The last standoff before peace?

While the Ukrainian military gives its last efforts on the battlefield, weary civilians are coping as best they can with increasingly dire living conditions.

Euronews international correspondent Valerie Gauriat travelled to the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine to document the situation in the area surrounding the city of Pokrovsk, at the heart of one of the war’s fiercest and most crucial battles.

This report takes you to the heart of the action on the Pokrovsk frontline, with an artillery unit, and to a Ukrainian army operational command post.

In one of the army’s so-called stabilisation points, emergency care centres for wounded soldiers, we hear 22-year-old Sasha’s story as she holds on despite the horrors she faces daily.

Not far away, in the city of Pokrovsk which has been devastated by constant Russian shelling, the few remaining residents refuse to evacuate, despite the high number of civilian casualties.

‘The only thing they leave behind them is ruins’

“Pensioners, unfortunately, are not willing to leave, nor are those who are waiting for the ‘Russian peace’, as they say,” sighs Maksym, a civil-military cooperation officer with the Ukrainian army, guiding us through the rubble.

“There’s this belief that today’s Russia, replacing the former USSR, will come and fix everything. The reality is that nothing is rebuilt. The only thing they leave behind them is ruins.”

Our reporter then travelled further west to the industrial area of western Donbas, a potential target for Russian forces. This is where most of Ukraine’s coal mines are located, providing a crucial resource for the country’s energy grid.

In the area’s oldest coal mine, we talk to the underground soldiers holding up Ukraine’s energy frontline.

Among them is an increasing number of women, as more and more men are being called up or have fallen on the battlefield. Prohibited from working in the mineshafts before the war under a law going back to Soviet times, women now represent 5% of the mine’s underground workforce.

Many of them were displaced by the war, including Oksana. Her life was shattered by the shelling of her hometown of Bahmut, where her eldest son and her father were killed.

She found solace at the mine, ensuring her livelihood, and saw her job as contributing to the war effort. A choreographer before the war, Oksana gives dance lessons to teenagers after her day at the mine.

“I’m driven by my love for children – they are our future – and for art. As well as by my faith in our victory,” she says. “I hope that I will stay strong enough to see peace come.”