The Memory Keepers

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.”