The front-line town braced for obliteration

Remaining residents of Chasiv Yar in Donbas tell of their struggle as the Russian invaders close in

With each explosion, the pigeons over Chasiv Yar scatter in a new direction. Their murmuration reforms, there is another boom, and the flock splits again.

Then, somewhere, the rapid drumming of a Grad rocket volley. Serhiy Chaus, the mayor of this small Donbas town, does not flinch.

“Stable. Stably f----d,” he said when asked to summarise the situation in his town yesterday morning.

“We’ve got incoming practically every day. We’ve had no power for five or six days. No water and no heat. Our school has been destroyed and so have two nursery schools. We’ve got killed and wounded,” he said. “And I’ve lost my car keys.”

He held up his bandaged right hand by way of explanation. “An arrival,” he said, using the slang for an incoming shell. “Couldn’t grip ’em. Just came flying out of my pocket.” If Bakhmut is a boulder slowly vanishing under the Russian tide, Chasiv Yar is the next rock up the beach: mostly dry, but already lapped by the breakers.

For more than six months, the Russians have battered themselves against Bakhmut, seven miles to the east of here. They have taken tremendous casualties in exchange for a snails’ pace advance.

However, in the past couple of weeks they have made progress. Inside the city, the sound of automatic fire is now mixing with the persistent shelling as the front creeps closer.

The fall of Soledar, to the north-east, has put the Russians dangerously close to the highway that runs between Bakhmut and Slavyansk.

To the south, they have succeeded in flanking the city and are within range of the main road from Kostiantinivka, the other supply artery.

That leaves a delta of poorly surfaced and rutted country roads over the snow-covered ridges between the Bakhmutka and Torets rivers as the last safe route in and out. Chasiv Yar is where they converge. It doesn’t take a Napoleon to work out its importance.

Mr Chaus is dismissive when asked if he fears the Russians will attack his town. Their only thought, he says, “is to destroy everything”, so there is no point in trying to look for method in their madness.

He is preoccupied with keeping basic services functioning for the 40 per cent of the population still in the town. Many are in flats damaged by shellfire and almost none have heating or power. The lifeline for many is a “point of invincibility” – a grandiose name for a ground-floor room with electricity, heat, and phone signal.

Yesterday lunchtime, it was crowded with people seated at trestle tables covered in phone chargers. Two home-made metal stoves provide heat and warmed a kettle for tea. The babble of conversation drowns out the booms of outgoing and incoming fire.

The crowd is mostly elderly but there were several younger adults and at least two children.

Everyone is struggling with the same dilemma. Stay or go?

By now, those who really want to and are able to have left. The rest are slowly winnowing down to the four stubborn categories of remainers who can be found in any front-line city.

There are dedicated local officials and volunteers reluctant to abandon their town, their citizens and their work. There are very likely some pro-russians, quietly hoping to be “liberated”. There are the poor, elderly and infirm who cannot travel and have nowhere to go. And there are the very vulnerable, the drunk and the feckless.

Oleksander, the middle-aged man stoking the burzuika and maintaining the invincibility point, falls into the first and third category. He’s got a role here and a salary (at least for now). But he also has debts and alimony payments to meet. Walking away from a job is not an option. Others say they feel trapped.

“How did you get here?” asked Daria, a 32-year-old fast-food worker, charging her phone. “They didn’t take you at the checkpoints? They’re not taking ordinary guys at the checkpoints?” She went on: “What if they take my husband? Could you imagine living without your spouse? I couldn’t either. If they take him, I’ve nowhere to go.”

Outside, raising her voice over the artillery booms, another woman tugging on the lead of a terrified dog asked the same question.

The Daily Telegraph is not aware of any truth in the rumour that men will be press-ganged into the army if they leave. By law, the most that Ukrainian police can do is issue a paper instructing someone to report to a recruiting office. No one we spoke to could cite any example of a pressganging that they had witnessed.

A Finnish volunteer group is running daily evacuation convoys from the town centre and has offered to pick up less mobile and elderly people from their homes. They say evacuees only need their documents, and they can be delivered safely to Kramatorsk or Kharkiv. But sometimes helplessness has its own immobilising logic. The tense atmosphere here covers an unspoken consensus that the battle is getting closer. It is certainly getting louder. “We can’t do much for the injured, we are here to help people with chronic health problems. But we’re mostly writing out death certificates,” said Irina, a nurse who declined to give her surname. She is running a drop-in medical point in an unlit public building.

“We’ve got a lot of elderly people dying. Lots of strokes, heart attacks, things like that. It’s the fear, the shelling and the fear.”

In the darkened corridor outside the consulting room, she scratched the ear of a black mongrel. “Everyone is afraid. Including the dog.”