A Ukrainian soldier, armed with a shovel and a bucket, sticks his head out of a hole, then carves steps into the dirt. His role: to dig trenches and shelters in case the Ukrainian army should lose Bakhmout.
The scene of the longest and bloodiest battle since Russia invaded Ukraine, Bakhmut has been largely destroyed, as Ukrainian forces resist repeated assaults from the paramilitary group Wagner and the Russian army.
After about nine months of battle, two-thirds of this eastern Ukrainian city is in Russian hands. However, if the city were to fall, kyiv fears that the major cities of Donbass still under its control, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, will be threatened.
One kilometer from the front, while his comrade is digging a trench shelter, Sergeant Andriï explains their mission.
“We are on the second line of defence. In the event of a massive enemy attack, this is where our guys will come to take their positions,” said the 23-year-old.
Frowning above his black eyes, Andriï is tense, despite the relative calm that day. Usually, on this section, the “orcs”, nickname given to the Russians, “constantly bombard us”.
Feet in the mud, he readily admits that “it’s difficult”. But “we have no choice, we must maintain the defense”.
Around him, arable land stretches as far as the eye can see, but instead of furrows, trenches more than a meter deep zigzag.
“Each trench is made for eight soldiers,” explains Andriï.
The sections of a hundred meters in length, when they come together, create long lines of defense.
From there, the soldiers, relatively protected, can resist the enemy until he exhausts his resources. A war of positions and attrition.
On its side of the front, Russia is making the same calculation. In the east as in the south, kilometers and kilometers of trenches were dug at a good distance from the line of contact.
Because the Kremlin knows that Ukraine, which resisted the multiple Russian attacks all winter, intends to launch a vast counter-offensive.
To reinforce the roofs of the trench shelters, Andriï’s soldiers used the poplars that had escaped the Russian artillery. The wooden logs are tied together with iron wire, then covered with soil and tires.
“It’s quite a technique, a shell that can penetrate to a depth of 1.60 meters”, explains the sergeant.
“Normally, you finish a shelter in two weeks. But if it rains, snows or you are bombed, it can take much longer. During the winter, the ground was frozen over almost a meter, it was like rock,” he said.
Here, everything is done by force of arms, because Andriï and his men are too close to the enemy positions for the engineers to risk deploying their mechanical shovels.
Yevgene, the youngest in the unit, emerges from a trench, blond hair and a childish face.
Kalashnikov in hand, he says he was trained from the start of the war in the construction of these lines of defense, essential in a war where artillery is used to ravage enemy positions.
“When we say that it’s an artillery war that is being played out here, it’s not just empty words,” notes the young soldier. “The deeper we dig, the more we will resist,” he says.
When a first projectile shakes the neighboring moor announcing the arrival of a salvo of GRAD rockets, Andriï and his comrades take refuge in their shelter.
“There’s nothing to fear here,” the sergeant said from the shelter, lit by flashlights and candles.
A bouquet of flowers is placed there on a shelf, just below a machine gun. The coffee is boiling on a stove. The smell is acrid, the space cramped.
Outside, the noise of the explosions fades and Andriï has to come out for the resumption of work. “I would like the war to end soon,” he blurted out with a sigh.
16/04/2023 18:22:02 – Près de Bakhmout (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
