Kupiansk, Ukraine (CNN) The artillery fire gets worse at night, so Liuba and her husband hold hands. It protects her, she says with a sad nod. She stands in the remains of her garden after being hit on a particularly bad night a month ago.
The shelling destroyed her neighbor’s house and threw Liuba and her husband on the floor of their kitchen. Serhei, she says, landed on top of him with the fridge, luckily more shaken than physically hurt. Still, they won’t go.
“This is our home,” Liuba told CNN. “Not that of the Russians. It’s also getting warmer and we’ll survive with the rainwater that we collect from buckets.”
Liuba and her husband are determined to stay in Kupyansk despite the dangers.
Liuba and Serhei, who gave only their first names for security reasons, are among the last 2,500 residents of Kupiansk, a city in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region from which the frontline has never strayed too far and which Ukrainian authorities fear may be the dead end case might be going to return again.
Kupyansk Police Chief Konstiantyn Tarasov says since mid-February the noise of the artillery — both the dull thump of outgoing fire and the sharper whistle of incoming fire — has grown worryingly closer. Russian positions are now less than 5 miles from a town they held early in the invasion before losing it to Ukraine’s counteroffensive in September.
Last week, the Ukrainian authorities ordered a forced evacuation of the most vulnerable residents of Kupyansk due to the “constant” Russian shelling.
“We put signs everywhere with free evacuation phone numbers,” said Dmytro Kovalov, one of the volunteers involved in the evacuations.
“As the shelling intensified, more people registered. But then the internet went down for two days, so they couldn’t get in touch,” Kovalov told CNN. “That’s why we started blindly looking for addresses, knocking on doors. But some people refuse to leave. They don’t want to leave their homes and hope that the Russians will be pushed back.”
Authorities say they are handling between eight and 40 evacuations most days, although these remain voluntary.
According to a spokesman for the Kupiansk police, 350 children and 363 people with disabilities were still living in the city last week. Aside from the repeated shelling, the city is also difficult to access because of the damage more than a year of war has done to its infrastructure, including many roads and bridges leading in and out.
The main market was also reduced to rubble, forcing the city’s remaining residents to buy and sell as little as possible on boxes lining a dirt lane. Anything that is laid out can easily be packed away when the sound of grenades gets close.
Lida, seen at her makeshift market stall, says she will stay in town despite the ongoing shelling and hide where she is.
Lida, piling yellowed smoked fish among the products laid out in front of her, says she’s become an expert on the sound of artillery going in and out. She survived six months under Russian occupation last year. She told CNN that she will not be transferred from Kupyansk this time either.
“We are not rats!” said Lida, who also only gave her first name for security reasons. “Besides, if we leave, who’ll take over?”
About 100 yards from where she was seated, Tarasov, the police chief, showed CNN what a Russian Grad missile had done to a makeshift drug dispenser just days earlier. But apart from the debris and the remains of a rocket, there isn’t much to see. This, Tarasov said, is what the Russians do when they try to close in on the city center and target the few civilians who remain while they try to survive.
But Lida is unmoved.
“What is the difference?” She asked. “They are also bombing Kharkiv. Is there any certainty that I’ll stay alive there? No. So we stay here and hide where we can, behind the houses or somewhere.”
Most buildings bear the scars of the relentless attacks, and many have been demolished. There aren’t many places to hide for the last few thousand civilians of Kupyansk.