Letters from the Republic

May 17, 2025

Today I went to Izium.

Izium is not some backwater Soviet industrial village. The area has been inhabited since at least the neolithic 3rd century BC; the city was founded in the 17th century and achieved its municipal title in the 18th. Much of the architecture dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when it held its status as a serious regional economic power on the Donets River. A promontory over the civic center allows stunning views of a beautifully situated town by the winding river with the vastness of the Ukrainian countryside visible beyond. As I walk around, children ride their bikes in the park next to the city square, the fountain providing a welcome respite from an unusually strong May sun.

Izium is the site of some of the worst Russian war crimes known to date, and showing up here with only a camera feels morally irresponsible.

Farmland in want of care, checkpoints, and abandoned entrenched positions are the sights on our journey southeast to the formerly occupied town. A temporary bridge over the Donets gives us a view of the regular one, demolished by either Russian or Ukrainian forces. Houses bear the scars of bullets and explosives, and military and emergency vehicles and personnel assume a majority status.

We are taken on a grim tour. A five-story building is our first stop; in 2022, it was struck by a Russian MiG ahead of the Russian occupation and retreat that year. Fifty civilians, many of them children, were killed when the building was hit in its center of mass by a missile. Where once there stood a broad residential structure, there are now two towers either side of a crater filled with the detritus that was once the effects of its inhabitants. Standing by the mangled playground in what was once the building’s front yard, one now stares past abandoned playing fields all the way to Izium’s St. Nicholas Church, framed by rooms ripped open by the blast. Files are still piled in a cabinet with one door swinging open; boots sit on the bottom shelf of a wardrobe of rags; the back of a modular sofa hangs out over the steep drop into the void blasted into the residence. Soldiers may have taken a position in the destroyed building at some point, and bullet holes dot an enclosed balcony; the wind through its shattered glass sways patterned curtains inside. Memorials – mostly to children – have been planted in the yard, where one of the residents is still buried. Tributes to the lost have been painted on the entrances.

In the back, someone has spray painted a swastika.

We go to the cemetery. I have never seen any quite like it: the land was never cleared, and graves stretch as far as one can see through the dense pine forest. I am able to go only so far into it – the oldest grave I see is from 1994 – but from the sheer sense of boundless headstones in an endless forest, this is clearly a generationally hallowed ground. An Orthodox funeral is being conducted, and I do my best to keep my distance.

Russian forces, out of an echo of conscience or simple convenience, brought Izium’s dead here as they swept through the city. When Ukrainian forces retook the area a month later, they found unmarked graves containing 447 people. 22 were servicemen. 5 were children.

Though all known victims have been exhumed, the scars in the ground mark bear witness to the sadness that will forever be associated with this place. Bus-sized gouges in the ground mark where most were found, many with evidence of torture and summary execution.

Some were found in individual graves, which are now empty except for simple crosses of plywood that rest against the grave edges. One stands out: a carved Orthodox cross that may well have come from one of Izium’s ruined buildings.

I am called back to the car just after observing on slightly raised ground a newer grave; it is that of a 9 year old girl who died in 2023.

I buy lunch for everyone and feel like the biggest asshole on the planet. Back in Kharkiv, not 100 miles away, a dolled up 20-something walks her designer lap dog in an immaculately manicured public park.