February 2026
Dear Pokrovsk,
It is with deep sadness that I address these words to you, now that you are in ruins, charred and bombed, and stripped of the thousands of inhabitants who until very recently gave you life.
Why do we write this?
During his visits to the now-occupied and ruined Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a Monitor reporter fell in love with its roses, for the hope and inspiration they provided to the city’s warm and welcoming wartime residents.
However, they are also words of gratitude for what you revealed about yourself and for what is lost but could be resurrected.
It’s been almost three years since this American journalist first walked its rose-lined streets.
That warm afternoon in June 2023, my goal had been to interview some of its residents about the Russian war that had already isolated them from their region’s capital, Donetsk. I would spend the night and then move on to other cities along the slowly changing front lines.
Little did I know then that this would be only the first of many visits to Pokrovsk, as it is a strategically important rail and transportation hub for both Ukraine and the invading Russian forces. Or that, when Russia’s scorched-earth war had turned you into an empty, ruined wasteland last fall, I realized I had a special place in my heart for you, Pokrovsk.
On my most recent reporting trip to Ukraine, in December, visiting was out of the question. Drone images of ruined streets and videos of Russian soldiers raising their country’s tricolor flag over a bombed town hall made this abundantly clear.
However, that special place in my heart had been secured by the many wonderful residents who invited me into their homes, their gardens, their parks and emergency response stations, to share their stories as a terrible war approached.
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
Sign of resilience
Pokrovsk was a city of roses. The manicured rose bushes flanking the concrete welcome sign at the city’s highway entrance were proof of that, as were the rows of flowering shrubs along the main avenue through town.
On that first visit, several couples enjoying the evening from park benches in front of their Soviet-era high-rise apartments were unanimous in their pride in the city’s roses. But one woman told me rather cryptically that many of the flowers were a recent addition to Pokrovsk’s public spaces, and that therein lay a story I could investigate.
A little research revealed that, in 2022, the mayor had announced that 60,000 roses would be planted as a sign of the city’s resilience despite the war.
More recently, in the fall of 2023, as Russian troops carried out a costly (and ultimately unsuccessful) siege aimed at quickly capturing the city, some Ukrainian officials criticized Pokrovsk’s obsession with its roses. The city’s leaders would have been better off if they had ignored such frivolous activities, they opined, and focused instead on building the city’s defensive infrastructure.
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
I did not agree with the criticism. As I have learned over the years I have covered the war, while meeting hundreds of Ukrainians, people need something hopeful and inspiring to cling to in the midst of so much adversity. For the inhabitants of Pokrovsk, that something was roses.
The roses of war
The glimpses I had of this became certainty when I reported a story about their roses in June 2024. Their population was reduced from 60,000 to about 11,000, but the roses were in full bloom.
I visited the 84-acre Jubilee Park with its 1,300 rose bushes, where park director Konstantyn Derevinskyy spoke fondly of roses. With the thuds of war coming from the front lines less than 20 miles away, Derevinskyy said every day residents stopped him expressing their appreciation for the sense of order and hope the roses brought.
Then, on the main street through the city, in the equipment sheds on the municipal grounds, administrator Oleh Tkachenko echoed the mayor’s view that the city roses were not superfluous niceties, but played a vital role in reassuring residents and telling the world what Pokrovsk is made of.
“When our residents see us tending to the roses, it reassures them that we’re not going anywhere,” he said. To the world, he added, he says: “We are Ukraine. Pokrovsk is a Ukrainian city and we will be here tomorrow.”
But it was an encounter with resident Halyna Fateieva that I now realize began this mysterious process of putting you, Pokrovsk, in my heart.
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
As my team and I drove down a residential street on our way out of town, I saw glorious rosebuds towering over a fence. We stopped and rang the bell at the garden gate, ushering Halyna out of her house. When interpreter Oleksandr Naselenko explained that an American journalist wanted to ask him about his roses, he did not hesitate to welcome us.
In my story, I described Halyna’s rose garden as fit for a queen, and it really was. But it was what she said as she presented me with the most beautiful bouquet I had ever seen that stuck with me: “I love these roses,” she said, “but I don’t see them as all mine. They are in my garden, but their message of hope and peace is for everyone.”
The joy of music.
The place of my heart for you, Pokrovsk, was expanded again in November 2024. On what would be my last visit, we discovered the modest railway yard building where the composer Mykola Leontovych, at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote and rehearsed with the railway choir his famous “Shchedryk”, known to me as “The Carol of the Bells”.
Thanks to that composition and the enthusiastic receptions it would receive throughout Europe and at Carnegie Hall in New York, Leontovych would be known as the Ukrainian Bach.
By that visit, which lasted only a few tense hours, their population had dwindled even further and the front was less than five miles away. Buildings and concrete smashed and burned
The anti-tank installations attested to the invasive presence of war. I imagined that despite the distant rumblings of war, I could hear that choir rehearsing a Christmas carol that would become another gift from Pokrovsk to the world. And I was filled with joy.
And yet, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration last fall that after a 20-month siege, Pokrovsk was finally his, reports continue of ongoing battles, particularly in the north of the city, calling Putin’s confident claim into question.
So while I know that you are ruined and wasted, dear Pokrovsk, and that the many residents who welcomed this reporter and shared their stories are gone, you also give me hope: that your Jubilee Park with its 1,300 roses has been saved, that the modest white stucco railroad building where Leontovych composed the stills for “Shchedryk” still stands.
And that Halyna Fateieva’s roses have survived, and are even now preparing to bloom this spring.
With lasting love…
