Town Reclaimed by Ukraine Sees Residents Stay Loyal to Russia

When construction manager Miroslava, 36, returned to her hometown of Sviatohirsk in eastern Ukraine, she expected to find her home destroyed by bombing. The place was indeed damaged, but she discovered something even more disturbing: neighbors, who had stayed there during the Russian occupation, had stolen furniture, insulation and tiles from her house and a property she managed in the city.

Looted tiles were visible on the neighbor’s roof. “They were people I had known since I was a child. Friends are no longer friends,” he says on a cold day, his small body wrapped in a coat. “The neighbors are not neighbors. The relatives… A part is no longer related, because nobody expected us to come back.”

Similar anxiety has flared among residents of the mostly empty town since Ukrainian forces liberated it in September. The arrival of the Russians months earlier posed something of a litmus test for Sviatohirsk and other close-knit communities in eastern Ukraine, where the Russian church and TV had for years promoted loyalty to Moscow.

While civilians who fled are reunited with neighbors who stayed behind, residents say they now look at each other with suspicion. And as winter approaches, the city remains divided — not by lines of trenches and artillery, but by where people’s loyalties lie: with Moscow or Kiev.

Suspicions are so strong that there is no consensus on which side, Russia or Ukraine, is responsible for the bombings that hit several neighborhoods, damaged homes and killed dozens of people.

A makeshift cafeteria, called Bouchée, serves as a kind of neutral territory: anyone can eat something undisturbed — as long as they don’t express their loyalty. The newly installed local government recognizes the problem and hopes that residents with pro-Moscow sentiments will end up supporting Kiev, especially as conditions have improved after living without power and basic services during the occupation.

“The cell phone connection is back, the bread factory works, the Ukrainian post office works too,” says Volodimir Ribalkin, head of the local military administration, who serves as acting mayor. “Even people who consciously remained under occupation, waiting for the so-called ‘Russian peace’, will sooner or later understand how wrong they were.”

But the conversion will not be easy. Even before the war, the Caves monastery — loyal to the Russian Orthodox Church and considered one of the five holiest sites in the designation — gave the city a pro-Moscow reputation. The perception was heightened by Sviatohirsk being in the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbass, where Moscow has for decades promoted a policy of Soviet nostalgia.

Propaganda, especially on TV, helped the Kremlin influence civilians, while falsely portraying the region as an essential part of Russia and citing alleged oppression of Russophones as justification for the invasion.

It remains unclear how Sviatohirsk will emerge from its troubled occupation interlude. About 650 people remain out of a pre-war population of 4,000, according to local officials. Just over 120 have returned since the Russian withdrawal.

Some, like Miroslava (who declined to give her last name for fear of reprisal), believe that more people with a pro-Ukrainian bent will return when the weather warms up in the northern hemisphere spring, diluting pro-Russian sentiment. “They have already started to come back little by little, because many cannot pay the rent in other cities and come back even with the house destroyed”, she says.

The monastery, where nuns and monks remained loyal to the Russian church, wields significant influence in the city, which adds an extra layer of complexity.

In recent weeks, Kiev’s intelligence services have launched at least one operation and a series of arrests aimed at rooting out spies in the church, drawing condemnation from Moscow. And President Volodymyr Zelensky recently proposed banning the branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church loyal to Moscow, saying the move is necessary to ensure Russia is not able to “weaken Ukraine from within”.

One of the monks, who declined to be identified, said that western Ukraine and Donbass are each thinking in their own way.

Local authorities are still trying to determine whether some residents actively collaborated with the Russians. District Police Officer Ruslan Tsimbal declined to discuss the matter, but confirmed that investigations are ongoing. In the case of Miroslava’s looted belongings, agents managed to recover some of the stolen furniture.

Residents who endured much of the occupation in basement shelters still survey parts of the destroyed city, and there are wildly different opinions among some as to which army is to blame for the carnage. More than 40 people died during the occupation, according to local officials, many in bombings.

And neighbors are still discussing how the battle for Sviatohirsk played out — which lasted from June, when the Russians occupied the city, until their withdrawal in September. The fighting took place in phases, on both sides of the Siverski Donets River, which bisects the city. The bridge connecting the two sides, where couples used to put padlocks on the railings, was destroyed when Kiev forces retreated.

Russian soldiers on the north side of the river fired into the hills to the south, occasionally hitting the monastery grounds. Ukrainians entrenched on the high bank fired back into the city across the river.

The monastery’s monk accuses the Ukrainians of bombing the site, killing several people, although it was clear from the visible damage outside that the shells came from the Russian side of the river.

Miroslava downplays claims by residents who blame Ukrainians for the city’s destruction. “They like to say: ‘Ukraine was shooting from the mountain.’ But nobody would have fired if seven Russian tanks hadn’t been parked near my backyard,” she says.

The rusted hulls of some of these vehicles remain in the neighborhood, carved by Ukrainian shells, as do the houses around them.