How those displaced by the invasion preserve their occupied hometown through pixels, pages, and bread.
When Arif Bagirov pedaled his bicycle out of Siverskodonetsk in May 2022, riding 70 kilometers under continuous artillery fire toward Bakhmut, his primary luggage was digital.
Behind him, the city in Ukraine’s easternmost Luhansk Oblast was rapidly losing all signs of civil life. After an artillery shell struck his apartment block, shattering the windows and turning everything upside down, Bagirov realized that with no electricity, no running water, and no phone signal left, staying was no longer viable. Packing a few essentials and hard drives into a backpack, he chose the bicycle to navigate the roads amid the ever-present risk of falling shells.
Stored on cloud drives was an entire visual record of his hometown: thousands of photographs documenting modernist mosaics, constructivist facades, and pine-fringed avenues.
“For me, Siverskodonetsk isn’t just a rented apartment you can easily walk away from,” Bagirov recalls. “It is my hometown, my brother, in some ways even a father. It was hurting, and it needed help. I left so I could keep defending it through information – by telling the world about its tragedy.”
Digitizing a Vanished Past
Today, Siverskodonetsk (formerly Severodonetsk) remains under Russian military occupation, nearly five years after the 2022 siege that damaged or destroyed up to 90 percent of its residential infrastructure and scattered its more than 100,000 residents across Ukraine and abroad. Yet Bagirov and others from the town refuse to let their city disappear. For these displaced people, “home” has shifted from a fixed geographical point into three shared dimensions of collective memory: the visual, the written, and the sensory.
This fight against cultural erasure is part of a broader phenomenon across Ukraine. From Mariupol and Bakhmut to Melitopol and Kakhovka, displaced communities are establishing decentralized digital registers, publishing hyper-local testimonials, and relocating iconic businesses to ensure that the living identity of their occupied cities survives.
These grassroots registries are deliberately designed for open civic use. Platforms such as the digitized collections of the Mariupol Museum – now functioning entirely online after the physical building was destroyed – alongside the virtual archives and documentary photo projects dedicated to Bakhmut, a major battlefield in the early phases of the full-scale Russian invasion – allow the public to explore rescued historical artifacts, regional art, and prewar landmarks. Material gathered by these digital initiatives has already anchored touring documentary and art exhibitions, such as the Unbreakable Mariupol exhibition in Warsaw and the Mariupol Unconquered exhibition organized by the diaspora in Estonia, transforming raw digital pixels into tangible gallery spaces where exiled communities gather to reclaim their physical presence.
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Before the invasion, Bagirov collaborated with initiatives like DE NE DE (an artist collective dedicated to rethinking Soviet heritage and modernist architecture in Ukraine) and Museum Open for Renovation (an initiative for rescuing and documenting endangered urban museums and artifacts). He organized grassroots festivals under the city’s historical worker-given name Svitlohrad (“City of Light”) and worked to establish Siverskodonetsk’s first independent municipal museum. Along the way, he cataloged over 800 architectural and artistic landmarks.
When Russia invaded in 2022, Bagirov’s bicycle became both an emergency vehicle and a tool of documentation. For three months under heavy artillery barrages, he delivered insulin and food to neighbors in basements, helped evacuate the archaeological collections of Volodymyr Dahl University, and photographed the city’s destruction in his series Sever in Scars until departure became inevitable.
Today, serving on the frontlines in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Bagirov continues to maintain his visual catalog as a decentralized public resource. While the high-resolution master copies remain securely stored on remote drives, Bagirov actively curates and shares these collections across his social media channels and independent cultural blogs. Displaced residents regularly reach out to him online, requesting specific coordinates or archival frames to locate their destroyed childhood courtyards, kindergarten facades, or demolished Soviet-era mosaics. Beyond digital screens, his pre-invasion photographic collections, such as Urban and Sever Art, previously formed the backbone of local grassroots exhibits and modernism research projects across Ukraine, and now stand as one of the few surviving visual records of a city that has been almost entirely erased.
“In my understanding, a city isn’t just brick or concrete blocks,” Bagirov explains. “The soul of a city is its people, and they have survived. If buildings are destroyed, we can always repair or rebuild them. But preserving our history proves to everyone – and to ourselves – that we have an authentic heritage and something worth fighting for.”
This grassroots preservation aligns with broader institutional documentation across Ukraine. Platforms such as the Ukraine War Archive (established by Ukraine’s NGO Docudays and the UK human-rights group Infoscope) systematically collect, verify, and store digital records, occupation diaries, and eyewitness testimonies according to international standards.
“Our main task is to make forgetting impossible,” explains Anastasiia Ankovych, the archive’s communications manager. “When combat zones become temporarily occupied and depopulated, the aggressor actively tries to erase crimes and rewrite local history. Secure digital archives prevent that truth from fading, ensuring that destroyed communities remain documented for collective memory and that the perpetrators cannot escape accountability.”
The Written Word: Archiving the Human Voice
If Arif Bagirov safeguards Siverskodonetsk’s visual geometry, Ukrainian journalist and researcher Svitlana Oslavska preserves its human voice and social fabric. Born and raised there, Oslavska spent 2020 and 2021 documenting her hometown’s transition from a Soviet chemical outpost into a vibrant Ukrainian cultural center for her book Сєверодонецьк. Репортажі з минулого (Severodonetsk: Reports from the Past).
When Russian forces razed the city in 2022, Oslavska and her publisher made a deliberate decision: to leave the pre-invasion reportages unchanged, without rewriting her characters’ stories around the destruction. Rather than reducing Siverskodonetsk to war ruins and casualty statistics, the book serves as a paper time capsule of everyday street encounters, local memories, and regional identity.
The strength of Oslavska’s documentary reporting lies in its intimate character portraits. In one chapter, she profiles a veteran chemical engineer from the massive Azot plant – the industrial spine that gave birth to the town in the 1930s. His recollections trace the city’s arc from a pioneering Soviet technocratic dream into an aging post-industrial landscape, capturing the quiet dignity of laborers whose life’s work was wiped out in 2022 in just weeks.
In stark contrast, another reportage captures the young cultural activists who emerged after the city’s brief occupation by Russian-backed rebel forces in 2014, establishing independent coffee spots, organizing music festivals, and creating open art studios under the constant hum of nearby artillery. By refusing to update these narratives after the 2022 catastrophe, Oslavska preserves both the city’s industrial roots and its fragile modern reawakening exactly as they breathed, untainted by the rhetoric of total annihilation.
“The book is a document of a world that no longer exists and never will again,” Oslavska says. “Even if the city is rebuilt, it will be a completely different Siverskodonetsk. The book will remain a document of what it truly was.”
For displaced residents, literary reportage becomes primary evidence. When municipal libraries burn and local records are seized under occupation, recorded personal testimonials preserve the living memory of a community that refuses to be erased.
A City That Lives On
Siverskodonetsk today exists simultaneously in Bagirov’s cloud drives and Oslavska’s printed pages – and in the baguettes the author’s grandmother Nadiia bakes in Bucha, where she built a new business after being forced to abandon her home and established bakery when the invaders took over Siverskodonetsk.
Occupying forces can seize territory and demolish physical landmarks, but they cannot erase a city whose residents deliberately choose to remember. As long as its people digitize its streets, record its stories, and bake its recipes, Siverskodonetsk remains indestructible – waiting to be carried back home.
Yelyzaveta Andrukhova is a Ukrainian journalist and communications specialist. She currently works in the international department of Suspilne, Ukraine’s public broadcaster, focusing on international reporting.
This article was researched and written as part of the Bakala Foundation Journey Journalism Bootcamp held this summer in Prague.
