With a shovel in their hands and a helmet on their heads, several Ukrainian soldiers get out of a truck and prepare to build a trench near Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine. The head of the team gives his instructions to thirty excavators: “You have to dig here, there,” he says, showing with his hand a portion some tens of meters long, covered with green grass and still wet from the night’s rain.
The place is located between a small road and a forest six kilometers from the first Russian positions. The boss continues: “Half digs and the other can smoke, and they exchange. They dig until 2:30 p.m. and then we leave here,” he says this Sunday noon. “There is Bakhmut, there is the front,” he concludes, pointing in both directions.
The soldiers who are going to dig place their rifles on the grass, and shovel in hand, they line up along the designated part. The others are placed a little further back. They have not started even when the shrill noise of a rocket pierces the air before falling less than 50 meters away. Some soldiers drop to the ground, others run into the nearby forest. Then twenty explosions occur in a row, with thunderous noises near and far.
The detonations occur every twenty seconds. Then calm returns. Some soldiers get up, but run away again when more explosions are heard. When calm returns, the chief orders the soldiers to run towards the truck parked some 50 meters away, hidden under the trees. “Quick, quick!” He yells, pleased that no one is hurt. They run towards the vehicle, some with shovels in hand, everyone gets on and the vehicle leaves the area.
“They were rockets with submunitions,” Ruslan, a team sergeant, told AFP minutes later in a sheltered location. The Russians “maybe saw our group. The shells landed right where there were a lot of people gathered,” he says. He considers it very likely that the diggers were captured by a Russian observation drone, despite the overcast and gray skies this Sunday.
“We didn’t dig in dangerous places. Some days we dug almost at ground zero (of the line of contact between the belligerents), but there were no such attacks,” he adds. “We can make a trench every two days. We must do the job quickly,” she says.
AFP journalists saw soldiers dig many trenches in the Bakhmut region, a city where bloody fighting has been taking place since last summer. In recent weeks, members of the Russian Wagner paramilitary group and special forces of the Moscow army have advanced towards the center of the town.
The Ukrainians only have a small part of the west of the city in their possession, and the occupation authorities claim to have 90% of the city almost reduced to ruins and that at the time it had 70,000 inhabitants.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
