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Ukraine’s frontline bakery revisited

A new bakery in east Ukraine offered war weary people the taste of peacetime. But as an all-out conflict with Russia looms, there are fears for the bakery’s future.

Lucy Ash catches up with a warzone bakery comforting people in an east Ukrainian town. She visited in 2017 to tell the story of a small enterprise that was bringing hope to a trapped community living near the frontline. The town of Marinka is in the buffer zone – the ‘grey zone’ - that separates Ukraine from the Dontesk region – now claimed and occupied by Russian backed separatists. For the town’s inhabitants the low-intensity conflict had become an unavoidable part of daily life. But there was one bright spot amidst the gloom – a bakery. It was Ukraine’s first frontline workplace-generating enterprise, and a haven from the politics, propaganda, and violence that had been tearing the town apart. But now, more than four years on, with Russian troops now massing along Ukraine’s eastern border, the threat of all out conflict looms. The bakery’s owner Oleg Tkachenko tells Lucy Ash he hopes there will not be an all out conflict. He fears an invasion could destroy everything that he and his community have built up over the past five years.

(Image: Workers in the bakery in Marinka. Credit: Frederick Paxton)

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27 minutes

Last on

Thu 10 Feb 2022 21:06GMT

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  • Thu 10 Feb 2022 02:32GMT
  • Thu 10 Feb 2022 09:06GMT
  • Thu 10 Feb 2022 13:32GMT
  • Thu 10 Feb 2022 20:06GMT
  • Thu 10 Feb 2022 21:06GMT

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