Coloured Post-it notes on a café noticeboard express local solidarity with Ukrainian colours and hearts. A 26-year-old soldier, Bohdan, now in logistics, spends his day off photographing recent Russian bombing damage in Kramatorsk with his dog Arnold and plans to turn a damaged tree image into a tattoo symbolizing endurance. Kramatorsk constitutes roughly 30% of Donetsk oblast still held by Ukrainian forces amid a grinding Russian advance. Vladimir Putin demanded all of Donetsk as part of a peace deal, a proposal reportedly briefly endorsed by Donald Trump despite Ukraine's rejection. Many Donetsk residents reject ceding their land.
I have a history with this place, he says. It is part of my destiny and my puzzle. Kramatorsk is the core of the 30% of Ukraine's Donetsk oblast that its military still holds in the face of a grinding Russian advance. This week, the region was the subject of what appears to have been a failed negotiation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The Russian president demanded all of Donetsk which together with Luhansk oblast makes up the Donbas region as part of a peace deal, a proposal that Trump seemed to have briefly endorsed even though Ukraine rejected it. Map showing areas controlled by Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts Russia's arguments change, but in Putin's eyes, Donetsk, traditionally a Russian-speaking industrial region in Ukraine's east, is culturally closer to Moscow than Kyiv.
People who live there, however, have a very different view. They show no interest in seeing the land of Donetsk given up; it is their land after all. A few minutes earlier, Bohdan had photographed the nearby site of a Russian bombing in the centre of the city on 31 July that had killed five, taking an image of a damaged tree in front of a ruined apartment block.
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