The Kramatorsk aquarium: An oasis on Ukraine front

Piranhas, known for their predatory disposition, can be found in the freshwaters of Brazil or Ukraine’s Kramatorsk, mere kilometres from the front line with Russian forces. Despite the war that has ravaged eastern Ukraine, couple Roman Dubinin and Iryna Artyomova fund and run an aquarium with around 200 fish in a city that is regularly struck by Russian glide bombs. “Here, there is no more war,” said Dubinin, a 47-year-old enthusiast whose love for aquariums was passed down from his uncle. The warm light, soft music and colourful fish at the facility are in stark contrast to the bearded soldiers, camouflage cars and broken windows that have become a feature of the city, which lies just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the front line.

With a smile playing on his lips and wearing military fatigues, Dubinin feeds the fish while waiting for rare visitors — most of them internally displaced people who have fled from other parts of the region as the Russians advance. The aquarium, which is free, opened in 2020 — six years after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine and at the start of a conflict with Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, which cut off the most direct route for locals to access the sea. It was closed for six months at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 when the 41-year-old Artyomova and her child fled from Kramatorsk to the west of the country.

Now back in Kramatorsk even though the front line is moving towards the city, Artyomova said she is glad the aquarium can offer some respite from the daily realities of war to local children. “They are constantly talking. They have strong emotions,” she said, smiling.

Soldiers also sometimes come and visit to stare at the fish tanks “for hours”, Dubinin said. “They say: ‘I forgot the war, I rested a bit’... It’s a psychological relief for them,” he said.

Artyomova said: “For us too! We would not have been able to survive without this place”. “It gives us a responsibility, we know why we are doing it,” she said. Squeezed into her pink down jacket, Maryna Rosytska’s eyes open wide as her daughter Melania clutches her leg going round the aquarium. Rosytska, a 35-year-old teacher, said she was struck by the “paradox”.

“You feel like you’re in another region, maybe even another country,” said Rosytska, who has come to visit her husband, a soldier deployed in the region.

“It’s inspiring to see what people can create” even this close to the front, she told AFP, as the reflections of the water played on her face. She smiled widely in front of a surgeonfish, a species which stars in the cartoon Dory’s World. “It’s like being under the sea,” she said.

The Kramatorsk aquarium’s bubble of calm risks being burst at any moment and running a facility like this so close to the front is no easy task.

A missile fell nearby, another destroyed a restaurant a few streets away, killing 13 people and injuring 64 in June 2023.

Artyomova still remembers the screams and “the smell and the dust” of that strike.

She said she feels happy every day she wakes up and is “still alive”. Dubinin, who built up the aquarium fish by fish, lost many tropical specimens due to power cuts that affected the temperature and oxygen in the tanks.

“Every day, a new one died,” he said.

Although he cried at first, after the 50th dead fish he said he finally “got used to it”.

Some of the animals are themselves refugees, entrusted to the aquarium by local residents who were unable to take them when they fled the city.

These include a freshwater stingray, two turtles and around 40 birds in an aviary at the back of the premises.

With the war on the city’s doorstep, the couple are thinking of evacuating and relocating their fish to Lviv in western Ukraine or Odesa in the south in a specialised lorry — a costly and complex logistical operation. “We try not to think about it,” Artyomova said. But she says that if the authorities announce the compulsory evacuation of children, as they have done in other towns close to the front line, that will be her cue to leave. Dubinin gazed tenderly at his piranhas, impassive despite the sounds of war that keep Kramatorsk on edge every night. “If I have to give them away, I’ll give them away so they can live somewhere else,” he said, adding: “But if Kramatorsk survives, then the aquarium will survive”.

Agence France-Presse