Bakhmut newspaper Vpered still read in fortress town

A new issue of the local newspaper Vpered was sent to the few townspeople still staying in Bakhmut.

“Currently, there is only one Invincibility Point in the town, located in the basement being, probably, the safest place there today. Local volunteers work there. Products and newspapers are delivered there by the military,” Svitlana Ovcharenko, the editor-in-chief of the publication, said in a comment to the press service of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU). “During the short breaks between shelling, people flock to the Invincibility Point for food… and information. Volunteer Svitlana Hrekova, who sends via military packages to Bakhmut, told me: “We will send the newspaper! I would rather not hand over the food, as there is food in the town… It’s better to deliver the newspaper!”

In the latest edition, there are articles about the work of Bakhmut communal services during the war, the search for the missing, and how the dead and the killed are buried in the town… And also, as always, information about evacuation is currently only carried out by people in uniform, particularly police officers from the White Angels unit.

“One military woman involved in the evacuation told us that when she took the children out, they were indescribably happy when the sun set: these little ones, hiding in the basement, did not see sunlight for several months,” the journalist says. “And the youngest child who was evacuated from Bakhmut is only 1.5 months old. The baby was born there, in the basement… It is complicated to understand the people who still remain there among the ruins. After all, any conditions in a peaceful town are better than being under fire in a basement.

According to Svitlana Ovcharenko, there are about 2,000 people left in the town out of a population of 80,000. The rest left for safer places both in our country and abroad. Therefore, part of the circulation of the newspaper Vpered goes to Bakhmut hubs (cells) throughout Ukraine.

“We work for the people, for Bakhmut residents, not for the territories,” says the editor. “Bakhmut hubs unite compatriots who were made leave their hometown for Dnipro, Kyiv, Kostiantynivka, Zhovti Vody, Kryvyi Rih, Odesa…”

According to Svitlana Ovcharenko, she receives many appeals from places without Bakhmut hubs and ones the newspaper simply does not reach.

“There were letters from Poltava, from cities and villages in different parts of Ukraine, requesting to send copies of the newspaper. One woman wrote that she considers the newspaper as something dear, and even the smell of printing ink makes her associate it with Vpered, and therefore with her hometown…,” says Svitlana Ovcharenko. “This woman accidentally got a copy of our newspaper in her hands and, according to her, her “heart almost stopped.” She asked if there was any way she could subscribe to Vpered. I replied that we do not send the newspaper to her town. Then she asked… to send her the newspaper via Nova Poshta [private postal company]! And even paying UAH 55 for the delivery of each copy does not frighten her off… You can imagine how touching all this is for me!”

Today, for the displaced people, during its 103 years of existence, the Vpered newspaper has become the source of information for many generations of Bakhmut residents and still remains the only link with the hometown, which no longer exists. No one will be able to return home in the near future as there is simply nowhere to return to; everything has been wiped off the face of the planet. Svitlana Ovcharenko says that in one video, she saw the remains of her house on the site of her apartment and several neighboring ones, which a huge black spot, they were burned to ashes. On the site of the mother’s house are also the ruins themselves. Currently, there is not a single surviving house left in the town. The only thing the people of Bakhmut have are memories of their hometown.

“Therefore, no matter how difficult it is, we still make a newspaper. We publish it, deliver it, send it out,” says the editor. “There is a lot of work. Preparing the newspaper and filling out the website and the Facebook page is vital. There are days when I get up at four and go to bed at one in the morning. But it does not matter. I woke up in the morning ready to work again.”

Thanks to the support of the NUJU and the help of philanthropists, the Vpered newspaper, restored after a months-long break on November 4, 2022, is published regularly twice a month. One issue has four pages, and the second eight. It is printed in Kyiv.

The resumption of newspaper publishing for de-occupied and front-line territories is one of the NUJU priorities. As of now, we managed to finance the release of at least one issue of more than twenty local newspapers in the East, South, and North of Ukraine.

Maksym Stepanov, NUJU information service