common sense.” In one apartment Lesia and her husband picked, the previous occupant had left a list of restaurant recommendations. The first two had been destroyed by the time the couple were searching for a meal in Kramatorsk in Easter 2024. They decided not to sit down for lunch or dinner in any establishment in the city. Takeout felt safer. Lesia’s husband managed to wrangle a few hours away from his duties each day. They walked around the city’s green spaces, while Lesia attempted to cook with ingredients sourced from the grocery stores that were still open. “I failed, and we just went to local cafés,” she says.Park walks and coffees dominate the agenda for most couples. During one stay in Kramatorsk, Maryna strolled with her husband to a small café famed for its sweet treats. “Outside, there was a huge pink sign, and inside everything was pink—chairs, walls, soft decor, very cute, almost Barbie-style,” Maryna says. “When we walked in, we were the only ones there at first, and my husband—a big, bearded soldier in uniform—looked a little shy in such a sweet place. “Within minutes, the café filled with other men just like him—tall, tired, strong soldiers in uniform, ordering lattes and desserts and sitting on those tiny pink chairs.” “Over time, as my social circle became filled with military personnel, related individuals and everyone involved, Kramatorsk became a cozy corner where you can see and meet your people in establishments or elsewhere, just like in Kyiv,” adds Margo. “Only here, everything reminds you that war is nearby.” During Iryna’s fall visit last year, she and Volodymyr gazed up at a total lunar eclipse on a walk in the park. The moon, swallowed up by the Earth’s shadow, became dyed a bold red. The phenomenon is sometimes called a blood moon.Iryna says, “You enjoy and live every moment, because you’re constantly reminded that every moment can be your last.”
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