The Siege of Chernihiv
Blocks of buildings in Chernihiv show the ravages of shelling from the Russian Army’s thirty-nine day campaign to capture the northern Ukrainian city.Photograph by Celestino Arce / NurPhoto / AP
For more than a month, the Russian military pummelled residents with bombing raids and missile fire, turning a locked-in Ukrainian city into an urban death trap.
by Joshua Yaffa
In the middle of March, bulldozers dug trenches in an unused field at the edge of the Yalovshchina cemetery, in the city of Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine. By that point, Chernihiv had been under effective blockade for more than two weeks, with most buildings left without electricity, heat, or water. Roads and bridges leading out of town had either been bombed or were now the site of active battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces. All the while, the Russian military pummelled Chernihiv with bombing raids and missile fire, turning a locked-in city into an urban death trap. As many as fifty people were killed each day, struck down while in line for food or huddling in their apartments.
Where to bury them? The city’s main cemetery, on the northern outskirts of town, was under constant bombardment. Supply routes were blocked, and no factories or workshops were open, which meant it wasn’t possible to produce enough caskets to keep up with the bodies piling up at the morgue. Finally a solution was reached: during episodic lulls in bombardment, city workers would pick up a dozen or so bodies at a time, put them in caskets cobbled together from spare wood, and lower them into the ground beneath a muddy field at the Yalovshchina cemetery.
On March 29th, the Russian military announced that it would “drastically reduce military activity” in the area, part of a larger redeployment reflecting its inability to take Kyiv—ninety miles down the highway—and other large cities, including Chernihiv. A week later, that withdrawal was complete. The city’s residents, who numbered two hundred and eighty-five thousand before the war, emerged from their basements and municipal bomb shelters; the power flickered back on, and water again flowed from the taps. The siege had lasted thirty-nine days and, according to the city’s mayor, killed some seven hundred people—though countless more died as a result of freezing temperatures, lack of medical care, and shortages of food and medicines. People could now begin to make sense of their loss, accounting for the dead and visiting their graves.
One morning last week, I walked through the site, marked by rows upon rows of small dirt mounds, with simple wooden placards noting the names and approximate dates of death of those buried underneath. At one end, near a patch of forest, I came across three men standing around the grave of Evgeny Blokhin, who, according to the unadorned metal tablet sticking out of the ground, was born on September 13, 1986, and was killed on March 17, 2022, at the age of thirty-five.
“He was our friend—the soul of our company, you could say. He held us all together,” a man who introduced himself as Dmitry said. Blokhin, he explained, owned his own automobile-repair shop, and had two children. He was athletic, able to do twenty pushups on one arm. Another friend, Igor, explained what happened: the explosions started at eleven-thirty at night, when Blokhin was at home with his family, including his parents and brother. He leaped to cover his six-year-old son with his body. “He was hit in the back. Through the window. It was a cluster bomb. Then the roof exploded.” It took an ambulance nearly an hour to reach the building, owing to the continued bombing. By the time Blokhin was brought to the hospital, he was dead. His son was unscathed.
Blokhin’s friends had been wandering the grounds, searching for his grave by date of death. Now that they had found it, they planted a stick in the dirt and tied a yellow ribbon to it, so that they’d be able to find the site again. As a final offering, they filled a plastic cup with cognac—“Zhenya liked whiskey and rum, but we brought what we found,” Dmitry told me—and placed it on the damp ground, along with two pieces of candy and a slice of bread. There had been no funeral, so this would have to do.
Nearby, a man in his sixties named Oleksandr was standing over a similar dirt mound where his wife, Ludmila, was buried. He explained how, one day in March, they had split up: he went to the city’s eleventh-century Orthodox monastery in search of water—the well on its grounds was then one of the few reliable sources—and Ludmila had gone to find groceries. When Oleksandr came home, Ludmila still wasn’t there. Phone service didn’t work, and so Oleksandr set off toward the store, knowing that Ludmila liked to sit on a bench out front in the afternoons; it was one of the few places in town where you could get a mobile Internet connection.
The square had been bombed: debris and shrapnel littered the asphalt, and soldiers and paramedics were running back and forth. An officer motioned to Oleksandr and took out his phone. “He showed me a photo,” Oleksandr said. “There she was, in her coat, her hood over her head. She had tried to hide.”
Oleksandr identified Ludmila’s body at the morgue; a few days later, she was interred at the mass grave site. Now that the siege was lifted, city officials had asked if he wanted to rebury his wife elsewhere. “But what’s the point?” Oleksandr said. He nodded around. “This is a wonderful place. Right in the city, with a birch grove nearby. She loved birch trees.”
Chernihiv is forty-five miles from the border with Belarus, or, as its mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, came to learn in late February, about an hour and a half by tank. On the morning of Russia’s invasion, February 24th, hundreds of them—along with armored personnel carriers and mobile rocket launchers—were streaming across the border. By the next day, the city was surrounded. “Units of the armed forces of the Russian Federation have completed the encirclement of the city of Chernihiv,” Russia’s military spokesperson announced. The siege had begun.
I visited Atroshenko, who is fifty-three, with an athletic frame and a spirited, always-on energy, in his makeshift headquarters in a location that he prefers not to disclose. He’s been effectively on the run, regularly watched over by armed bodyguards, since early March, when a Russian Iskander ballistic missile slammed into Chernihiv’s city hall ten minutes after Atroshenko walked inside—Atroshenko thinks he was tracked by his telephone signal—shattering the glass in his third-floor office.
The Yuri Gagarin Stadium lay in ruins in early April as Russian attacks on Chernihiv continued.Photograph by Metin Aktas / Anadolu Agency / Getty
“For the first two or three days, when they mainly bombed from planes, they tried to hit more or less the area with the army barracks and other military sites,” Atroshenko told me. “But, when they saw that we’re not giving up, no one is abandoning the city, they started to bully people, to terrorize them.” Bombs, rockets, and artillery fire began to fall seemingly at random. The Hotel Ukraina, in the city’s center, was hit. So was the colonnaded historic cinema. The outdoor stadium was left in ruins. Residential buildings were struck with terrifying regularity.
“This was not a war against an army but aimed at the destruction of an entire population,” Atroshenko said. Food grew scarce; a loaf of bread was a rare delicacy. Lines formed at the few places that had supplies, but, with bombs and rockets falling across the city, it was dangerous to linger anywhere. “The city was cut off from life,” Atroshenko said. A number of volunteers braved the roads to bring in food and medicine; several of them were killed in the course of the siege. But their efforts were nowhere near enough to feed a city of Chernihiv’s size.
Tens of thousands of people fled, including doctors and municipal workers and local deputies, making the running of the city that much harder. “We had cases in which workers who oversee critical infrastructure finished their shifts, saying ‘See you tomorrow,’ and then disappeared and didn’t answer their phones,” Atroshenko told me. He never considered leaving: “I made the choice, very consciously, to stay and defend the city, to fight—and, if necessary, to die.”
On March 3rd, Russian aircraft streaked overhead and dropped at least eight bombs that slammed into a group of apartment buildings on Viacheslava Chornovola Street, in the center of town. A line of people had formed at a pharmacy nearby—with medicine in short supply, the news of an open pharmacy had led dozens to run over as quickly as they could. Those standing outside were left a gruesome pile of flesh and limbs and ash. Cement walls crumbled into pieces; window glass shattered into a mist that left people cut and bloodied in their apartments. Whole floors collapsed, crushing those underneath. Forty-seven people were killed, making the bombing among the most deadly single attacks of the entire war.
It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house. I passed the charred hulls of half a dozen cars, and walked into a courtyard. A giant crater, perhaps ten feet across and more than six feet deep, appeared, as if someone had taken a giant ice-cream scoop to the earth. International investigators, including those from Amnesty International, concluded that the Russian Air Force used FAB-500 bombs in the attack—unguided, Soviet-era munitions that each weigh more than a thousand pounds.
A woman came out of one of the entryways and introduced herself as Natasha. She had been at home when the blasts occurred; she was knocked off her feet, flying backward into the kitchen, as glass sprayed all around her. Her apartment was still habitable, even if it had no windows or doors. She estimated that a third of the building’s residents remained, living without power or heat. “But it’s not clear who moved out and who is dead,” she told me. Another man, Vasily, said he had been outside, near the pharmacy, when the bombs fell. He ended up face down in the earth, with bodies scattered on all sides. When he ran upstairs to his seventh-floor apartment he found his wife alive and in shock, her face slicked with blood.
I went down to the cellar, where, since the start of the war, a few of the building’s residents have made their home. One of them, Yuriy, told me that he was down here when the bombs hit on March 3rd. “The whole basement shook,” he said. He emerged to the courtyard to a scene of horror. “They were pulling the dead out of the rubble.” One body was that of his upstairs neighbor. “In one moment we lost everything,” a woman named Svetlana, from the seventh floor, told me. She and her husband, Vitaliy, now live in a cramped concrete space the size of a closet, with a portable heater and some glass jars of pickled vegetables. “We don’t have any place to go,” Svetlana said. “So we sit here.”
As the siege wore on, and bodies began to pile up, they were brought to Sergey Andreev, the chief pathologist of City Hospital No. 2. When I sat in his office, he was filling out the eight-hundred-and-first death certificate since the start of the war, and that was just for his own facility—there was still the central city morgue across town. Normally, Andreev processes eight hundred deaths a year. The certificate belonged to a man who died, at the age of sixty-nine, of bone cancer. He had been in regular treatment, Andreev explained, but, owing to the blockade, was unable to do his last course of radiation therapy. “In theory, we shouldn’t be too sensitive at this job, but even for me this is something rather terrible,” he told me.
During the worst days of the siege, Andreev had lived in the basement at the morgue, bringing his wife with him. They cooked meals over an open fire in the yard. There was no electricity, which meant Andreev kept bodies from decomposing as best as he could. He managed to get a dozen diesel-powered refrigerated trucks and parked them out front, but they soon ran out of space.
He told me of the corpses, or, rather, their stories. “There were two men in their forties, friends—one was godfather to the other’s child—who were out in the street together, and then a shell hit, and, just like that, the two of them are gone,” he said. “And I remember this family of three, parents and a child, who were running to reach a bomb shelter but didn’t make it in time.” The worst, he said, was a “stupid story” of a security guard he knew from a nearby medical clinic. “In the evening he called me to say he was going fishing tomorrow, and the next day they brought him here.” The man’s longtime fishing spot, a pedestrian bridge, had come under fire.
Those who were lucky enough not to end up in Andreev’s hands were brought to the hospital next door. In the wards, I found a number of victims recovering from yet another notorious attack during the siege: on March 16th, Russian shells hit a crowd of people waiting in line to buy bread outside the Soyuz grocery store, leaving at least ten dead. Among those killed was James Hill, a sixty-eight-year-old U.S. citizen, who had come to Chernihiv with his Ukrainian partner and then got trapped inside. “Nobody in Chernihiv is safe,” he wrote in a Facebook post two weeks before his death. “Indiscriminate bombing … Ukrainian forces hold city but are surrounded. It’s a siege here. Nobody in. Nobody out.”
Lying in a hospital bed, Nikolay Nosilnik told me that he had been waiting several days for bread to appear in the shops. “They didn’t bring any the first day, the second, neither,” he said. He had been in line for an hour or two when a wave of fire and metal passed overhead. “The blast came, and everyone dropped,” he said. “When I came to my senses, I looked around, and saw what must have been eighty people lying on the ground.” Shrapnel ripped through Nosilnik’s side and back, but he was alive.
In a hospital room down the hall, Mikhail Kluch told me that a group of people standing near a fence outside the shop suffered the worst of the blast. “They were immediately torn to pieces,” he said. “I heard screams and moans, and myself was yelling out, ‘Help me!’ ” He looked down to see one of his arms hanging on by a tendon, with a spray of shrapnel wounds up and down his torso. “I’ve been in this bed ever since,” he told me. “I can’t even turn over.”
The hospital itself came under fire on March 19th. There was already no power; doctors were performing surgery by flashlight. “It started with some explosions not so far away,” Bohdan Rozhylo, who leads the hospital’s trauma unit, said. “Then they got closer and closer, and, finally, really loud.” A flurry of artillery shells hit the hospital, blowing out a chunk of its outer wall. One nurse was killed; a whole wing was rendered inoperable. With the electricity out, the elevators didn’t work, so it was impossible to get patients to the basement. Instead, Rozhylo and some of the other doctors laid them down on the floor in the corridor.
Rozhylo now led me to a room of female patients who had been injured in shelling and bombing attacks, only to endure the same thing all over again in the hospital. “We didn’t spend one night in peace,” Valentina Tsarik, who has been recovering from shrapnel wounds for the past month, said. She and three other women in the room described lying awake, listening to the explosions outside. “The windows trembled, and glass showered down,” Tsarik said.
One woman, frail and white-haired, watched me from her hospital bed with wide eyes, but didn’t say a word. Finally, as I was getting ready to leave, she announced that she had something to say. Her name is Nina Rogacheva, she told me, and she is ninety-two years old. She was eleven years old when her family got news that her father, fighting with the Red Army in the Second World War, was killed on the front, near the city of Smolensk, in western Russia: “I remember the brutality, the violence, the horror.”
Rogacheva was injured in a rocket attack on the second day of the current war, February 25th, as she was leaving her apartment building. “I took two steps, then all of a sudden there was a boom, and that’s it, I fell,” she said. She’s been lying in the hospital since. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, but coiled with fury. I bent down to hear her. “My father died defending Russia, and now that same Russia is bombing me.”
As the Russian military pulled away from Chernihiv, Ukrainian officials declared that the city had played a heroic role in staving off the larger Russian attack on Kyiv. Russian forces were tied up for weeks laying siege, and were kept from moving soldiers and heavy equipment south toward the capital. On a visit to Chernihiv earlier this month, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Zelensky administration, said the defense of the city “kept Ukraine from being cut into pieces.” He added, “I came to say thank you.”
The heaviest fighting had taken place in the outskirts of Chernihiv, where Russian tanks and armor tried—and failed—to break through and penetrate the center of the city. I drove out to Novoselivka, a village just to the northeast. Gnarled Russian tanks, their turrets blown off or drooping down into the mud, stood scattered along the side of the road. At a Ukrainian military checkpoint, soldiers told me that this stretch of road essentially functioned as the front line, demarcating the depth of the Russian advance.
Novoselivka itself was a scene of near-apocalyptic destruction. I could make out where houses once stood by keeping an eye out for piles of wooden beams and cement. Craters, similar in size to the one I encountered in the courtyard, dotted the landscape. I came across a man in his twenties, Yury Chugai, who was sorting through the rubble of his house. We inched around the chasm left by an FAB-500 bomb that had fallen in the garden. Chugai told me he had lived here with his parents, and they had managed to leave days before it was destroyed. “We’re collecting what we can,” he said. He and his dad have found clothes and bedsheets. A neighbor came by holding up a charred car door. “We try and dig into the middle of the pile, watching out that it doesn’t collapse on us,” Chugai told me.
Down the road, three men—Oleksandr, Valeriy, and Mikhail—were standing in front of a two-story brick apartment building that had been bombed into a charred pile of ruins. It happened the last day before Russian troops pulled out, they told me. A woman from the neighborhood, Nataliya Kravtsova, had been cooking meals on an open fire for those left behind during the worst days of the siege. A spotter must have noticed the smoke. “It was like the strike was aimed right at her,” Oleksandr said. She was blown apart where she stood. “We gathered up in a box what was left of her in the garden.” Oleksandr, a strong, formidable man in his fifties, began to cry. “It would be one thing if it happened right at the beginning,” he said. “But the very last day!”
A wall and door in the basement of a school in Yahidne, near Chernihiv, bear writing from residents who were trapped there for weeks as Russian forces occupied the town.Photograph by Evgeniy Maloletka / AP