Dispute over groceries led to artillery strikes
Artillery shells fired by Russian-backed separatists shrieked into this small town deep in the flatlands of eastern Ukraine, shearing branches from trees, scooping out craters, blowing up six houses and killing one Ukrainian soldier.
It was an all-too-common response to the smallest of provocations — a dispute over grocery shopping for 100 or so people living in the buffer zone between the separatists and Ukrainian government forces. But in the hair-trigger state of the Ukraine war, minor episodes can grow into fullfledged battles.
Hunkered down in a bunker, the Ukrainian commander, Maj. Oleksandr Sak, requested a counterstrike from a sophisticated new weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal, a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drone.
Deployed for the first time in combat by Ukraine and provided by a country that is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the drone hit a howitzer operated by the separatists. Things quickly escalated.
Across the border, Russia scrambled jets. The next day, Russian tanks mounted on rail cars rumbled toward the Ukrainian border. Diplomacy in Berlin, Moscow and Washington went into high gear.
The sudden spike in hostilities last month underscored the tenuous nature of the cease-fire that exists along the 279-mile front in the Ukraine war. It set off a new round of ominous warnings from Moscow, and highlighted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to escalate what is known as hybrid conflict, a blend of military and other means for creating disruption — including exploiting humanitarian crises like the current one on the Polish-belarusian border.
The drone strike in Hranitne also raised fears in Western capitals that Russia would use the fighting as a pretext for a new intervention in Ukraine, potentially drawing the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
“Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014 when it amassed forces along the border, crossed into sovereign Ukrainian territory, and did so claiming falsely that it was provoked,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told journalists in Washington last week.
The battle came at an increasingly volatile moment in the conflict. This fall, commercial satellite photos and videos posted on social media have shown that Russian armored vehicles had massed near the Ukrainian border; Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has estimated the buildup at 100,000 troops. And Russian rhetoric toward Ukraine has hardened.
Amid this heightened tension, the drone strike in particular became a flash point for the Kremlin. Alarmed that Ukraine possessed this highly effective new military capability, Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement reached in 2015.
Putin has long made clear that he views Ukraine as inseparable from Russia. In July he published an article outlining that doctrine, describing Russia and Ukraine as “essentially” one country divided by Western interference in the postsoviet period, an apparent justification for Russian-ukrainian unification. Russia has already annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
“We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia,” he wrote.
Hacking, electoral meddling, energy politics and a recent migrant crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland have all strained ties between the West and Russia. But nowhere are the tensions more overt than in this conflict zone that cuts through villages and farmland, where opposing soldiers — one side backed by the United States, the other by Russia — face off.
Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine after street protesters deposed a pro-russian Ukrainian president in 2014. Moscow sent soldiers wearing ski masks and unmarked uniforms to the Crimean Peninsula, whipping up the rebellion in the east in two separatist enclaves, the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.
The frontline in the war is sometimes called a new Berlin Wall, a dividing line in today’s geopolitics. It is an eerie realm of half-abandoned towns, fields and forests.
It is also a tinderbox that requires only a match to spark new hostilities. In late October, the buffer zone near Hranitne provided one.
In most places along the front, a scant few hundred yards separate two trench lines. But in some areas, including Hranitne, the gap widens to a few miles, and people live in between the two armies, in a no-man’s-land known in Ukraine as the “gray zone.” Residents must cross the Ukrainian trench line to shop and send their children to school, protected by an uneasy truce. Residents are aware of the danger, but are too poor to move.
“It’s scary,” said Oleksandr Petukhov, a retiree as he cleared the last checkpoint one recent day carrying a bag of cheese and eggs. “This is a ridiculous situation.”
The troubles began about a month ago when separatists closed a checkpoint on their side — where local residents also traveled for shopping — for unclear reasons, possibly as a coronavirus precaution.
In response, on Oct. 25, Volodymyr Vesyolkin, the administrator of Hranitne, a position akin to mayor, led a contingent of about a dozen soldiers across the footbridge. The same day, the military laid concrete blocks for a new bridge about 700 yards away that would be accessible for vehicles.
His motive, Vesyolkin said, was humanitarian: to assure locals of access for shopping and deliveries of coal for winter heating.
“How can it violate anything?” Vesyolkin said in an interview. “This is our village. These are our people. They walk several kilometers to buy groceries.”