It’s never quiet on Ukraine’s Russian front
The Trump administration kept military aid in limbo for months to pressure Ukraine’s new president, said journalist Christopher Miller in BuzzFeedNews.com. Meanwhile, on the front lines, Ukrainians are still dying.
NOVOOLEKSANDRIVKA, Ukraine—When he’s not engaged in gun battles with Russian-led forces on Ukraine’s eastern front line, Stas, a scruffy 26-year-old soldier, likes to cozy up in his bunker and brush up on his English skills by watching Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He cracks up at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of President Donald Trump. Watching political satire on American TV—when he’s able to get a strong enough signal on the battlefield to access YouTube—is also how Stas learned that Trump had frozen $391 million in U.S. security aid meant for the Ukrainian armed forces over the summer. The news made him angry.
The fighting was hot at the time, and he and his fellow soldiers were stuck with second-rate gear.
“Look at this. It’s old and falling apart,” he complained of his Ukrainian government– issued bulletproof vest in accented English. It was barely stitched together and slouching on one side. “It’s a piece of s---.”
There’s one thing Stas and the soldiers in Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade positioned in the village of Novooleksandrivka do have, which they say has helped them spot enemy soldiers who creep within grenade-throwing range of their trenches at night: a pair of U.S.-made night-vision sights. The only problem? They don’t fit on the Ukrainian rifles.
He explained that “they would definitely be more effective if we had them on our rifles,” which is impossible without a special adapter. He demonstrated how he has to hold the sight in one hand, pick a target, lower the device from his eye, and try to remember where he was looking as he aims and fires his weapon. “Nobody in your country knows what’s happening here,” Stas continued, waving his arms in frustration. “They don’t know how we are fighting for our lives with almost nothing.”
Fought for more than five years in trenches cut through some of Europe’s most fertile farmland, Russia’s war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass has killed around 14,000 people and brought under
Russian control a chunk of a territory larger than the state of New Jersey. Yet—despite being fought with $1.6 billion of U.S. help since 2014—the war had largely been forgotten in the U.S. before it was catapulted into the headlines by revelations that President Trump froze U.S. security aid for Ukraine to pressure the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into investigating Trump’s political rival.
The aid freeze was overturned in September, but the damage had already been done. “While they were playing with our aid, I wonder, did they know we were dying out here?” asked Oleksandr, a sergeant in the 14th Mechanized Brigade who goes by the call sign “kuvyrok,” or “somersault.” As we crept through trenches outside the village of Krymske, 40 miles northwest of Stas’ position, careful to keep our heads down and out of Russian snipers’ sights, Oleksandr said at least two soldiers were killed at the position over the summer.
The warring sides in Krymske, which is accessible only over a cratered dirt road that winds through a field of dead sunflowers, are so close that they can see each with the naked eye across a desolate no-man’sland where only feral dogs dare to roam. Underscoring the danger there, in the days after I visited his position, the brigade lost two more men, including 32-year-old Artem Sokolov, who was killed by a sniper.
The soldiers, whom I met over the course of a week in October while traveling along the snaking 250-mile front line in eastern Ukraine, painted a clear picture of just how important U.S. military assistance is for Ukraine in its war against Russia. The soldiers spoke on the condition that their surnames not be used for security reasons. In what many described as a Davidand-Goliath-like fight, they shared several stories about how the U.S. aid has helped level the battlefield and stop the larger and more powerful Russia from grabbing more of their land.
The war exploded in 2014, shortly after Ukrainian revolutionaries ousted kleptocratic former president Viktor Yanukovych and Russia responded by invading and annexing Crimea. Eventually, with Western help, Ukraine’s military got back on its feet and halted Russia’s advance, but not before much of the Donbass was lost or destroyed. Today, much of the region is a battle-scarred wasteland. The front line that slices through it divides 6 million people—2 million living on the government-controlled side and 4 million under Russia’s control. With thousands of apartment buildings and private homes badly damaged or destroyed, people who didn’t have the money to flee, or didn’t have family elsewhere to stay with, or had a disability, or were too stubborn to go elsewhere have been forced to rough it. They shack up in crumbling homes patched together with tape and plastic tarps, and they huddle in dark, dank basements with no ventilation, where at least they believe they’re safe from shelling. Desperate, many people have hung religious icons over their doors in the hope that somebody above is looking out for them.
OME 75 MILES southwest of Stas’ position—past sandbagged checkpoints and over roads badly chewed up by military vehicles—lies the city of Avdiivka, where Svitlana Savkevych is the librarian at School No. 6. Savkevych lives with her husband in the old part of the city. In her neighborhood, there’s hardly a home that hasn’t been hit by gunfire or leveled by artillery shells.
“So many people and families have been killed,” she said. Long gone are the days when she could stroll to the park with her family or take her students on field trips.
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It was 2016, and grenades and mortars were crashing down in rapid succession, wreaking havoc on Ukrainian positions on the edge of Stanytsia Luhanska. Krupko didn’t know where the artillery was coming from but could tell it was somewhere beyond the opposing hillside. He also knew that if he didn’t stop the bombardment soon his brigade could lose several soldiers and a foothold in the country’s eastern war zone.
In the melee, Krupko switched on a counterbattery radar system that had been delivered to Ukraine as part of a U.S. military aid package. He pinpointed the incoming fire tell you, hell no. “I don’t know what the size of the balls on your guys are over there in the U.S.,” growled Oleksandr, the sergeant in Krymske, cradling a rifle in his arms, “but we have guys with huge ones here.”
O REACH THE forsaken village of Opytne, I had to drive over a makeshift dirt road that cuts through a minefield. On the other side I met Maria Horpynych, a spirited 80-yearold who referred to herself as Baba—or “Grandma”—Masha and said she wanted nothing more than to see the war end. Horpynych was born as World War II broke out, she told me at her modest cottage, which has fallen into disarray after being pummeled by mortars and rockets, a consequence of living within sight of the destroyed Donetsk airport. She said she hoped not to die in another war.
In far-flung Opytne, which more than 300 people used to call home, word of Trump’s decision to delay U.S. aid hadn’t yet reached the 39 elderly residents who remain. They don’t have electricity, and phone service is shoddy; the roads are terrible and treacherous, so the news is slow to reach the village. There’s also no running water and no gas to heat homes. “We are only surviving,” Horpynych said. With a heavy sigh, she added: “We used to have everything here....There were children playing in the streets.”
If the war comes to an end, soldiers and residents in eastern Ukraine will be able to begin piecing their lives back together. For Horpynych, that would mean she could visit the grave of her son, Viktor. In 2015, he’d gone outside to help a neighbor fix a broken gas pipe. Not long after, that neighbor came running over to say that Viktor had been hit in the head with shrapnel from a rocket that had exploded beside them.
It was too dangerous outside for Horpynych to make it to the cemetery to bury her son. So she placed Viktor’s body in a makeshift coffin and buried him in a shallow crater left by another rocket in her yard. His body stayed there for five months until she was able to exhume him and give him a proper burial. “War is misery,” she said. “I wish it would end soon and we could live in peace.” Horpynich wouldn’t get that chance. A little more than two weeks after we met, she died in a fire after an oil lamp or candle she used to light her cottage fell over and set it ablaze.
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