Scars Of War: Ukraine’s Transformation Under Russian Aggression

Houses, schools, and hospitals wiped out. Entire cities emptied.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago this month has left massive destruction, with estimates that more than one in 10 homes have been damaged or destroyed across the country.

While some Ukrainian towns and cities have undergone reconstruction, satellite imagery shows the scale of the ruin that Russia’s invasion has wrought throughout the war.

The eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was the site of one of the bloodiest battles in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Known for its sparkling wine industry, Bakhmut was home to 70,000 people prior to the invasion. In May 2023, the city’s mayor, Oleksiy Reva, said Bakhmut lay in “ruins and ashes,” with officials estimating that only 500 people remained. (Slider image, swipe for comparison)

Human rights researchers say 576 educational facilities in Ukraine were damaged or destroyed in 2024, more than double compared to the previous year.

The international nongovernmental organization Save the Children said last month that thousands of children in Ukraine are now learning online or in underground classrooms.

“The bombing of education facilities in Ukraine is against international humanitarian law and is absolutely unacceptable — the attacks must stop immediately,” Sonia Khush, the organization’s director in Ukraine, said in January.

School No. 66 in Mariupol, the port city on the shores of the Sea of Azov in eastern Ukraine, was renovated in 2018 and described as the city’s most modern educational facility. It was bombed on March 10, 2022. Its destruction remains visible.

A joint report by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Commission in February 2024 estimated the cost of rebuilding Ukraine at $486 billion.

The eastern Ukrainian city of Maryinka had a population of around 9,000 prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. By November of that year, the city was uninhabited after suffering near-complete destruction. It remains uninhabited to this day.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov said earlier this month that Ukraine needs to double its gross domestic product in order to rebuild. In his Facebook post, Chernyshov said that at its current level of productivity, Ukraine is lacking up to 4.5 million workers.

The salt-mine town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine has been the site of intense fighting since Russia’s all-out invasion, leaving most of its infrastructure devastated.

A survey conducted in the spring of 2024 found that many in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin and the southeastern city of Kharkiv have rebuilt their homes using their own funds.

Around one-third of Kharkiv residents interviewed for the survey and half of those in Irpin said they applied for assistance under the Ukrainian government’s eRecovery program. But more than 70 percent of those who spent their own money said they do not believe these funds will be reimbursed.

Some of the most intense fighting and destruction in the eastern Ukrainian city of Rubizhne occurred in March 2022. The city has remained under Russian occupation since May of that year.

More than one in 10 homes in Ukraine have been damaged or completely destroyed since Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to a December 2024 assessment by the World Bank, the Ukrainian government, the European Commission, and the United Nations.

Severodonetsk in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region came under constant Russian bombardment in 2022. Russian forces were briefly pushed out of the city in June of that year but later retook it.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview this month that the United States wants to have a stake in Ukraine’s long-term independence by investing in its economy, including in potential joint ventures for Ukrainian mineral rights.

Rubio said this would help Washington recoup billions of dollars it spent in Ukraine, and that part of this money would be “reinvested back into Ukraine to rebuild all the destruction that’s happened there.”