A year into the Russian war in Ukraine, several cities have been razed to the ground along with hundreds of casualties on both sides. There have been numerous losses of lives, people fleeing their homes, pets killed and infrastructure destroyed.
The aerial photos of the destroyed Marinka in Donetsk show how Russia’s invasion reduced the Ukrainian city to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The dystopian pictures, released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, showed scorched earth, burnt trees and buildings razed to the ground.
Marinka, located around 80 miles from Bakhmut, has recently found itself at the center of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the visuals from the drone show the city with around 10,000 people reduced to ruins.
The city looks completely wiped out while the remains of the houses are surrounded by debris as a result of repeated attacks.
“Ukrainian Marinka in the Donetsk region. It used to be home for around 10,000 people. It used to be a peaceful city. It used to be… until Russia’s war criminals razed it to the ground. Zoom in to see that nothing is left untouched," the ministry said on Twitter.
Earlier in February, video footage shot from a drone showed how intense fighting has left no building in Marinka intact.
Many are barely recognizable as buildings at all. Shell-fire has also made matchsticks of the town’s trees — many of them ripped apart at the trunk.
Marinka’s police chief Artem Schus said that every building in the city has been damaged, according to Associated Press.
Apart from soldiers, the town has been entirely evacuated because there is no way for the civilian population to live there.
Donetsk, the center of Ukraine’s industrial heartland of the Donbas, has been engulfed by fighting ever since the Moscow-backed separatist rebellion erupted in April 2014.
However, four months later, it was retaken by the Ukrainian forces. But, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict started in February 2022, all of the city’s buildings and trees have been destroyed, rendering the town uninhabitable.
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