The children instinctively duck when they hear the whistle of Russian rockets falling over the city of New York (Nju Jork) in eastern Ukraine.
After almost three months of war between Ukraine and Russia, they know which ones will land nearby and which ones will land further away. The young mother Valeria Kolakevych explains that her neighborhood was shelled last night, including four houses next to her own. “It was horrible,” she says. “And the worst thing is that there is nothing here, just civilians.”
The firing continues, from fields that until recently marked the dividing line between the areas seized by the pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and the areas that have remained under Ukrainian control.
New York sounds like America, but it’s actually in Donetsk Oblast. German colonists founded the settlement in 1892 under the name “Нью Йорк” Nju Jork (“New York”). In 1938 it received the status of an urban-type settlement. In 1951 it was renamed Nowhorodske (Ukrainian Новгородське; Russian Новгородское Novgorodskoje).
The small town, mostly inhabited by Russian-speaking residents, decided in the summer of 2021, after five years of struggle by local activists, to go back to the name it was given by its German founders in the early 19th century.
In the face of the Russian troops’ offensive, New York feels abandoned. Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian army has concentrated its troops in the more strategically important neighboring cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk to the north-east of the front line.
Meanwhile, a time bomb is ticking in New York: the Russians could hit a nearby factory that stores phenol, a chemical ingredient used in paint and the plastics industry. Should this penetrate the earth, the soil would be irretrievably contaminated.
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