Ready to defend Ukraine
Oleg Kurilov snapped his laptop shut as the first tell-tale vibrations hummed through his living room on Tuesday evening. Without thinking, he dived for the basement and lodged himself under the stairs – and remained there for the next hour of bombardment.
About 20 Grad rockets slammed into the village of Muratove on Tuesday evening, in the first tremors of what threatens to become one of the most violent wars in Europe since 1945.
Panic was spreading throughout the country last night after separatists requested help from Moscow to repel “aggression” from the Ukrainian army and the US warned that an all-out invasion was “imminent”, with almost “100 per cent” of the required force for a push to Kyiv gathered on the border.
“The people are scared. I’m scared,” said Mr Kurilov, a Ukrainian military veteran who fought for two years in the long war here before returning to civilian life as the mayor of the village.
“Krymsk was never a quiet place,” he said, referring to the frontline village a few miles down the road. “But there was always small stuff – machine guns, grenade launchers, maybe a mortar sometimes. Nothing heavy. Grads are new here.”
Grads were the terror of the 2014-15 war. Their sudden reappearance on the line of contact has been read as a grim sign of what is to come if Vladimir Putin unleashes his invasion.
These unsophisticated, Soviet-era, multiple-rocket launch systems mounted on the back of trucks can loose off 40 high-explosive rockets in the space of a couple of minutes.
They are indiscriminate, inaccurate, and extremely effective. Concentrated fire from several trucks can wipe out every living thing in a grid square the size of a few football pitches.
Both Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces used them in 2014 and 2015, with devastating consequences for the civilian areas they hit.
The Muratove attack was apparently untargeted – an act of casual terror, careless aim, or sheer indifference rather than the focused destruction for which the Grad is noted.
The rockets smashed up one empty dacha, shattered the windows of another house without hurting the frightened owner, and left a crater in an allotment. No one was wounded, but fear spread through the village.
“There were about 600 here before the shelling. Now, I don’t know. Two hundred have left for sure,” said Mr Kurilov of the farming community of which he is the elected head.
Asked what he would do if a full-scale invasion began, he shrugged. “Me? I’ll stay. I’m a military reservist. I’ve nowhere to run.”
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, signed a decree mobilising reservists on Tuesday. Mr Kurilov said he was expecting his call-up.
A surge of shelling has erupted up and down the line of contact in the past three days. It lacks the intensity of preparation for an offensive, but has targeted civilian infrastructure.
In the frontline town of Schastye – which means happiness – the echo of artillery and mortar fire reverberated through deserted streets yesterday.
“We haven’t seen anything like this since 2014-15,” said Andrei, a builder who has been sleeping with his family in the humid basement of a neighbouring block of flats since Sunday. “When did it start? I’m not sure now. I think this is the fourth day we are down here.”
The main targets of the firing seem to be outside the town itself, but two people were wounded when mortar rounds crashed into the flats on Tuesday afternoon.
One of the first barrages from the Russian-backed separatist Luhansk People’s Republic on the opposite bank of the Siversky Donets river struck the nearby water pumping station, leaving almost the entire town without running water.
On Tuesday, an apparently targeted strike blew up transformers at the power station where most of the town’s adult population work. For now, there is still some power. Shells hit the plant again yesterday afternoon.
Residents in the flats closest to the river that marks the front line braved the shelling yesterday afternoon to queue to fill plastic bottles at a hand-pumped well in the middle of a dusty courtyard.
“We go in the day, because they start fighting around 6am or 7am then quieten down,” said Olga, Andrei’s 37-year-old wife.
Since the end of the worst fighting in 2015, locals say Schastye has been a relatively tranquil corner of the front line between Ukraine and the Luhansk People’s Republic. A few years ago, a bridge destroyed in the war was rebuilt to allow civilians to cross the river. On the Ukrainian side, a permanent checkpoint complete with shops and fast food shops appeared.
It was a picture of how the eightyear conflict might have looked if the