A concrete blockhouse known as a pillbox has grown up from the ground on the edge of a small park. Locals have gotten used to the grey hemisphere and no longer pay any attention. The pillbox is meant to serve as a shelter for civilians in case shelling happens whilst they are outside. It can hold about ten people.
There are numerous pillboxes in Pokrovsk. Over fifty thousand people lived here before the 2022 invasion. After February 2022, people left en masse, hoping that “all this” would soon end somehow.
Since the summer, the process has reversed itself. Over half of the inhabitants have returned: “We wandered around, spent all our savings, [and decided it was] enough.”
There are many cars in the streets. Shopping centres are open — but everything is “terribly expensive”. So are coffee shops, but “no one goes [to them]”. In the courtyards, people paint playgrounds and dig up flower beds, because “there is no work. The humanitarian aid is not for everyone; the best stuff gets stolen and sold, and that’s how people become millionaires around here”.
The Pokrovske coal mine, which had been taken over by oligarch Rinat Akhmetov’s Metinvest group a year before the invasion, has posted vacancies. The list begins with mining jobs for 25-35 thousand hryvnias a month (about 600–840 euros).
No one wants to imagine what will happen if the front line comes close to Pokrovsk and the bunkers have to be used for their intended purpose.