Stuart Ramsay on the frontine in Ukraine
(Picture: Dominique Van Heerden)There was a change, something about the eyes, something about their gestures. Ukrainian soldiers who had displayed remarkable bravura for weeks now, seemed suddenly less enthusiastic about life – being bombed for two days does that. Especially when there is more to come.
In the trenches of the frontline in eastern Ukraine, cold, wet, and muddy, it’s difficult to imagine how things are going to get worse.
But President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk looks certain to signal a new phase of bloodshed in this war that started in 2014, and has rumbled on, often unreported, ever since.
I was here in 2014 and 2015, freely moving between the frontlines, before I was taken hostage by the Russian-backed separatists.
Hooded, handcuffed, and made to urinate where I stood in a gravel-floored garage as a female interrogator screamed in my ear, and a colleague was beaten because he “mispronounced” the word ‘London’.
“Mispronounced” because he has a Birmingham accent; that made him a spy. It was that ridiculous.
And ridiculous is where we are now. The president of Russia claiming that Ukraine is threatening his country.
Ukraine couldn’t even threaten Belarus, its northern neighbour, run by an equally dictatorial leader – but this is where we are in 2022.
On the frontlines the sounds of incoming and outgoing rounds are fairly continuous.
The sounds of rockets firing and landing chills you to the core.
"It’s a little bit scary, because when it goes quiet it means they are getting ready for a larger-scale fight," 24-year-old Lyubomyr Chipko told me from his guarding position during a break in the fighting.
The separatists and the Ukrainians always blame their opponents for breaking the no-fire rules, but in truth they are both guilty of violations.
The problem with the 300-mile demarcation line is that it runs through urban communities, and when the two sides fight, people’s homes are right in the firing line. They are in physical danger of course, but the psychological scars on those, particularly the children left behind, is difficult to gauge, but almost certainly damaging.
Over the past three months, my team and I have visited dozens of towns and met hundreds of people in eastern Ukraine, many of them children.
One remarkably composed 10-year-old, Vika Syncha, who we met in the town of Krymske, told me how she would describe her life to a little girl in Britain.
“I would explain it to her this way: you live here, you survive. When they don’t shoot, you feel good. But when they start shooting, you get scared, you run anywhere to hide. In abandoned houses, for instance, there are a lot of them here. I also would say to her not to be as scared as we are,” she said.
It’s not uncommon to see army trucks and armoured vehicles crunch through the snow and ice-covered roads – through the towns and villages still populated by people holding out, despite the frontlines a short distance away, and the constant rumble of explosions and crackle of machine guns.
For years now the incessant firing and the growing numbers of casualties have been considered “manageable” because the lines of demarcation have remained set.
There are violations for sure, but in the great scheme of things these are minor infringements of the Minsk Agreements, that set out the demarcation lines.
But that has all changed now.
President Putin has torn it up. He started this conflict with the annexation of Crimea and the tacit support of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk; states on Ukrainian territory entirely dependent on Russian support, that lack credibility or competence.
They purport to be protecting an ethnic Russian population, who themselves often seem mystified by their status and now just scared.
Over the last few days, I have been talking to my contacts in Donetsk, my application to enter was denied. They paint a picture of panic, and of families separated.
Women, children and the elderly told to evacuate and head for Russia, and pretty much all men told to stay in place and register their ability to fight.
They tell me they are being press-ganged into the Pro-Russian militia, dragged from cars, taken away in broad daylight, and sent to the frontline to fight in a war they have nothing to do with.
As politicians and world leaders argue the rights and wrongs of decisions, it’s important not to forget that in the midst of this crisis are the people of Ukraine, on both sides of the demarcation line.
And many of them don’t feel they have a stake, let alone an opinion, on what might happen to them next.
