“You got what you wanted,” Olga says through tears of anger after fleeing her home town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, which Moscow says was captured after almost completely devastated by fighting, AFP reported.

The 33-year-old woman, who came to Kyiv in October with her husband and two children, spoke with those in Bakhmut who were “waiting” for the Russians to come, while others fled.

Like other displaced Ukrainians, Olga attends a special support center in Kyiv, where she can see a doctor and receive free clothes or bed linen.

She bitterly told AFP how she “woke up homeless even though she had a house” in Bakhmut, an industrial city that has been the epicenter of fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces since the summer.

Russia claimed the capture of Bakhmut on Saturday after the longest and fiercest battle of the war. Ukraine says it is still fighting in the last cell of resistance.

As the once peaceful and green city is now devastated and depopulated, displaced people from Bakhmut are following images on social media and news channels to find out what happened to their homes.

When fighters from the Russian paramilitary group “Wagner”, who were on the front line, arrived, “I knew it was over,” says Olga.

“In the beginning, some of our friends were still there. When they (the Russians) evacuated the last people who did not leave in time, we realized that they had wiped everything off the face of the earth,” she continues.

“I want to go home” in Bakhmut

Vera Biryukova, a 74-year-old retired teacher, shows a series of photos of a charred building with broken windows – her apartment is on the first floor.

“Now there is fighting around the building. In the photos, I can see that the second and fifth entrances to my house caught fire, as well as the roof,” she said.

“There is nowhere to turn, but I want to go home, even if the ruins remain,” she sighed. “We did not think that our city would become a fortress.”

The gray-haired woman broke down in tears as she recounted how she left for Kyiv after months of sleeping in a basement, taking only a few clothes and precious family photos.

But she does not condemn Russia’s actions: “What can I say? I want to go back home. I am not a politician.”

Another visitor to the support center, Iryna Tkatsenko, who has worked as a salesperson for 38 years, is very optimistic about the future of Bakhmut and Ukraine.

It’s a shame that they support “Russia” / I didn’t expect it to be like that

“The city is gone, but we believe that they (Ukrainians) will return it, that they will drive them out,” insists the 58-year-old woman.

She admits, however, that “many people think otherwise” among Bakhmut residents. “It’s a great shame that they support” Russia, she says.

She explains that Russian troops evacuated people from the area, including her brother and sister-in-law, who stayed behind to work at a children’s hospital.

“My younger brother and his wife have just been transferred to the other side,” she says.

Iryna herself is from Russia and still has family there.

“My relatives now write to me: ‘Everything will be fine, we will release you,'” she says, and then adds: “I did not expect that it would be like this, that now 80 percent of Russians consider us enemies, that we are Nazis.”

The Kremlin justified its invasion by wanting to “denazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine, while presenting its campaign as a struggle against Western hegemony, a discourse that resonates with parts of the population in the east.

According to Lyudmila Bondareva, director of the Kyiv Center for Assistance to Immigrants, more than 6,500 Bakhmut residents live in Kyiv and the region, including 1,400 children.

Many of them live with difficulty, especially due to the cost of rent in the capital, but Lyudmila also mentions the lack of food.

Iryna says she sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the studio she shares with three other people. She has not received any food aid since September.

“It’s hard, but what can you do? This is life,” she says.