Over 1,500 days of defence: How Mala Tokmachka became a meme, a ghost village and the centre of the universe
Before 24 February 2022, news about the village of Mala Tokmachka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast would only appear on the website of the local village council. Its name was familiar only to local residents, researchers of Bronze Age and Sarmatian burial mounds, and inmates of Orikhiv Penitentiary No. 88 and their families.
Today, things are very different. A Google search for the village returns more than 200,000 results in Ukrainian and nearly 300,000 in English. Ukrainians have come to refer to the settlement as a "fortress" and "the second Chornobaivka".
Almost every day, social media users have been creating new memes about the defence of the village. The famous phrase by the British banker Nathan Rothschild – "whoever controls information controls the world" – has been humorously reworked with "information" replaced by "Mala Tokmachka".
Behind this unexpected "popularity" lies Russia's repeated failure to establish even a foothold in the outskirts of this small village, located 75 km from the city of Zaporizhzhia. Over the past year, Russian officials and propagandists have repeatedly claimed to have captured Mala Tokmachka, only for Ukrainian forces to refute those claims each time.
Why is it so important for Russia to seize this settlement?
"Mala Tokmachka is the southern gateway to Orikhiv," says Dmytro Pelykh, Head of Communications for Ukraine's 118th Separate Mechanised Brigade. "If the bastards manage to enter the village and reinforce it with additional drone units, they'll make life in the town far more of a nightmare than it already is. But the Russians simply don't have the resources to pull that off." Soldiers from the brigade have been defending Mala Tokmachka since 2023.
Orikhiv is one of the Armed Forces of Ukraine's key defensive strongholds on the Zaporizhzhia front. Should Russian forces push deeper towards the town, they would gain additional opportunities to increase pressure on Zaporizhzhia.
The defence of Mala Tokmachka has now lasted for more than 1,500 days.
The village itself, however, has long since been reduced to rubble, its only remaining form defined by the lines on a map. Before the full-scale invasion, Mala Tokmachka was home to nearly 3,000 people. Today, not a single civilian remains.
Ukrainska Pravda looks at how people lived in Mala Tokmachka before 24 February 2022 and what is happening in the village today.
The Makhno movement, famine and war: a brief history of Mala Tokmachka
Written records of Mala Tokmachka date back to the late eighteenth century. Its first settlers were Ukrainians from Chernihiv, Poltava and Kyiv oblasts. Population records were kept by local priests, and one of the earliest entries in the village parish register records the birth of a child to the Ishchenko family.
Ishchenko was the maiden name of the grandmother of Serhii Plokhii, the internationally acclaimed, 69-year-old author and Harvard professor of Ukrainian history. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Plokhii family also appears in the settlement's records.
Plokhii has only visited his ancestral home once, long before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war.
"Mala Tokmachka loomed so large in our family's memory that when my father and I finally arrived there, we felt a slight sense of disappointment because it turned out not to be the centre of the world we had imagine," recalls Plokhii with a smile during an interview with Ukrainska Pravda. "The landscape was beautiful, though: the Konka River, green plants all around, everything in bloom."
The next stop on the Plokhii family's journey was the Nestor Makhno Museum in Huliaipole, around 50 km from Mala Tokmachka.
Between 1918 and 1921, the village of Mala Tokmachka was one of the strongholds of the Makhno movement. Insurgent detachments were formed and based there, while control of the local railway station allowed the Makhnovists to move infantry and weapons swiftly between fronts. [The Makhno movement is a large-scale attempt by Ukrainian peasants, led by Nestor Makhno and his Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921 – ed.]
"The commander of a large Makhnovist detachment in Mala Tokmachka was Yakiv Ishchenko," says Plokhii. "My great-grandfather's surname was also Ishchenko. I suspect they didn't get on, because the Makhnovists shot at my great-grandfather. After being wounded, he was forced to give up farming."
Within the historian's family, the Makhno movement was associated with banditry.
"I was told stories like this: a young man proposed to a girl and was rejected; later he joined the insurgents, returned and burned down her house. But village stories are often very complicated," he says.
After the Ukrainian struggle for independence in 1917-1921, Plokhii's great-grandfather became the head of one of the newly established collective farms. He would later become one of the defendants in the notorious "Orikhiv Case" during the Holodomor. [Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine which lasted from 1932 to 1933 and claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians – ed.]
In the winter of 1932, the entire leadership of the district party committee and executive committee, along with officials from agricultural institutions in the Orikhiv district, were accused of "organised sabotage" of grain procurement. They were alleged to have sought to reduce and conceal the true harvest yields. The suspects were arrested.
Plokhii's great-grandfather was sent to serve his sentence in Zaporizhzhia. His family brought him a warm coat so that he would not freeze in prison. Plokhii's aunt still keeps this piece of clothing to this day.
In early 1933, Plokhii's great-grandfather was released from prison. He gathered the entire family and moved 8,000km east to the Kamchatka peninsula in the hope of disappearing into the vastness of the Soviet Union. He returned to Zaporizhzhia in the late 1930s and bought a house near the railway station so that he could occasionally travel to Mala Tokmachka. But the Ishchenko-Plokhii family never returned to village life.
During World War II, the people of Mala Tokmachka lived under German occupation for almost two years, from October 1941 until September 1943.
The occupying forces terrorised and looted the local population, forcibly deporting young people to Germany in freight wagons. The mother of Halyna Levchenko, the director of the folk ensemble Tokmachanochka, found herself on one of these trains at gunpoint. Miraculously, she managed to jump from the carriage and make her way home.
Halyna spent her childhood listening to her closest relatives recount the horrors of wartime. She hoped that a war like this would never happen again.
But in February 2022, the first Russian missiles struck her native Mala Tokmachka.
How the village lived and celebrated life
Halyna Levchenko will soon turn 80. She spent almost her entire life in Mala Tokmachka. Her home resembled a museum of musical instruments, with an accordion, button accordion, wooden flute and tambourine among its exhibits.
For the past three decades, she has led Tokmachanochka, a folk ensemble founded in the village in 1985. Its repertoire includes some 600 traditional songs that Halyna collected from across Ukraine.
Before the full-scale invasion, Tokmachanochka performed in many Ukrainian cities, from Donetsk and Luhansk in the pre-war years to Kyiv and Yaremche in Ukraine's west. After 24 February 2022, the ensemble ceased to exist.
"We still keep in touch, but everyone has scattered. Some went abroad, others to the west of Ukraine. Only four of us are left in Zaporizhzhia, and we're all older now – we can no longer travel to give concerts," Halyna told UP.
In late February 2022, Levchenko was forced to leave her museum-like home and relocate from Mala Tokmachka to Zaporizhzhia. She has not returned since. However, she remains in contact with the Ukrainian soldiers defending the village. All that remains to remind her of Tokmachanochka is a single stage costume and an album of photographs from the ensemble's performances.
We interviewed Halyna Levchenko about the old and new traditions of Mala Tokmachka and about life in the village during the full-scale war. Here is her story in her own words.
"When I was young, we had a tradition called vyriazhanky, held when young men were called up for military service. There would always be an evening of music, dancing, games and a feast – almost like a grand wedding celebration. People would sing and dance right up until the train carrying a recruit to Zaporizhzhia departed. Only when he waved to us from the carriage would everyone finally go home. I was always invited to sing at these gatherings.
By the way, my ensemble never sang Russian songs – only Ukrainian folk songs. And hardly anyone in Mala Tokmachka spoke standard Russian. People mostly spoke surzhyk [a mixed Ukrainian-Russian vernacular].
Our favourite holiday was Ivana Kupala Night. There was a meadow by the river outside the village where livestock usually grazed. On Kupala Night, young people gathered there. The girls wove flower wreaths and set them afloat on the river to see who would marry first. That tradition had existed in Mala Tokmachka for generations.
We had everything we needed: a church, a hospital with a laboratory, a school, a nursery, a community arts centre, shops and a market. Many local people worked at the prison colony [Orikhiv Correctional Colony No. 88]. We hardly ever went to Orikhiv because we could shop for groceries and receive medical treatment in the village itself.
About five or six years before the full-scale war, gas and running water were installed. The entire village had street lighting. There was a tree-lined avenue with benches in the centre where we would spend our evenings. Music used to play there. Girls used to dance with such energy that sparks seemed to fly from their heels.
My garden was full of daffodils, tulips and peonies. There was an orchard with apple, plum and apricot trees. We had a wonderful life. But it has all been destroyed. The village lies in ruins. The craters in the roads are so deep that they cannot be bypassed. The only way to reach my house now is across the fields, and only in dry weather.
All that remains of my home are the walls and a half-collapsed roof. The ceiling in the bedroom has fallen in. It crushed the place where my musical instruments were kept. I don't know whether they survived. At the end of my vegetable garden, an unexploded munition is still sticking out of the ground. The Russians 'liberated' us from our home – from the good life we had.
There are no locals left in Tokmachka now. Only soldiers. Until the very end, a few [civilian] men stayed behind. Then there was an attack on the centre of the village. One [man] fled, the other was killed. I don't know whether his family managed to recover his body. There were difficulties with that. I suppose he is still there. It's heartbreaking.
And it's heartbreaking to see the village like this. A village like ours can never truly be rebuilt. If I live to see the end of the war, and if the walls of my house are still standing, I will ask my son and grandson to restore everything exactly as it was. Those are my dreams. I would like to live just one or two days after victory, if only to set foot on my native land once again. And what will happen after that is in God's hands."
The Mala Tokmachka outpost
The penal colony Halyna mentioned provided many residents of Mala Tokmachka with employment in peacetime. After the start of the full-scale invasion, the prisoners were evacuated, and the facility became both a shelter and a defensive position for Ukrainian troops.
Roman "Rokhas" Haman, 42, a former serviceman of the National Guard's 15th Brigade Kara-Dag and frontman of the band Royalcat, was born in Drohobych in Lviv Oblast but says he was "reborn" in the Orikhiv colony in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
He joined the National Guard of Ukraine in early 2023. His first combat deployment took him to Mala Tokmachka in April 2023, when he first learned of the village's existence. During his service there, Haman wrote the song Tokmachka.
Rokhas was seriously wounded on the fourth day of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive. After several months of rehabilitation, he returned to rear-area service, first on the Zaporizhzhia front and later on the Donetsk front. In 2025, he left the army for health reasons.
He told Ukrainska Pravda how he was "reborn" at the Orikhiv colony. Here is his story in his own words.
"In the spring of 2023, not every house in Mala Tokmachka had yet been destroyed. Our unit even had an observation post inside one of them. We stayed in the village for a week or two before relocating to Tavriiske. From there, we drove out to our positions every night.
Near Tokmachka, our positions had names like Valencia, Hamburg, Rome and New York (laughs).
We called the prison Shanghai. It was like a small town, with numerous buildings. We launched drones from there. The colony provided good shelter, but the Russians knew we were inside, so they constantly bombarded it with tubed artillery, aircraft and self-propelled guns.
One day our Starlink stopped working, so we had to move temporarily from the prison to where our brothers-in-arms were based in a block of flats. The buildings were rather flimsy and stood right on the edge of Tokmachka. Beyond them lay open fields and then the enemy. The Russians hammered those apartment blocks with anti-tank guided missiles and artillery.
Command ordered us to operate drones from the top floor. The building had already been partially destroyed – one flat had taken a hit on the balcony, another in the living room. I walked into an apartment and saw children's toys scattered across the floor and a USB flash drive lying on a table. It was an incredibly strange feeling: only recently people had been living there, and now every single weapon you could imagine was targeting it."
At the beginning of June, I suffered a head wound. It was an airstrike. Ironically, our bad luck was that we were inside a shelter. The Russians hit the entrance directly, and fragments showered inside.
I saw light. There was complete silence around me. I remember saying to myself: 'Bro, that was a strike. You're Cargo 300 now ["injured in action" in Ukrainian military slang].' Then I thought: 'Why Cargo 300? If I can still think, I must not be dead.' My brothers-in-arms started trying to bring me round, slapping my face. I couldn't feel any pain, only overwhelming weakness. I wanted to dissolve into smoke and disappear.
My commander bandaged my head. They had to cut my clothes off to check for other wounds. I was wearing a fashionable American-made UBACS tactical shirt. I paid UAH 4,700 (about US$110) for it. We were experienced soldiers, after all. Seryi said to me, 'Bro, sorry, but I have to cut it.' After being wounded, I realised that in combat you should wear whatever you have.
They took me to the stabilisation point, and I blacked out. I opened my eyes after surgery. There were tubes everywhere. I immediately started testing my memory: my wife's name, my child's name, where I lived. Then I tried recalling lyrics to songs. I thought to myself, if I can still remember songs, then my memory must be alright [he smiles as he says this].
The fragment is still lodged in my brain. It's too deep. The neurosurgeon warned me: 'We can remove it, but afterwards you may never walk again – or you could be left in a vegetative state.' So Mala Tokmachka will stay in my head forever [he smiles again]. An X-ray of my skull became the cover image for the song I wrote about the village.
I feel as though I was reborn in Tokmachka. I realised that the most important thing in life is simply to be alive. Everything else is insignificant. If you've made a mistake or said something foolish to someone, it can all be put right. Since then, I've taken life's problems far less seriously and become much braver.
I would love to return to Mala Tokmachka one day. To see what has become of the village. To walk through the places where we fought. To remember my brothers-in-arms. So many lads were wounded there, so many were killed... It's horrific."
The village today
On the June map published by DeepState analysts, the outskirts of Mala Tokmachka are marked as a "grey zone". However, Dmytro Pelykh, Head of Communications for the 118th Brigade, told Ukrainska Pravda that the entire village remains under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
"The 'grey zone' appeared on the DeepState map in autumn 2025 after one large-scale Russian assault. Out of 26 enemy vehicles, only one armoured vehicle reached Mala Tokmachka and deployed ten occupiers. We destroyed all the other vehicles before they reached the village. Over the following three days, our troops killed five Russian soldiers. By the end of the week, they had captured another five," Pelykh explains.
Almost every day, Russian forces attempt to infiltrate Mala Tokmachka in small groups of two or three soldiers. According to the 118th Brigade's press officer, Ukrainian troops eliminate 90–95% of the assault groups before they reach the village.
However, due to their dispersed tactics, some Russian soldiers still manage to reach the outskirts of Mala Tokmachka. Their objective is to build up forces before attempting assaults on Ukrainian defensive positions.
Alongside these "meat assaults", Russian units are also employing a scorched-earth strategy.
Using guided aerial bombs, drone-dropped munitions and FPV drones, they are systematically destroying every building in the village. Destroying the structures means destroying potential shelters, making it increasingly difficult to hold defensive positions. Russian forces used the same tactic in Bakhmut and many other Ukrainian settlements.
Mala Tokmachka had reliable shelters: the brickworks and the prison camp. Both have suffered severe damage from guided aerial bombs (KABs). The brickworks has been almost levelled to the ground by Russian strikes. The penitentiary remains in somewhat better condition, although it continues to come under regular bombardment.
The constant threat from the air has made troop rotations for the 118th Brigade extremely difficult. In May 2026, the brigade managed to evacuate a 22-year-old soldier who goes by the alias "Monster" from the outskirts of the village after he had held his position for 137 consecutive days.
The conditions for defending Mala Tokmachka are exceptionally harsh. Nevertheless, the head of communications for the 118th Brigade insists: "We are defending, not attacking, so our losses are minimal. Compared with the enemy, the ratio is roughly one to ten – perhaps even less."
***
The wave of public attention surrounding Mala Tokmachka was initially triggered by false claims spread by Russian propagandists. In Ukraine, however, that narrative was seized upon, reshaped and turned into a form of counter-propaganda.
United24 began comparing the length of the village's defence to the Great Siege of Gibraltar in the 18th century and the Siege of Leningrad during World War II.
At the end of May 2026, representatives of the Ukrainian Book of Records ceremonially presented soldiers of the 118th Brigade with a certificate recognising their uninterrupted defence of the village.
It gives the impression that another media campaign, similar to the "Bakhmut Fortress" narrative, is beginning to take shape. The important thing is that, amid the swirl of memes and slogans, Ukrainians do not forget that behind every "fortress" lie countless casualties and shattered lives.
Myru Street runs through the entirety of Mala Tokmachka. Until recently, it was the heart of village life: parents walked their children to nursery, students went to school, and local performers staged concerts at the community arts centre.
The central feature of the village's coat of arms is a Sarmatian sword driven into the ground – a symbol of peace. Its blue background likewise represents peaceful skies.
The so-called Russian world has turned Mala Tokmachka into yet another ghost village, one that now survives only in the memories of its former residents and of those who have defended it for more than 1,500 days.
Anhelina Strashkulych, Ukrainska Pravda
Translated by Myroslava Zavadska
Edited by Shoël Stadlen