Dvorichanskyi

Dvorichanskyi protects the white mountains: 3,131 hectares of chalk slope along the right bank of the Oskil in the far northeast of Kharkiv Oblast, between the villages of Topoli and Novomlynsk, declared in December 2009. The chalk is the floor of a Cretaceous sea, laid down some ninety million years ago and exposed here in bluffs so pale they read as snowfields in summer — part of a chalk belt that follows the Oskil from Vovchansk toward Sviatohirsk, with this stretch its finest open steppe. The left bank, by contrast, is low floodplain and terrace; the river divides two worlds.

Chalk steppe is a habitat with its own flora, and much of it grows on nothing else. Cretaceous hyssop and the white-felted wormwood Artemisia hololeuca are the emblems — low, silvered plants adapted to bare rock that reflects light and sheds water — among more than a hundred protected plant taxa in an inventory that had reached nearly a thousand species of plants and fungi and some 2,400 animals by 2018. Steppe marmots kept whistling colonies on the slopes; eagles worked the updrafts off the bluffs; Ukrainian lamprey and otter lived in the Oskil below.

Then the park became a front. Russian forces took the district in the first days of the full-scale invasion — the park touches the border — and when Ukraine's September 2022 counteroffensive swept Kharkiv Oblast it stopped at the Oskil, which is to say: at the park. The river that is the park's axis became the front line for the length of it. Bridges were dropped into the current, the valley and its lakes were shelled directly, the slopes were mined and dug into; and from late 2023 into 2024–25 the fighting returned in force, with Russian units pushing across the Oskil around Dvorichna itself. The staff evacuated long ago. Nobody counts the marmots now; the white bluffs, with their long sightlines over the valley, are observation posts.

What's worth knowing before you go

You don't. This page carries no travel advice because none is possible or responsible: the park is a combat zone, occupied in part, mined from the waterline up, and it will remain dangerous long after the shooting stops — chalk soils hold ordnance as patiently as they hold fossils. What can be said is what was true before: local guides walked visitors up the bluffs in June, when the hyssop and wormwood turned the white slopes silver-grey and the marmots stood sentry at their burrows.

And one thing worth holding onto: chalk steppe is old and stubborn. It survived the plough campaigns that erased the black-earth steppe around it precisely because nothing else would grow on bare rock. The war has cratered it, but the seed bank and the rock remain; when demining finally allows anyone back — years, realistically — the mountains will still be white.