Days and nights under artillery in Donbas, the epicenter of Ukraine's endless war

When Russian troops occupied Liman, the city where she was born and where she baptized her two children, in May 2022, Liuba Dmitrieva still believed her youthful dreams were possible. The ones in which she retired from her job as a laboratory technician and spent her old age with her husband in the warm Black Sea. She was thinking about the sun when the Ukrainian army regained control of Limán, 14 months ago. Those thoughts faded when she buried her husband this fall. She says she doesn't dream anymore. Curled up on a cot that almost completely occupies her damp underground storage room, which has been converted into her bedroom for almost two years now, she closes her very sad brown eyes and says that she only thinks about one day passing. . And then another. And the next one. “Some predict that this war will end in 2025, but what can we know?” asks Dmitrieva. “Most of us just want to go back to being ordinary people,” she laments.

Liman, in the Donetsk region, once a busy railway town of 20,000 inhabitants, has survived without gas or water – now with faltering electricity – since the first months of the invasion. The few remaining inhabitants, like Dmitrieva, 65 years old, resist in those small, deep beehives converted into shelters against the storm of artillery that Russia launches against a citizenry that claims to want to “liberate.”

On the street, the snow-covered ground rumbles. In the distance, several explosions are heard and Dmitrieva, who has gone out to collect water from the patio fountain on a particularly bright night, due to the almost full moon, wraps herself in her coat, carries the bucket and speeds her way towards the basement. . Her neighbor Vitali, who sleeps in one of the corners of the shelter, carves wood. The other corner is Sergei's space. The man, “very literate”, describes Vitali, who was a railway worker, has placed a small sofa on which rests an open book and an icon. They have had bed bugs and mice in that damp home. “I had an apartment with landscape paintings, with a piano. “There is nothing left,” says Vitali.

The war is a succession of eternal days and nights in Liman and other cities in eastern Ukraine, where the wounds of the large-scale invasion launched by Vladimir Putin in 2022 mix with the war in Donbas – sponsored by the Kremlin and already started in 2014—in a harsh territory and particularly punished by history. As the Moscow-initiated invasion enters its third year, adding to the previous eight years of the war in eastern Ukraine, many in those underground hives have lost hope.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in the southern plains and on the Dnieper River has not gone as expected. Not even on the eastern flank, in arid terrain, plagued by mined forests and destroyed villages. Since the summer, Russia, at a very high human and material cost, has taken small strips of territory in the Zaporizhia region and in Donetsk and Lugansk (where it had already occupied a large percentage of territory) that Ukraine had managed to reconquer. For kyiv, the casualties are also great.

They are not decisive enclaves nor do they represent a turning point that turns the balance of forces towards Moscow, says a Western intelligence officer, but that, together with his strategy of supplying weapons and military mobilization, consolidates the idea that Putin is preparing for a long war in which its objective remains to “subdue” Ukraine. A war that, above all, once again turns Donbas—where the battle for Bakhmut was fought and now the bloodiest combats are fought in cities like Avdiivka or Chasiv Yar—into the trench of an endless war.

The battle has become, more than at any other time, a struggle for positions, of attrition, in which they fight fiercely, meter by meter, with a bloody mixture of 20th century weapons – such as the Soviet-made tanks that The roads sewn with missiles and sinkholes that lead to Limán are curdled with 21st century techniques, such as reconnaissance and attack drones that have become essential for both parties. “It is very difficult to live like this, it is almost unbearable. Sometimes I think that everything doesn't matter anymore. Especially for us old people,” Dmitrieva mourns, smoothing her wheatish hair under a cap that she says she never takes off.

Ukraine begins the year 2024 with the south and east partially occupied, with new massive missile and drone attacks against cities and towns throughout the country – also those furthest from the front – and with an exhausted citizenry. Despite everything, in the trenches, in the shelters and also in the bars, cafes and restaurants of the cities, defeatism does not triumph.

The country invaded by Russia has a new European perspective, with the opening of accession negotiations with the EU. But at the same time, a tough path of reforms to assume its standards and a path full of uncertainties in the face of Western support that is faltering and without which it will not be able to resist the Russian invader, as Washington has warned. In the United States, internal struggles (mainly in the Republican Party) keep the approval of a package of 61 billion dollars (55 billion euros) for kyiv frozen. Funds that join another similar package that the EU is trying to move forward and that the Twenty-Seven will debate on February 1.

Dependents on humanitarian aid

Oleksandr and Katia Marchenko do not go down to the shelter. His house, on the second floor of a small apartment block in Limán, is like a small island of normality. Except for the hallway full of jugs of water and the pile of firewood accumulated on the landing. The couple, who made some jokes last February, when EL PAÍS visited his house four months after the city returned to Ukrainian hands, smile much less now. Ole
ksandr now spends his days listening to a small transistor, sitting at the study table in what was the room of one of his daughters. His wife knits a scarf. From time to time they go out for a walk, she says, to collect the pension and buy food, for her pantry and also for her cat. A couple of small grocery stores have reopened in Limán, but many of the remaining low-income people depend on humanitarian aid.

Now, in addition, the number of volunteers has decreased. About 10% of those who participated during the early stages of the large-scale invasion remain, says Iliya Borchuk of the Dnipro Volunteers organization. At the New Year celebrations in 2023, Borchuk filled his truck with jars of preserves, nuts, sausages and gifts and approached Limán.

This year, he came at Christmas, but there were no gifts. Just cans, some cold cuts and wool socks for some of the pensioners. “People thought the war would not be so long and now they are trying to get on with their lives. But, above all, he has less money,” says the volunteer. He himself, who ran an artists' circus in Dobripila, another city in Donbas, had to dissolve the company when the war started and began working as a driver for a transport company. A few weeks ago, he also lost that job and now he works, day by day, as a delivery driver.

On the Marchenko island, around the corner from a burned-out building and not far from the avenue that leads to the now dilapidated train station, Oleksandr talks about next spring. “We have to go to the country house. There, there are some fat red berries that are great for making jam and homemade liqueur,” says the man, dressed and shaved beautifully. His wife grimaces. “Next spring… Who knows what will be left then. Every day I am afraid that it will catch fire,” he comments. And he concludes: “We had very happy moments there. It is only a few kilometers from here, but in our memory it is as if there was no war there.”

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