Goodbye, Kostyantynivka

By Andrew E. Busch

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

Our first sight of Kostyantynivka (or, in the Russian appellation, Konstantinovka) came at about 6 a.m. on a late July day in 2003. Our overnight train from Kyiv had pulled into the station, and the local education minister was waiting for us on the platform. My wife Melinda and I had traveled to meet a little girl, three years old, who would soon become our youngest daughter.

 

As we stepped off the train, our host met us eagerly, walked us to her waiting car, and had us driven to the orphanage to meet Katerina, who was still sleeping in her crib. Our lives would never be the same.

 

Train station in Kostyantinivka, Ukraine

 We spent the next nine days in Kostyantynivka. The judge who had to approve the adoption was on vacation. The orphanage nurse, prematurely a widow, decreed that there was no hotel in town worthy of us, so, at her insistence, we lived for the next week and a half with her, her teenage daughter, and her pensioner mother in the modest but well-cared-for apartment that they shared. No kinder or more gracious hosts could be imagined. Every day, the mother worked in the kitchen to feed us; every evening, she urged, “kushai, kushai” — “eat, eat.” Meanwhile, the daughter told us of her desire to learn English and study in the United States, and the nurse went back and forth with us to the orphanage to spend time with little Katya.

 

Father and daughter

 Kostyantynivka was a town of nearly 70,000, a somewhat run-down industrial hub in Ukraine’s Donetsk region that had once manufactured elements for the Soviet space program. A faded mural celebrating Sputnik still graced the side of a multistory Khrushchev-era apartment building. The nurse’s daughter’s school had served as a field hospital for the Red Army during World War II. The park nearest the nurse’s flat sported a playground reminiscent of its 1970s American counterpart: lots of metal, worn paint, and no mulch. Ukraine had been governed since independence by old apparatchiks with a lean toward Moscow, but by the looks of Kostyantynivka, they hadn’t done much for the Russian speakers of the east.

 

Early on, we also met Katya’s grandmother. She was still the girl’s legal guardian, and to complete the adoption, we needed to get the grandmother’s permission. She told us she had been praying for us for months, not knowing yet who we would be, and she invited us to go with her to her Baptist church. The church was old, as were many of the congregants. It was far from the only long-standing Baptist church in eastern Ukraine. They had persevered through Soviet times, and now they were free. (Since 2014, Baptist churches in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine have been closed by the Russians, and the pastors beaten or jailed.)

 

Eventually, the judge returned and approved the adoption, and we bid Kostyantynivka adieu. We left behind the orphanage, the Baptist church, the nurse, her mother, her daughter, and Katya’s grandmother, as well as Katya’s half sister, who remained in Ukraine under her grandmother’s care.

 

The year after we adopted Katya, Ukrainians protested the fraudulent election of Viktor Yanukovych, leading to a revote and a presidential victory for the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Three years after that, we returned to the country when I taught for a semester on a Fulbright at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine. Kostyantynivka was not too different, but it seemed a bit less dingy. The nurse’s daughter hoped to apply for a program with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. Even in Donbas, many of the young looked to the West with hope.

 

A few weeks after we returned home from my Fulbright, the nurse’s daughter, filled with promise, was killed by a drunk driver. When we visited again the next year, our last time in the city, we put flowers on her grave.

 

When pro-Russian “separatists” supported by Russia and led by Russian military intelligence operative Igor Girkin launched their campaign in early 2014, they briefly swept into Kostyantynivka. In short order, the Ukrainian army swept them back out. And so things stood until the full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022.

 

Now, Kostyantynivka is on the front lines of war, one of a line of “fortress cities” holding back the invaders. Like Bakhmut and Pokrovsk, the industrial city we knew is now mostly rubble and burned-out shells of buildings. Its 70,000 residents have been reduced to 4,000, its apartments collapsed, its churches blasted, and its metallic playgrounds mangled.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 The nurse’s mother doubtless went to her reward years ago and is instructing Saint Peter to eat up. The last we heard of the nurse, she had remarried and moved to Mariupol. We hope she survived the deadly Russian siege of that city early in the war, but we have no way to find out — and we wouldn’t try if we could. If she is still there, receiving a message from American friends would land her in a filtration camp or in one of the FSB torture chambers dotting occupied Ukraine.

 

Katya’s grandmother died a few years ago, but Katya has remained in contact with her half sister, who has a daughter and whose husband served for years in the Ukrainian army fighting against the Russians. Katya’s birth parents also reemerged, to her surprise, with a new young daughter of their own. The whole family fled for a time to Dnipro, deeper into Ukraine; they returned to Kostyantynivka when the front seemed to stabilize, and then left again when conditions deteriorated. Those Russian speakers, like hundreds of thousands of others, had no desire to be “liberated” by Putin’s army of thugs and rapists. Now, there is nothing to return to, even if they wanted to.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 Kostyantynivka was never a city of grace and beauty, like an Odessa or a Lviv. It had its quirks and its shortcomings, to be sure, like the tree limbs that were inserted into manholes to keep people from falling in because the covers had been stolen for scrap metal. But it was a home to 70,000 free people who mostly wanted to be left alone to build their lives and their community as circumstances permitted. I weep for it. Every civilized person should. The Ukrainians may lose the city to a Russian offensive of mindless “meat assaults,” or they may hold onto it with a determined defense. But it is nobody’s home anymore. And no one should be confused about who bears responsibility. Kostyantynivka is an unambiguous casualty of Moscow’s war of imperial ambition.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 Whatever the future holds, the destruction of Kostyantynivka is a lesson for those with eyes to see. The “root cause” of this war is that Putin and the people around him cannot imagine a world in which the Ukrainians are not vassals of Moscow. For them, the operative principle is “rule or ruin.” And the Ukrainians are not inclined to surrender what they still hold in Donbas without a fight. Kostyantynivka and cities like it are not just their land, and not just their strongest line of defense. The ruined homes of their people rest on that land, along with their deferred dreams, factories that once gave them sustenance, churches where they worshipped, and even the graves of their children.