Ukraine

Christopher Allen

Mariupol, Ukraine

From a distance, the war in eastern Ukraine seems to have changed little since its beginnings in the spring of 2014.  The groups fighting are the same – the Ukrainian army, the pro-Ukrainian volunteer battalions, and the Russian forces along with their proxies.  Territory has been gained here and lost there.  Ceasefires have been instituted and violated.  But from within, the war of late winter is different from that which was being fought during the summer. 

            I rejoined Donbas Battalion at the end of February.  The group had split up since I was last with them in August: the second in command – Filin – had created a splinter group (also called Donbas Battalion) and the remaining group under Semen Semenchenko was fragmented and of a very different makeup than during the summer.  Many of the men from the old stock had been killed at Ilovaisk or had left the group soon afterward, and those from which it was composed of now had a very different attitude towards the war.  Franko, the American fighting in Donbas Battalion who was killed in Ilovaisk, had once said that the group had been focused on what was an internal struggle, that “all roads led back to Kyiv,” that there would be “an armed Maidan,” “a second Maidan.”  Rosomaha, the Battalion’s Deputy Commander of Internal Relations, had said in August that “Maidan will have to transform into a wider thing.”  But it never did. 

Instead, the war against Russia has halted the revolutionary movement begun on Maidan late last fall.  “Priorities have probably changed with time,” an officer in the Battalion told me in January.  But now, “…we [wouldn’t be able to] make another revolution.  It wouldn’t survive.”  The war with Russia has made it “impossible for us to do [another] Maidan now, if defense is the priority of our country.  Because if we do [another] Maidan, it is unclear who will take power afterwards.  They may be worse… and Putin will use it in his best interest… it will ruin everything.” 

Now the war has moved beyond the ideas of Maidan and is focused on the defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.  “Everybody is tired.  We have what we have now.  What are we going to do in Kyiv?” says Fransuz, a soldier in Donbas Battalion.  “From the time of the summer, everything is changed… in my company from the old squad remained only three from 30… Those who wanted to change the government disappeared,” Wolfewich, a Ukrainian Jewish officer in the Battalion, tells me in late February.  “We’ve got a lot of people who didn’t participate in the Revolution, who don’t give a damn about the Revolution, but now when the enemy comes they protect our land…  In August we had local drug addicts and alcoholics.  And now we have Russians… Now it’s a fight for the territory.  No more, no less.”  But according to Bohdan, a volunteer with the Battalion, “It’s beautiful to die for this land, it’s not a bad thing” he says, while on his way to the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) zone.

The men in eastern Ukraine have dug in: from Shchastya north of Luhansk, to Pisky outside of Donetsk, to the small towns east of Mariupol by the Azov Sea, they have fought for months and don’t expect the war to end anytime soon.  Though I rejoined the group two weeks after the Minsk II ceasefire agreement, the war has continued.  Much of the heavier artillery – including Grad rockets – has been pulled back from the front line, but there is still combat with lighter artillery, tanks, snipers, and small arms.  Despite the efforts of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to monitor the ceasefire, the war only pauses when monitoring teams come to observe.

“These men are gods of war,” an old soldier says to me as we prepare to leave the airport in Mariupol, the staging ground for the front line east of the city.  But these soldiers certainly don’t look like gods – not with their rickety trucks and mismatched uniforms and old weapons.  Not with their young unshaven faces or with their middle aged paunches or graying hair.  Now they stand in disorganized formation in front of the airport.  They load the trucks with food and ammunition for one rotation at the front: four to six days of fighting.  The old wheat fields around the airport are all mined.  “Instead of bread, there are mines,” one officer tells me. 

In the armored truck the man next to me taps his foot anxiously.  We squeeze into the old armored Kraz and drive east out of the relative calm of Mariupol and along roads that pass through quiet villages. The playgrounds are empty now, the swings are still, the sports fields deserted, the schools and community center black and abandoned.  We turn and finally get a glimpse of the sea.  Bohdan, one of the soldiers in our truck, had told me he had always wanted to go to the Azov Sea.  Here it is, but it is no place for a holiday anymore.  The sea is quiet, the morning - still, the sky - cloudless; but Shyrokyne is restless.  The small town has become one of the most contested places in eastern Ukraine.  War has turned this sleepy seaside village into a bombed out frontline.  There is no ceasefire here.  “This is the end of Ukraine for now,” Wolfewich says.

We unload the truck near the trenches in Shyrokyne.  There are two battalions of Russian soldiers in and around the town, Wolfewich says.  They hide in abandoned houses and behind the ridgeline, and camouflage their tanks amongst the grey dilapidated buildings and green-brown trees on the edge of the village.  While unloading the truck upon our arrival, there is an eruption of noise and then the whistle of a shell which brings us to our stomachs.  The trenches are dug well here though.  The men of the Third Company dug them themselves last week.  Later, they hit a Russian tank from this position. Now, we clean the trenches of debris left from the last rotation, digging out loose soil, disposing of trash, deepening the walkways, and re-digging the observation points.

Sometimes there is the whiz-crack of a sniper or the whistle of machine gun bullets, which force us to our knees beneath the protection of the trench.  We are on an exposed hill with Shyrokyne a few hundred meters in front of us and separatist lines approximately one kilometer away.  But Ukrainian artillery strikes closer than that - maybe a few hundred meters from our position - just at the bottom of the hill.  Our northern flank is completely exposed.  To our south is the First and Second Company from Donbas Battalion and then the Azov Sea.

Artillery booms from the Ukrainian positions behind us.  We hear its report and then see the eruption of dirt and smoke where it lands in the town or nearby fields.  The enemy fires back, scarring the hillside black.  The artillery is almost constant now.  The fields burn.  The smoke climbs the hill towards the Second Company on the ridge behind the church, in the old holiday resort whose top floors are already destroyed by shelling.  Pro-Ukrainian forces trade artillery and small arms fire with Russian forces.

Later the men sit in communion by candlelight, squeezed into the bunker of the trench.  At just three meters by five, the twelve men pack in under a foot of steel brought from the nearby Mariupol factories.  The men talk and laugh in the warmth of the bunker.  They drift off to sleep like this as the tanks go quiet.  The earth around the bunker is cold; sometimes it crumbles from the walls, but we sleep - only disturbed by the men who have to untangle themselves from the dense knot of bodies in this dark shelter.  In the morning it is quiet; only the sound of wind rushes over the hilltop and through the narrow trenches and the trees behind us.  But then a Russian tank interrupts the quiet with two booms which sound incongruous in the morning stillness.  A tank shell lands in the field next to us leaving a tall cloud of smoke and dust.  “Small village,” says Lima as artillery continues to boom in the background, “more problems.” 

At dusk, after the sun had slipped below the horizon and the half moon rose above the low flat clouds to light up a purple sky, Ukrainian artillery hit a camouflaged Russian armored vehicle position on the edge of town.  It burned all night.  But in the days that follow, three more Russian tanks move into town.  Though it hasn’t stopped the war, the two week old ceasefire has done something to change the nature of combat.  Ukrainians have traded artillery with Russian forces in the past days, and snipers still fire from positions in and around the town, but the front has become quieter and Wolfewich is prevented by his commanding officers from shelling Russian targets.

In the morning roosters crow and wind blows off the sea and over the dirt embankments built up around the trenches.  Sometimes the wind finds its way down into the trench and stirs the fire in the corner or picks up the dry dirt.  The odd civilian car drives by on the road from Novoazovsk, at times pulling a trailer full of remnants of life before the war.  In the afternoon, as the sun escapes the clouds and lights up the Azov Sea, a stray dog barks.  Life in the trenches has its own rhythm, too.  Sleep at night is disturbed every few hours as men rotate for the change of guard.  Days are passed around the stove: drinking tea, smoking, eating tinned kasha.  Then there is the occasional run from the trench to gather firewood.  Eyes are perpetually pasted to binoculars. The boredom.  But even more than the boredom: the waiting – waiting for the whistle of shells or the crack of a sniper.  These sounds of war stop conversation and leave the men crouched, looking expectantly, hopefully, at each other. Then there’s the boom and smell of gun powder from the sniper further down the trench.

After five days the rotation is over.  The men from Donbas Battalion are replaced by soldiers from Azov Battalion, another volunteer group fighting in the east.  They gather their things from the trenches – rocket launchers, ammunition, sleeping bags, clothing stuffed into colorful plastic laundry bags – and drive past the artillery and armored vehicles dug in behind the ridge.  Back through quiet towns which increasingly come to life the further we get from the front.  After a bumpy ride we re-enter Mariupol.  Then, under the city’s tall, grey, concrete apartment blocks and Soviet steel mills, the men share their last cigarettes.