Maxim was 18 when he left for Donbass. It was 2014 and in this forgotten war fought on the borders of Europe he lost many friends, not the hopes of driving “the Russians out of Ukraine”. He puts the Ak47 machine gun on his shoulder and from the camouflage takes off a cell phone full of images, the memories of these eight years spent at the front. There is also footage of the ambush he ended up in Shirokyne, South Front, Sea of Azov. He shows it because he fears he will not be believed if he only describes in words what he experienced. The video is an endless deluge of fire. «The separatists were waiting for us at the top of this hill, hidden in the cemetery: twenty minutes of uninterrupted clashes, then they fell back. One of ours didn’t make it. ‘ Impossible to enter the small cemetery because the pro-Russians undermined it before abandoning it. After all, everything around here is littered with explosive devices: the houses, the school, the fields once luxuriant with wheat. Only the church was spared, even if someone on a wall engraved an angry inscription “The only light of God is that of a burning church.”
From these windswept heights the separatists bombed Mariupol, an important center for the port and for the huge steel mills that never stopped polluting the air and burning the coal coming from the occupied territories despite the conflict: power of business, power of oligarch Akhmetov. In 2015, the Grad rockets started from here and wreaked havoc in a market on the outskirts of the city, leaving thirty dead and a hundred injured on the asphalt. “Russian peace,” Maksim hisses. It took almost a year to conquer Shirokyne but Ukraine paid a very high price: “Four or five comrades died every day.” Today of this village there are only colorless rubble, rusted car carcasses, shreds of metal sheets that the wind churns incessantly. The Sea of Azov is there, a stone’s throw away, quiet but unreachable because concrete blocks and barbed wire separate it from the beach strewn with explosive devices.
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The Donbass front starts from this remote place, then goes north, skirting Donetsk and Lugansk, “capitals” of the two self-proclaimed People’s Republics of the same name, the territories that the armed separatists from Moscow have snatched from Ukraine together with Crimea. Four hundred kilometers of entrenchments, fences, bunkers; a border that in eight years has cost over 13,000 dead, thousands of injured, more than two million displaced. And immense destruction. The Moscow offensive is expected in the Ukrainian positions, the news are constantly talking about it. But there is no tension, everything seems ready to withstand the military shoulder threatened by Putin. The aid promised by the United States, Great Britain, Canada is reaching the front: they are the deadly Stinger and Javelin missiles ready to arrest the Russian tanks, if they ever move towards the West via the Donbass. In the meantime, the soldiers take advantage of the unusually mild winter (minus five is not much in these parts) to dig new walkways or improve existing ones. It is exhausting to work in the middle of the ice, which during the day turns into slimy mud, under the constant shooting of snipers who do not allow distractions, errors, fatigue. In some places the enemy positions are only a few hundred meters away and with the periscopes you can clearly see the smoke rising from their outposts. In Promka, an industrial area wedged between Avdiivka and Donetsk, fighting continues among the remains of warehouses gutted by explosions, as in Stalingrad in the Second World War.
The landscape is ghostly, faded, surreal: machine guns crackle, snipers crack. Then suddenly the muffled thuds of the pro-Russian artillery which, despite the agreements, continue to incessantly hammer the Ukrainian lines, from North to South, without respite. The shots hiss high above our position, continue beyond, crash releasing a thick, high column of white smoke. It went well but someone swears all the same, cursing the policy that has turned the Ukrainian army into “cannon fodder”. Because with the 120 and 80 mm calibers that rain on their heads, they can only respond with Kalashnikovs and heavy machine guns. David against Goliath, in short, in an unequal struggle that continues to claim victims, every day.
«We could have already taken back the Donbass, but we are still here to die, bargaining chips of diplomacy, ”blurts out a veteran. After the attack, life makes another round of the carousel, you immediately return to the interrupted occupations: there are those who split wood to heat the shelters, those who supply water supplies, those who fill sacks of earth to protect the stations from shards of mortars.
Who can rest in the bunk beds placed, God only knows how, in dark and cramped dormitories, heated by small stoves that can do nothing against the humidity that exudes from the earth. At half past four the sky begins to darken, the sun goes down quickly. Grek, the commander of a group of explorers, suddenly gestures not to speak, pokes his head out of the trench just enough to keep the snipers from seeing it. He listens, points to an almost invisible point in the sky. In the distance, an annoying buzz comes: it’s a killer drone approaching with its load of pocket fragmentation bombs. For some time now in the Donbass there has also been fighting in this way, with small radio-controlled aircraft, handcrafted transformed into precise instruments of death. “Russian quadcopters often attack in pairs: one distracts you, the other hits you from behind,” explains Grek. Lithuania, another country threatened by Russia, has supplied the Ukrainian army with hundreds of jammers, electronic rifles capable of blinding drones. They work, but it’s not always easy to save yourself from raids. In Shakta Budovka the mine tower is gone. Russian tanks shot it down hoping to erase forever the symbol – and the myth – of the Ukrainian outpost that blocked separatists at Donetsk airport. Now it lies curled up on itself, poised over the well over a thousand meters deep that once bore the coal to the surface. It seems a metaphor for the abyss into which this country is desperately trying not to fall. On an explosion-torn pylon someone wrote: “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes! ». Good luck Ukraine. Good luck, Europe.
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