Spartak Kiurdjiev, 16, was bragging to friends in front of a school on Wednesday, saying he no longer hides during bombings, when an intense burst of rockets landed near him, and he ran into the school. .
“Let’s go!” he yelled at his two friends, and the three of them ran for cover.
Residents of Avdiivka, in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, have for years lived in the shadow of the fight against Russian-backed separatists. But the danger they now face, with Russian forces massing on the outskirts of the city in a new and potentially more lethal phase of the war, could be far more devastating.
Avdiivka is no longer simply a town on the front lines of the conflict with the separatists, absorbing periodic volleys of gunfire in a war that has been raging for eight years. Now the city is a significant impediment to Moscow’s military goals, situated, as it is, right in the middle of Russian forces seeking to advance to gain control of the country’s east.
The city’s contingent of hardened Ukrainian fighters is hidden in an extensive World War I-style trench system, and it will be difficult to dislodge them without the use of massive fire.
The ability of Avdiivka and other cities like it in the Donbass to repel Russian forces will determine whether Moscow can win a more limited victory after being roundly defeated in northern Ukraine. But the Kremlin is determined to wrest eastern territory from Ukrainian control, and the inhabitants of Avdiikva and the entire length of the line of contact with breakaway territory have already begun to get a taste of what the Russian military has in store for them.
Artillery shelling has recently intensified in Avdiivka, reinforced this week by airstrikes that destroyed a supermarket and sporting goods store right in the center of the city, according to local officials. Dozens of people were injured, and some civilians died every week.
Already there are signs that confrontation with Russian forces is taking a toll. The only surgeon at the local hospital, Mikhail Orlov, said the injuries he has had to treat in recent weeks are more severe than anything he has seen since the separatist conflict began in 2014. Orlov held up a 30-inch metal shard. cm from a rocket he said he took off a woman’s back last month. She survived.
“The wounds are much deeper, with trauma involving large chunks of muscle mass torn off,” said the doctor.
City life is miserable. There is no heating or running water, and the electricity is spotty at best. Up to 2,000 people have gone to live in the city’s 60 bomb shelters, and many more have fled, said Vitali Barabach, director of Avdiivka’s military administration. But, according to him, Russian forces have not yet broken through the Ukrainian defensive position.
“Russian forces are not able to get past the front lines, so they are starting to simply destroy the city,” he said.
He likened the bombing of Avdiivka to the early days of the attack on Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city that Russian forces had turned into scorched ruins.
The story is similar across the east of the country. This week the Russian chancellor announced that his country’s artillery and rocket forces had hit hundreds of military targets, in the initial onslaught of this phase of President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, which is about to enter its third month. From Kharkiv, in the north of the country, to Mariupol, in the south, Russian forces are positioned along a front that stretches for almost 500 km, preparing to try to take a territory, the Donbass, whose surface is more or less equal to that of the US state of New Hampshire.
On Wednesday, Avdiivka was a flowery city, with tulips, apple trees and pink cherry trees in bloom in almost every backyard, though few people are left to enjoy them. Of the city’s pre-war 30,000 residents, there are now just 6,000, officials said, and the periodic rumbling of artillery and rockets throughout the day kept most people hidden in underground shelters.
The city’s central hospital was recently renovated, but it was without electricity and drinking water was available only from a large blue cistern in the lobby. The hospital is operating with a reduced team of 40 professionals. The medical director and surgeon, Orlov, have been living in the hospital itself for more than a month.
“If I go home, I may not be able to return,” Orlov explained. “I might get shot on the way.”
His colleague, medical director Vitali Sitnik, said there would have been many more injuries if residents hadn’t adopted the habit of spending much of their time in underground shelters.
Valentina Mutieva, 72, has spent much of the last month in a dank basement lit by a single candle, accompanied by 10 other people, including her daughter and two grandchildren. Young people often return to the surface, where much of the food is cooked on a wood-burning stove in the courtyard. But Mutieva said she spends most of her time underground.
“You just go up for five minutes and they start dropping bombs,” he explained. “At night they keep dropping bombs.”
She said she misses the comfort of her home, but what really worries her is the effect the war is having on the town’s children. She pointed to one of her grandchildren, Sacha, a slender, blond 15-year-old boy, saying he is deeply scarred by the fighting that has been going on for much of his life.
“Because of this war he started walking around at night and talking to himself,” Mutieva said through tears. “Underground children. It’s so brutal.”
In another part of the city, a rocket explosion that shook the walls of a basement that houses about 30 people did not quite startle a 6-year-old girl named Varvara who was sitting at a small table, drawing. When she was done, she showed a reporter her drawing of a green extraterrestrial with a hollow black eye that, according to her, is intended to see into the future. Varvara happily announced that the alien told her that the reporter would live forever.
“And the war, when will it end?”, they asked the girl.
“That he cannot see,” he said.
