As Russia Advances in Ukraine, a Cop Has to Flee City After City

The belongings of Volodymyr Nikulin, a Ukrainian police officer stationed near the country’s eastern front line, boil down to this: a shrapnel-riddled car, a small sack stuffed with sweaters and pants, and two plastic bags filled with basic food and medicine.

Keeping it simple is essential for Mr. Nikulin, who has had to leave three cities to escape the advance of Russian forces in the country’s eastern Donbas region, losing his home each time. So he has learned to live with little, and to be ready to pack up on short notice.

He has barely bothered to settle into the friend’s apartment he currently occupies in Sloviansk, a city 15 miles from the combat zone, leaving the bedroom untouched and sleeping instead in a small office. The distant rumble of Russian bombing regularly echoes through the walls, a reminder he may soon have to leave everything behind, again.

“Who knows where I’ll be in a few months?” Mr. Nikulin said on a recent morning last month in Sloviansk, acknowledging that Russian forces in the area were creeping closer. He joked that he could at least count on his damaged car, recalling how it had helped him escape several Russian attacks.

“It’s my lucky car,” Mr. Nikulin, a 53-year-old police lieutenant colonel, said with a thin smile.

Mr. Nikulin’s story of fleeing city after city under assault — Donetsk in 2014, when Russian-backed separatists took control of the city; and then, after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Mariupol in 2022 and Myrnohrad this summer — is emblematic of the plight of millions of Ukrainians displaced by the war. Like many, he has left beloved towns, watched his homes be destroyed or occupied, and mourned neighbors killed in the fighting.

As a police officer evacuating besieged cities, he has also braved ordeals, including helping journalists escape Mariupol so they could reveal harrowing images of the Russian onslaught there.