AVDIIVKA – On Saturday afternoon, as Irina Holobatenko ushered me into her spare flat on the ground floor of an apartment complex on the edge of Avdiivka, an industrial suburb in far Eastern Ukraine, two dull booms from artillery sounded in the distance. “Privyet!!” Irinia’s husband, Vitaliy, chuckled. Avdiivka was saying hello.
The first thing you see in Avdiivka are the towers: tall, slender smokestacks piercing the horizon like the spires of a filthy black palace, plumes of white smoke and gas boiling from their tips. The road leads down a slight hill toward the Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant, which supplies fuel for the region’s residential heating and its powerful steelmaking blast furnaces. The town surrounding it was once an industrial suburb of nearby Donetsk, some 20 minutes from the glittering city center of Eastern Ukraine’s crown jewel, renovated and…
