Izyum in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, occupied by Russian forces in 2022, still bears the scars of destruction. Local residents say about 80% of the city was reduced to ruins. Vladlen Noll, a Kyiv-based cameraman born in Izyum, returned immediately after the deoccupation and over more than three years has recorded more than fifty interviews for his project “My Izyum”.
One of the people he interviewed was Mykhailo Yatsentiuk, who lost his family after a strike on building No. 2 on what is now Memory Street, formerly Pervomaiska Street. He says that on March 9, 2022, at around 9 a.m., an aerial bomb hit the residential five-story building where civilians had been sheltering in the basement. At least 44 people were killed.
“I stepped out to get tea, and at that moment there was an explosion. When I came to, the house was destroyed, the basement was blocked, and my relatives were trapped under the slabs,”
Yatsentiuk recalls. According to him, his relatives’ bodies were recovered only on April 13 and 14, while debris removal continued until May 1. Some of those who had been hiding there are still listed as missing.
Noll keeps the recorded material on hard drives in his apartment in central Izyum. He documents not only the war, but also the city’s prewar life, and, as the article notes, local residents are more willing to speak openly to someone they regard as one of their own.
Among those whose testimony he recorded is Oleh, nicknamed Bartender. He speaks about shelling, hunger, clearing rubble in exchange for food, and the presence in the city of Russian units including Rusich and the Wagner Group. His account, like the other interviews in the project, captures the experience of people who survived occupation, bombardment, and isolation.
Today Izyum remains about 30 kilometers from the line of combat. Noll continues gathering testimonies in an effort to preserve, for history, the memory of the shattered city and its residents.