Deaf children escape front line as shells land so close they can feel impact

The whistle and thump of artillery and rockets is one of the terrors of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But imagine you can’t hear the shells. Imagine you only know you are in danger when the explosions are so close that the basement you are sheltering in shakes, dust falls from the ceiling and the shock judders through your bones.

That was the reality for Vladislav Bilokin and his classmates at the Kamenskoye boarding school for deaf children for the past several days.

“This is the first time in my life I realised what war is. We can’t hear what is going on, so we only feel it – the house shaking, the windows shaking, everything shaking,” he told The Daily

Telegraph by sign language yesterday afternoon. “I’m fine now. But it was getting really scary,” he added.

Vladislav, 19, was speaking in the city Zaporizhzhya after The Telegraph was asked to help escort a group of his classmates out of the front-line town.

It was a relief for everyone. But it was also a case of a reporting trip that had taken an unexpected turn.

In the north and east, Russia’s armoured columns have run into trouble. Around Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy, Ukrainian tank-killing teams, armed with, among other things, British anti-tank missiles, have taken advantage of shambolic Russian planning to inflict colossal losses in men and equipment. But in the south, it is a different story.

Three Russian spearheads that broke out of Crimea on the first day of the war have made rapid progress. One, turning east along the Azov Sea coast, linked up with an offensive from mainland Russia, cutting off and laying siege to the strategic port of Mariupol. Another, heading west, crossed the Dnieper at Kherson and has now reached Mykolaiv. The battle there has raged for days – if it falls, the road to Odesa will be open.

The third, central thrust has pushed north. Last week, they took the town of Vasylivka and overran Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant. Kamenskoye, 27 miles by road south of the city of Zaporizhzhya, is the next town where the Ukrainians have decided to make a stand.

So when a Ukrainian military contact asked if we wanted to join soldiers heading down there, we jumped at the chance. “The enemy is continuing offensive operations. He has been stopped here and so he is now moved to our left and is trying to flank us,” said the commander of the

battalion here. “It is methodical. First there’s a bombardment – they use Smerch, Grad, and SAU. Then they send tanks,” he said.

“We have had some successes. We’ve destroyed tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers. We turned Vasylivka [south of Zaporizhzhya] into Stalingrad number two,” he said.

Smerch and Grad are rocket artillery systems. A SAU is a heavy self propelled howitzer. The enemy, he said, were just three miles away and we would be able to see their firing positions from a Ukrainian observation post.

As we spoke, a small, middle-aged woman in a blue coat accosted the commander.

Galina Panchenko is the director of the town’s boarding school for deaf children, which is something of an institution in Kamenskoye.

When the war began, she explained, almost all the students were sent home. But some had nowhere to go.

Vladislav and 12-year-old Irvin Yushof ’s home opposite Crimea was overrun by Russian troops on the first morning of the invasion. Another Vladislav, 15, and Daria, 16, are from similarly occupied areas of Donetsk region.

They were staying in the homes of teaching staff. But things were now getting dangerous, and Mrs Panchenko wanted them out.

On Friday night, the town came under rocket attack and one of the school’s dormitories was destroyed.

The following evening the Ukrainian army arrived. The town is now crawling with soldiers digging trenches for the coming battle.

“Of course they don’t want to go,” she said of her students. “They live here year-round. It’s where their friends are. We take on all their problems. The teachers are like parents. Now they are living at home with them like family.” She continued: “The teachers keep telling me they won’t leave their homes. They can’t abandon their neighbours, or they have relatives here. I keep telling them, your neighbours are adults, let them make their own decisions. They won’t listen.”

Meanwhile, the relaxed atmosphere around the soldiers had begun to change.

The shelling that afternoon had begun as distant crumps. News came in that a Russian column had been spotted.

Then the crumps began to creep closer, and turned into bangs. A nervous soldier ordered us into cover.

The battalion commander vanished. The invitation to observe Russian positions evaporated.

A couple of loud bangs occurred uncomfortably close. “Is that yours or theirs?” I asked Nikolai, our military press escort.

“Ours I think. Outgoing,” he said. “But if we’re firing, they’re likely to answer,” he added.

“We’re going to take the kids,” announced another soldier. I turned around. The doors of our vehicle were open and civilians I had not seen before were loading gear into the boot. Evidently minds had changed.

I almost objected. This was most definitely not part of the arrangement. We could hardly stay to report a battle with a vehicle full of children. We hadn’t even finished interviewing the commander, for a start.

Then, a couple more close bangs: ragged, explosive and without the

‘We are the only ones left because our parents cannot come and get us, They are in the occupied territories’

reassuring round thump of an outgoing round.

“Yours again?”

“Probably already theirs,” said Nikolai.

I looked at Julian Simmonds, The Telegraph’s photographer, and Jerome Starkey, The Sun’s defence editor with whom we were travelling. We all understood the day’s reporting was a write off – but it didn’t really matter.

We piled into our overcrowded vehicle and drove north, back up the deserted highway to Zaporizhzhya.

In the end, the four students, Anastasia Dolya, a teacher at the school who is herself partly deaf, and her daughter Maria travelled out with Telegraph.

When we got into town, I asked the students via Mrs Dolya what had changed their mind about staying. “It wasn’t safe,” said Vladislav Bilokin. “The Russians are coming to Kamenskoye. Yesterday was more or less OK, but today it started to get really scary.”

“Every night and most of the day we sat in the basement. That is where we have been living.”

“Of course it is very painful to leave the school. All the other children, our class mates, our friends went to their parents on the first day. We are the only ones left because our parents cannot come and get us, They are in the occupied territories.”

The students are heading to west Ukraine, like so many refugees. But the teachers who hosted them refused to go. Yelena and Vasily Savenko, the teachers who had hosted Irvin, laughed off the suggestion that they should leave too. “We’re not giving up our house,” said Mr Savenko.

Mrs Panchenko also stayed, like so many people, reluctant to leave either her home or her duties – in this case to the school to which she has devoted most of her life. “I can’t go. I’ve got responsibilities,” she said as we bade her farewell. “The school. My staff.” His voice quivered for the only time during the conversation. “I never thought I would see this. And Russians! How can it be Russians? Our friends.”