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For two decades, Kostiantyn Grigorenko tended the fruit trees in the garden of the historic building that housed the newspaper he edits, Obrii Izyumshchyny (Izium Horizons). This local paper has covered the small Ukrainian railway city of Izium, roughly sixty miles from the border with Russia, since 1919. That all came to a halt in March 2022, when its offices were severely damaged during the Battle of Izium, along with nearly all the residential buildings in town. After a month of relentless bombardment, Russia took full control and the newspaper was forced to shut down. Grigorenko and his family went into exile, as did nearly two-thirds of the city’s forty thousand residents—and half of the paper’s staff.

Three years on, Grigorenko, a grave but friendly man of sixty-one with a dry sense of humor, is back at his desk in a temporary office space in Izium. Ukrainian forces retook the city in September 2022, and Obrii resumed publishing just two weeks later—one of the first newspapers in the formerly occupied territories to do so. When I arrived in Izium one morning in May, he was waiting outside the train station to collect me. “Hospital,” he said, nodding at one of several bombed-out buildings as we drove past. Not long afterward, in the same matter-of-fact way: “School.”

The paper’s original editorial staff of six has been whittled down to just three people working out of two small rooms: Mykola Kalyuzhnyi, a journalist and poet in his late sixties (affectionately referred to as the newspaper’s literary editor); Ani Ryabenko, a recently hired twenty-two-year-old video journalist; and Grigorenko. (Two other experienced staffers left Izium earlier this year, shaken by a ballistic-missile attack on the city council building that killed five civilians and wounded fifty-five more.)

At first glance, Obrii could be a local newspaper in any frontier town. On any given week, you might find inside its green-tinted pages a report on the latest town budget or a new dentistry department set to open at the local hospital—interspersed with the weekly weather forecast and a selection of personal ads (“I will buy your horses, goats, and cows”). But war has changed the paper’s priorities. Between an interview with the local police chief and a short piece on the opening of a new bus route, a paragraph marks the death of two Iziumers in a missile strike. Another notice urges readers to report war crimes committed during the occupation, such as rape and sexual violence: “There is no statute of limitations.” 

Izium has seen its share of horrors. Its name, like that of Bucha or Irpin, has become synonymous with Russian war crimes—famous no longer for its annual strawberry festival but for the corpses of at least 440 Ukrainian men, women, and children discovered in a mass burial site on the edge of town in late 2022. Until Russian tanks rolled into Izium in March of that year, Grigorenko said, Obrii had only stopped printing once before: when the Nazis occupied the town during the Second World War. For a hundred and six years, it has been the newspaper of record for this community—births, deaths, elections, local fetes, traffic accidents. Today it represents something greater. “The return of the newspaper is hope,” said Kalyuzhnyi. “Hope for the return of normal life.”

Unlike Grigorenko, Kalyuzhnyi did not flee Izium when it fell into Russian hands. Instead, he and his wife took shelter in the bare-earth cellar underneath the newspaper office, continuing to live belowground even after the Russian bombardment was over. The town was without water, heat, or electricity, and it was best not to attract notice. On several occasions, however, the occupiers came to him. He was known to have been a journalist, and they wanted him to write for the Izium Telegraph, a propaganda newssheet. He made his excuses every time, despite knowing this might mean torture or death.

“We hid our Ukrainian flags and waited,” he said. “But you had to do your best to be wise to survive.” In the cellar, Kalyuzhnyi and his wife listened to Ukrainian frequencies on a battery-powered radio—occasionally even picking up Grigorenko’s voice from hundreds of miles away in Lviv, confidently proclaiming that Izium would soon be liberated. “Though, if I’m honest,” Grigorenko conceded with a flash of humor, “I didn’t know how soon exactly.”

We had been speaking for a couple of hours by then, our coffee cups drained and air raid sirens whining intermittently in the background. Grigorenko asked me if I would like to head into town to see what the Russians had left behind, and the three of us piled into his car.

Cruising through the ravaged streets, I noticed a few repair workers in eye-catching orange vests—the task ahead of them is daunting, and only more so because it is seemingly without end. The city council building destroyed in February had already been rebuilt once and, shortly before my visit, Izium’s new post office (not far from Grigorenko’s house) was hit by a drone. 

Before the war, most of Obrii’s profits came from print subscriptions. Now, with the postal service still not fully restored, it survives on a combination of in-person sales, advertising, individual donations, and proceeds from patriotic “souvenirs,” such as Izium-themed bracelets and fridge magnets, sold in local cafés. It’s unclear who buys these, since the town continues to be bombed and there are no tourists. But when print copies go on sale each week, the queue stretches down the street. “People trust us,” Grigorenko said simply.

Still, the community Obrii serves remains fractured, particularly after the city council evacuated during the occupation, leaving those who stayed behind feeling abandoned. “They distrust authority,” said Grigorenko. There are also the collaborators and those nostalgic for the era of Soviet rule, most of them elderly. (He and Kalyuzhnyi take pride in the fact that Obrii has always been a Ukrainian-language newspaper, even during Soviet times.) He isn’t naive about the power of the newspaper to heal these fractures.“I’m glad that the youth understand better,” he said. “Ani’s generation can’t believe such things.”

We turned onto a leafy, quiet street not far from the center of town. The fruit trees Grigorenko had planted two decades earlier still stood, but the once carefully tended garden was unruly and overgrown. Grigorenko produced a key and let us into the building. A fine layer of white dust lay over everything, clumps of plaster shaken loose by the force of an explosion that had also blown out most of the windows. There was Grigorenko’s old office, his nameplate still on the door, and the newspaper’s video studio, which the Russians had stripped of everything of value. Another room was pockmarked with bullet holes where the Russian soldiers had apparently shot at a Ukrainian flag hanging on the wall. A smaller office was dominated by a huge empty bookcase that once held the newspaper’s 106 years’ worth of archives. These have been hidden safely elsewhere. (“Slava voho!” Grigorenko exclaimed. Thank God.)

I thought back to something Kalyuzhnyi had told me earlier, about how he’d tried to process life under Russian occupation. He kept a diary the whole time, meticulously documenting everything he experienced. Now the newspaper was doing the same thing for the community at large—but, he said, “people also need something for their soul.” At his urging, the newspaper recently published a selection of poems by Iziumers, to which he contributed a short verse of his own. It reads:

No, I didn’t live, I didn’t live without you
I was just preparing for you to come in the middle of autumn, against the clear sky
When the gardens are filled with crimson.
When the eyelashes of chrysanthemums tremble
Under the dense reverence of autumn dew.
What I dreamed about for so long has come true
How good that it has finally come true.

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