Published in The Sunday Post, 28th June 2026
The northernmost district of one of Kharkiv’s vast high-rise estates feels like a ghost town. Block after block in Ukraine’s second-largest city lies in ruins, smashed shells of 1980s prefabs with empty windows and shrapnel-scored facades.
Some have been demolished entirely, the debris-strewn foundations marking the spot where once hundreds of people lived.
The playground is overgrown and wild, the school is boarded up. Except for the occasional, terrifying buzz of a Russian drone, it is eerily quiet on Natalii Uzhvyi Street, northern Saltivka. Yet even here, they are rebuilding.
Among all the grey rubble, the smart red facade of a 16-storey building stands out. It was renovated last year and looks new, the windows all marked with stickers. The block, number 60, was heavily damaged in the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Russian forces came so close that they could lob artillery straight into this housing scheme. Several blocks here have been renovated, at enormous cost to the city council. But the war has not ended, and though the Russian army was pushed farther back from Kharkiv in May 2022, it continues to terrorise the city, and particularly this district, with missile attacks and waves of bomber-drones. When The Sunday Post visited, a drone flew overhead and was caught by air defence guns, blowing up mid-air.
Some of the handful of residents around were soldiers living in temporary digs close to their unit’s positions. Serhii, 35, from Kryvih Rih, was serving with Khartiia brigade, part of the National Guard, stationed nearby. “There’s people, but very few, you know. In general they all left this district,” he said with a shrug.
“No one knows what will happen tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, and so on. The war is still here, and I think it’ll be here for a long time.”
Oleksandr Viskovatov, 58, said he left in the worst weeks of 2022, but came back in the autumn, undeterred by the danger. “We’re already used to it. I live on the top floor and two drones flew by today. Maybe we shouldn’t get used to such things? I don’t know, we just keep living,” he said.
Oleksandr showed a picture on his phone of a now-demolished building, taken after it was bombed in March 2022.
“They demolish one thing, renovate another… but these 16-storey buildings, who is going to live there? Where are they, those people?”
Oleksandr had looked online and found flats for sale in number 60. He added: “Inside the condition is terrible. They did repairs only on the outside.”
He shared the general sense of cynicism about what is being repaired in this area, and how decisions are made. The city council began ordering restoration work here in 2023, with contracts for the projects in this area going in one instance to a company owned by a member of the council’s executive committee.
There’s a sense of absurdity in this battered neighbourhood.
The bus station across from number 60 is a twisted wreck, but a smart new bus is waiting outside for passengers. Distant explosions occasionally reverberate. It does not feel like a place to linger, let alone one to return to.
Farther south, the district’s metro station is surrounded by shops and market stalls, some rebuilt after being destroyed by shelling.
Above the supermarket is a library branch. The roof was destroyed in a rocket attack in 2022, librarian Olena Serova explained, and water flooded in, causing further damage.
But now it’s functioning again: the city allocated funds, repaired the ceiling, and last year moved the library to the other side of the building.
Bomb damage is still evident as you climb the stairs: the roof of an adjoining structure is in pieces. But inside, the library is an oasis of calm and normality: stacks of books, special displays on Ukrainian and Kharkiv history, decorated with vases of dried flowers
In a big room where they screen movies on Saturdays, Olena pointed out a display of framed artwork: drawings and paintings by local teenagers. Some depict an idealised Kharkiv, a safe and sunlit place; some include the destruction these schoolchildren have become so used to: the burnt-out flats, the piles of rubble.
Olena, 61, was here through the worst of it four years ago, unable to leave due to family responsibilities. “It was scary to even go outside,” she recalled. “We ran for bread quickly, close to the houses, hugging the walls.”
Now, the danger is more manageable. The supermarket downstairs is bustling. Life continues.
But Russian tactics shift, technology improves, and in recent weeks first-person view (FPV) drones began to enter the city – an extremely worrying development.
The ring road was closed by authorities because Russian FPVs had been spotted, destroying cars. Their range will almost certainly increase; while Ukraine is renowned for its drone innovations, the other side learns quickly too.
For Olena, the library plays a central role in making life liveable in Saltivka. Not just as a cultural centre – they show films in Ukrainian language, hold special events and promote Ukrainian culture – but as a refuge.
“It gives people an opportunity to disconnect from these events, from the explosions, from all this tension. They take books, read them at home, and they remember their peaceful life,” she said.
Most popular, Olena noted, are romance novels, but also books about the war: reportage, soldiers’ memoirs, and histories. An illustrated book by Serhii Zhadan, Kharkiv’s rockstar poet, sits alongside the story of Sloviansk, the eastern city now being pummelled by Russian forces. Even in this haven, war is very present.
Olena thinks Saltivka and the wider city have a bright future, if only the war would come to an end.“If there is peace, there will be such big plans for the future,” she enthused. “Kharkiv is like no other city, even in Europe there’s nowhere like this – public transport is free, it runs perfectly, and they feed people in schools, and help pensioners, no one is starving… Kharkiv is holding on.”
Hundreds of residential buildings have now been restored or renovated by order of the city council – 71 in 2024, they say, and 57 the year before.
But there is a degree of cynicism among Kharkivites about how the decisions are made. An architect by training, Daria Spasova, 38, writes about food culture and architecture in the city. Like others, she is quick to mention the possibility of corruption when asked about the renovation projects – or at the very least, incompetence.
“There’s definitely a lot of money spent on renovation, but it’s sometimes illogical,” she said. For instance, some buildings recently got new roofs, but didn’t seem to be urgent cases, while others are “screaming for help, but nobody shows up”, Daria noted.
“Sometimes it’s just that we don’t understand the decisions made. But we definitely need to rebuild somehow,” Daria said. “Because this war is not just about existence – we also need to live. The point, I guess, is to feel that there’s a future.”
In the district on the far edge of northern Saltivka, where the renovated block sits quiet and seemingly empty, there’s also a school. Its windows are smashed or boarded up, and there are no children here at all, but among all the shrapnel spatters and gouges on the walls you can see words and pictures, made by picking out the tiny mosaic tiles that decorate the school. It was an art project, created last summer.
The artist, Vitalii Kokhan, said the idea is a bit like graffiti. “This wall is a witness to horror since 24th February 2022”, reads one line. It’s a makeshift memorial to the suffering of this neighbourhood. Talking from Kyiv, where he now lives, Vitalii, 38, said he thinks renovations around the school “at least help to conserve the buildings for the future”, even if no one wants to live in them right now.
“If the frontline will not move closer, then, yeah, people come back,” Vitalii said. But, he admitted, “now it’s dangerous just to stand in this location”. The return of normal life to northern Saltivka feels a long way off.
