“When you leave, you don’t know if you will come back”, asserts Oleg, a Ukrainian soldier, veteran of Bakhmout, the longest and deadliest battle of the war in Ukraine.
The 34-year-old sapper from an engineering unit alternates missions in the city itself and its surroundings.
He and his comrades have just left the city to demine a few kilometers further west a passage for the infantry who will join the fighting which has been raging for nine months against the paramilitary group Wagner, supported by the Russian army.
“The artillery, the mortars never stop. Drones drop grenades and in the street of course there is fighting and machine gun fire,” says Denys, 20, who was still a few hours earlier. in the small third of the city still under Ukrainian control.
Oleg tells him about demining missions, often at night, which send shivers down your spine.
“They even mine the bodies of their soldiers, when they fall back they mine everything”, says the deminer, “you have no margin for error, it all depends on how lucky you are”.
Pavlo, 34, who was a firefighter before the invasion, considers that his enemy “has very intelligent sappers”, capable of installing formidable traps.
“They don’t obey any rules”, he adds, “wire traps, anti-personnel mines, even if it’s forbidden, they lay them”.
Pavlo tells him of the human waves of fighters that he saw melting on the Ukrainian positions to nibble a little ground, in spite of immense losses for the Russians.
“More than once we’ve seen them jump out in the open and run. They get killed, they regroup, then start again,” he said.
While observers and analysts deem Bakhmout’s strategic value low, politically the city has become a symbol of both sides.
For kyiv, it is a question of defending the fortress against all odds and making everyone understand that Ukraine yields nothing to Russia.
Militarily, it is a question of inflicting a maximum of losses on the Russians, of weakening their lines, in anticipation of a major counter-offensive to retake the occupied territories of the East and the South.
Moscow, for its part, is looking for a victory after its series of defeats in the autumn and hopes that the capture of Bakhmout can open the way to the main cities of the East, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
An unlikely scenario, because so far the winter offensive of Russian forces in the East has only resulted in very limited progress.
However, Moscow is not giving up, and for the umpteenth time the Russian army suggests that taking Bakhmout is only a matter of time.
Whatever the outcome of the battle, the city, which had 70,000 pre-war inhabitants and was known for its sparkling wine and salt mines, will be rubble.
“There is practically not a whole house. It is almost annihilated, every day there are strikes and every day there are more ruins”, underlines Denys, who recounts the whistling of the shells, the explosions and the bursts that fuse.
“It scares, scares everyone,” says the young soldier who joined the army last year, after the invasion, after leaving university.
However, a few civilians, usually elderly people, remain in the city, refusing to leave, despite being condemned to live in cellars, without water or electricity.
“Yesterday I saw an old lady, I was really surprised,” says Denys, “it was flying, it was whistling all around us and there she was, near a house chopping firewood.”
19/04/2023 12:01:53 – Droujkivka (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
