The Ukrainian skatepark sanctuary on the frontlines of war

It’s mid-afternoon on Friday, May 30, and Pavlo Ihnatenko stops mid-sentence and picks up his laptop. ​“Stop, one moment – listen,” he says to me, on the other end of the line. He takes me outside of the room that he is seated in next to translator Stanislav and skater Bohdan, out into the open air, and points towards the sounds of air raid sirens and shells hitting the ground nearby.

“Life has changed pretty drastically – a lot of people moved away from town, a lot of people have died during the war,” he says. ​“And we live each day as our last, because we don’t know if we will wake up tomorrow morning.”

The trio are calling from Krytka, an expansive indoor skatepark set in an abondoned factory in Okhtyrka, a small city in eastern Ukraine set just around 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the border and frontlines of the war with Russia. Pavlo heads up Street Cultures Okhtyrka, a non-profit organisation that runs graffiti workshops and skate classes, and creates spaces for young people to express themselves and find community.

Pavlo had always been interested in skating as a sport and culture, binge-watching skate videos in the early days of the internet, while also ingesting references from American television channels such as MTV around the turn of the century. ​“We were amazed by the culture of the Southbank in London, and we just wanted to make space for people to come,” he explains. ​“I’m not a skateboarder at all, but I was really influenced by skate culture after seeing it on TV – we had no infrastructure for skateboarding in our hometown at all, but while growing up and seeing and consuming all of this media, we were inspired by it.”

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Krytka first opened in 2023, after a laborious eight-year long process that took years to gut and clean out the factory space before they could even begin construction. The idea to build it in the first place came along a decade ago, when Pavlo first met Bohdan, who would skate around the city using cheap, brittle boards that he bought from supermarkets, before he began to travel 100km to the city of Kharkiv, where the nearest dedicated skate shop existed to purchase parts to make his own boards.

Of course, its building process was disrupted first by a global pandemic, and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The landscape of life in the city – particularly for young people – changed overnight, as people either fled west or out of the country altogether. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), as of February 2025 there were 3.7 million internally displaced people, while there were 6.9 million recorded refugees across the world.

“When a lot of people started leaving in 2022, it felt like everything was frozen in time – like our society had frozen,” Bohdan recalls. ​“But we did not lose hope, we even participated in the international Go Skateboarding Day during the Russian invasion. But in 2022, after that day, a lot of people were moving away because it was insufferable staying in the city. We had constant bombardments from missile and drone strikes.”

Having done much of the groundwork before the invasion, the final push came with the help of a short window of funding coming from the USA that allowed them to gather the materials to bring their visions to life. ​“Every bolt we turned was like a small resistance,” says Pavlo. ​“Some days we worked in silence, under shelling, without power. But the space grew, and with it, so did our hope.”

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Before the war, a small but burgeoning electronic music scene existed in the city, and naturally Pavlo was a regular at parties. But the attrition of young people leaving the city, plus the danger of holding raves within a warzone, has put brakes on the culture. ​“We have a saying in Okhtyrka, that it’s a little Bristol of Ukraine,” Pavlo says. ​“We love a lot of breakbeat, we love industrial techno, drum & bass, and graffiti culture.” 

“We had a dissonance, because people were dying and we were having a party,” Pavlo says. ​“It was this constant fight with our societal norms, but we had a drum & bass DJ who we invited, Igor Zadorozhnyi, who is a war veteran, and he said: ​‘Fuck it, let’s just have it. You don’t know where or when you will die. You don’t know when anything will happen, Just fuck it. Forget about it.’”

To this day, music remains an important part of Krytka’s DNA. Alongside the half-pipes and ramps, the space also has DJ equipment, which its young people are encouraged to use. Fast breaks often blare out of the room’s speakers while skaters attempt kicks and varials, and small-scale gatherings are held there where people can get together and dance. Next to the skatepark are rows of ping pong tables, while Krytka also has table football and a bar.

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With access to skateboards being limited in Okhtyrka, Street Cultures provide them for free so anyone can pick one up and try to pull a trick. But most of all, it’s a place where young people can go to skate, as well as hang out with their friends in a safe setting. For a short period of time, they can insulate themselves from the horrors of the past three years, and counting.

“It’s more than a skatepark, and it’s more than skateboarding itself,” Pavlo explains. ​“It’s a creative space where you can just walk in there and express yourself in any kind of form you want – you can do a live event there, you can paint in there, if you have a strong desire just to play table tennis and speak with people, you can do that. It’s about meeting people, communication, and creativity.”

Street Cultures are currently putting the final touches on a short documentary, which captures the skaters, musicians and friends who put Krytka together. Their hope is to show the film at screenings around Ukraine, before taking it to European film festivals, though they anticipate leaving the country will be difficult.

It’s a portrait of resilience, set directly in the mouth of war. ​“The film is about people, and community – the skatepark is just a metaphor,” Pavlo says. ​“We had this whole community that was built around the skatepark, and we wanted to inspire communities in other towns and cities, to take inspiration and move forward. Culture isn’t only about taking, it’s about giving, moving forwards and evolving.”

Follow Street Cultures Okhtyrka on Instagram.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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