Artillery shells fired by Russian-backed separatists crashed into a small town on Ukraine’s eastern plains, ripping tree branches, opening craters, blowing up six houses and killing a Ukrainian soldier.
It was a deplorably usual response to a very small provocation: a dispute over the purchase of supplies for about a hundred people living in the neutral zone between separatists and Ukrainian government forces. But, in the heightened state of tension of the Ukrainian war, episodes of small magnitude can take on the contours of large battles.
Protected in a bunker, Ukrainian commander Major Oleksandr Sak called for a counterattack with a sophisticated new weapon from the Ukrainian arsenal: a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drone.
First used in combat by Ukraine and supplied by a country that is a member of NATO (Western Military Alliance), the drone hit a mortar operated by separatists. From that point on, the situation quickly escalated.
Russia mobilized jets and, the next day, tanks were sent to the Ukrainian border. Diplomatic efforts accelerated in Berlin, Moscow and Washington.
The sudden increase in hostilities over the past month highlights the tenuous nature of the ceasefire in place at the 450 km-long front of the Ukrainian war. And it has unleashed a new wave of dire warnings from Moscow, highlighting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to escalate the so-called hybrid conflict, using military and other means — including the exploitation of humanitarian crises like the one currently unfolding in Moscow. border between Poland and Belarus—to promote turmoil.
The drone attack on Hranitne has also raised fears in the West that Russia will use the fighting as a pretext for further intervention in Ukraine, potentially drawing the US and Europe into a new phase of conflict.
“We fear that Russia will make the serious mistake of trying to revive what it did in 2014 when it amassed forces along the border, entered Ukraine’s sovereign territory and did so by falsely claiming to have been provoked,” said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken , to journalists last week.
The conflict is experiencing an increasingly volatile moment. Photos and videos from commercial satellites posted on social media showed a cluster of Russian armored vehicles near the border. Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski estimates there are 100,000 soldiers gathered in the area. And Russia toughened its speech.
Amid heightened tension, the drone attack became a turning point for the Kremlin. Alarmed that Ukraine had this new and highly effective military capability, Russia described the attack as a destabilizing act that violated the ceasefire signed in 2015.
It is not today that Putin makes it clear that he sees his neighbor as inseparable. In July he published an article introducing this doctrine, describing Russia and Ukraine as “essentially” one country divided by Western interference in the post-Soviet period. It appears to have been an attempt to justify unification — Russia has already annexed the Crimean peninsula.
“We will never let our historic territories and the people close to us who live in them be used against Russia,” he wrote.
Hacker operations, electoral interference, energy policy and the recent crisis in Belarus — all these factors have heated relations between the West and Russia. But nowhere are the tensions more evident than in this conflict zone that spans villages and fields, with one side backed by Washington and the other by Moscow.
Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine in 2014 when street protests led to the ousting of a pro-Russian Ukrainian president. Moscow has dispatched soldiers in ski masks and unmarked uniforms to Crimea, intensifying the rebellion in two separatist enclaves in the east of the country, the people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The front line of war is sometimes described as a new Berlin Wall—a dividing line in geopolitics. It is a strange region made up of semi-abandoned cities, fields and forests.
It’s also a powder box that only requires a spark to ignite new hostilities. In late October, that role fell to the neutral zone on the outskirts of Hranitne.
In most places along the front, only a few hundred meters separate two lines of trenches. But in some areas, including Hranitne, the zone widens. At these points, people live between the two armies, inhabiting a no man’s land known in Ukraine as the “grey zone”. Residents are forced to cross trenches to shop and take their children to school, being protected by an uneasy truce.
“It’s scary,” commented retired Oleksandr Petukhov, carrying a bag of cheese and eggs as he passed a checkpoint. “It’s an absurd situation.”
Hranitne residents who shop on the Ukrainian side must cross a bridge over the Kalmius River, a stream of dark green water. Soldiers peer over sandbag parapets.
Trouble began a month ago when separatists closed a checkpoint. The reasons are not clear, and it is possible that it was a precautionary measure against the coronavirus.
In response, on 25 October Volodimir Vesiolkin, administrator of Hranitne, led a contingent of a dozen soldiers across the bridge. On the same day, soldiers laid concrete blocks for the construction of a new bridge, 700 meters away, which would allow the passage of vehicles.
Vesiolkin says his motivation was humanitarian: to guarantee residents access to purchases of groceries and charcoal to heat their homes in winter. “How is it possible that this violates anything?” he asks. “This is our village. It’s our people.”
The separatists interpreted the initiative differently, as an attempt by the opposing side to seize land. And shortly thereafter, they fired about 120 projectiles at the unfinished new bridge—but all missed their target and hit nearby houses. One of them turned out to be a pile of cinder blocks.
Sak said he called for the drone strike because it was the only weapon capable of hitting enemy artillery and because civilians were in danger — although none were hit. “Only modern weapons allow us to stop Russian aggression.”
Most military analysts say the explosive incidents are more a pretext than a cause for threatening strategic gestures. But they spark in an already dangerous world, with the West on high alert and Russia taking an increasingly bellicose stance toward Ukraine.
When fighting in Hranitne calmed, villagers emerged with at least one small victory: they got their supplies. Two days after the drone attack, separatists opened their checkpoint, letting the Red Cross deliver 25 kg baskets of food to each house in the village. They contained rice, sugar, sunflower oil, pasta, wheat flour and cans of meat and fish.
.
