2 years after cease-fire, Ukraine still at war

MARINKA, Ukraine — The gray-bearded officer’s summary of the war in eastern Ukraine is terse with weariness.

“We stand in place. We shoot over there, they shoot back from over there,” Mykhailo Gaiduk said. “It’s just burning up time.”

The area that Gaiduk calls “over there” is territory controlled by Russia-backed separatists, where a rebel using the nom de guerre of Chester agrees: “Everybody is tired of this pointless war.”

A cease-fire signed two years ago was supposed to have ended the fighting. So was a cease-fire last year.

A temporary truce called for the beginning of the new school year on Sept. 1 briefly tamped down the fighting — the Ukrainian side reported only one soldier and one rebel were killed Tuesday. But that relative calm is clearly fragile; Ukraine also claimed rebels fired some 90 mortar rounds at troops outside the city of Mariupol, one of the war’s tensest areas.

According to United Nations figures, more than 9,500 people have been killed in the fighting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that began in April 2014, after Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by street protests and Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula.

The region, which is also known as Donbass, forms Ukraine’s Russian-speaking industrial heartland, and many local residents on both sides of the front line are deeply distrustful of the new Ukrainian government’s Western-leaning policies. However, an allout war didn’t break out there until after the arrival of a large number of troops and heavy weaponry, chiefly believed to be Russian supplies.