In the village of Slatyne, north of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and perhaps 10 miles from the border with Russia, an elderly resident called Viktoria told me that half the villagers had suffered a severe health issue over the previous year.
Strokes, heart attacks, and high blood pressure abound in de-occupied and frontline areas of Ukraine. I asked her why. “Uncertainty,” she said.
That’s unlikely to improve in 2025 and may even get worse. As politicians and generals examine maps and consider the creation of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) as part of a possible peace deal, Slatyne will be bang in the middle of whatever happens next.
I run a small charity called KHARPP that repairs bomb-damaged homes in the Kharkiv region. I’ve spent much of the past two-and-a-half years traveling from village to village and speaking to residents. The horrors of war are, of course, endless, but over the past few months, it has increasingly felt that the uncertainty thrust upon these villagers is perhaps the worst torture of all.
Most of the communities I work in are to the north of Kharkiv Oblast. They have had a rough time — for the first six months of war, they were either occupied by the Russians or on the frontlines. The level of damage ranges from 60-100%, with whole streets flattened and the roads still pockmarked by shrapnel holes. Despite this blast of destruction, the year and a half following the oblast’s liberation brought an uneasy peace, and residents slowly began to return.
But when Russia launched a fresh incursion across the border in spring last year, this fragile sense of stability was shattered. The worst fears of the residents generally were not realized: a small handful of mostly abandoned villages were occupied, but a major defeat was avoided.
Nonetheless, the Russians will not leave the residents in peace. Weeks go by without any attacks, and then suddenly a glide bomb will destroy a residential house, killing its owners, or a rush of artillery will be fired at the village without warning. There are no air raid warnings or shelters: these villages are too close to the frontline for them to make any difference.
The impact on the mental wellbeing of the village residents is palpable; life continues almost as normal, with the local commuter train still running to Kharkiv and the market functioning on a daily basis, and yet death hangs in the air. There is no certainty that each approaching moment will not be the one to kill you.
After months of the news cycle drifting further and further away from Ukraine, Donald Trump’s election and renewed talk of negotiations and a potential peace agreement have brought it back into focus. Kyiv is back in the headlines, whilst the deteriorating frontline in the Donbas makes regular news, as the world waits to see what a potential end to the war might look like.
There are innumerable variations on what might happen, but none seems to offer hope for communities like Slatyne. The fate of Kharkiv Oblast, partially occupied to both its north and its east, and was a major target at the start of the war but is not included in Russia’s current claimed list of annexed territories, cannot be predicted.
In the spring, Putin claimed to want to create a demilitarized zone in the region. The incoming Trump administration is also talking about a DMZ. What would this mean for Slatyne and other villages? What even is a demilitarized zone? Would the village be emptied of people? Where would they be expected to go? As missiles continue to hit, locals are left wondering if, after all this, they will be displaced again.
Even if a deal is reached that allows them to stay, it is hard to imagine anyone could ever feel safe given Russia’s established disdain for ceasefire agreements. This is also a major worry of the administrations in Slatyne and the villages surrounding it: what viable future can these communities have living next door to Putin’s armies? Why would you choose to bring up children in a village where a Russian missile can hit within 20 seconds, with no prior warning?
In Tsupivka, a village in the same hromada (administrative community) as Slatyne, but a few kilometers to the north and therefore closer to Russia, over hot tea and freshly baked bread, a resident called Iryna described herself to me as a “hostage.” She was born in her village, she told me, and she would die in it. Tsupivka was once, she told me, one of the most beautiful communities in the area. Now, almost every house is damaged, with rubble still scattered everywhere.
Having de-mined her garden herself along with her husband, Iryna was not willing to leave again. “Why should we?” she asked me.
The realpolitik idea that these villages should simply be emptied for the greater good blindly ignores the reality of these people’s lives, fated to live too close to Russia, but unwilling to consider moving elsewhere. These places are stuck in limbo: young people refuse to move there, whilst the elderly refuse to leave.
2025 may bring some pause in hostilities. But in villages near the Russian border, the risk of being forgotten and falling through the cracks in any possible deal now creates as much tension as the bombings.
Ada Wordsworth is the founder and director of KHARPP, a UK-registered charity repairing homes in eastern Ukraine. She is also PhD student at UCL, researching Ukrainian cultural heritage.
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Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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