No end in sight to the war on the Donetsk front

Ukraine’s allies are deploying different formulas to end the war on the carpets of palaces thousands of miles from the front. In Donetsk, in muddy and frozen towns like Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, Velyka Novolsika or Chasiv Yar, where Russia is harassing Ukrainian troops in the fiercest battles of this year’s end, neither civilians nor soldiers see an end to the conflict. Terrified and exhausted, both want it all to end now, but they deeply distrust Moscow. Any ceasefire, they warn, will allow the enemy to recover, rearm, and return with greater strength to its goal of taking over the entire country.

The situation is critical at these points on the eastern front, where Russia is advancing at its fastest pace since the start of the invasion in February 2022. The Kremlin’s forces are just a few miles from Pokrovsk, a key logistics center for the Ukrainian army in Donetsk. The “heaviest fighting” of recent months is taking place there, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said last week. He reported that the Russians are sustaining about 400 casualties a day, including dead and wounded, but did not give details about Ukrainian losses.

There are still about 11,000 people left in Pokrovsk, of the 60,000 inhabitants who lived there before the war. Marina Volodimira, 28, was evacuated last Wednesday after spending several days without electricity, water, or gas. A day later, with terror and cold still in her body, she describes the constant attacks, the windows of her house smashed, the city without supplies, and the rockets flying over her head if she dared to leave the house.

Sitting on a bed in a theater room converted into a communal dormitory at a transit center for evacuees, wearing a hat and coat, she warns of the speed of the Russian advance. “They move very fast. They can get anywhere,” she says fearfully, despite being in Pavlograd, in the Dnipro region some 70 miles from her home, in a place run by NGOs and organizations such as the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR.

The Ukrainian army has replaced commander Olexandr Lutsenko, who was in charge of operations in Donetsk, with Olexandr Tarnavskyi, after several major defeats, according to the Ukrainian press. The fall of Pokrovsk — a crossroads that also includes a mine essential for the steel industry that has had to partially suspend its operations — would facilitate the Russian campaign to take Chasiv Yar.

Sergeant Anatoli Yakimets, 57, has just emerged from a 22-day “hell” in a frontline infantry position in the Chasiv Yar sector. He has lost 13 kilos. The logistics of such basic items as food and water were almost impossible, but the hunger disappeared with the stress and adrenaline. “I slept when there was shelling, because when everything was quiet I was worried that the Russians were preparing something,” he said on Saturday, some 40 miles from the front, in a place where he could rest and do his thing: repair weapons.

In his sector of the front, the war has not let up and there is no end in sight. On the contrary, the intensity of the attacks with drones, mortars, artillery, and machine guns is such that Yakimets lost his mind and had a psychotic episode in which he believed that his comrades were enemies. “Luckily, I didn’t shoot them,” he recalls.

The sergeant wants the war, in which his two sons are also fighting, to end as soon as possible, but he is wary of politicians. “There are not as many people motivated to fight as there were at the beginning, because the war is killing us, and there are fewer and fewer good fighters; this has to end now,” he says. In the trenches, there is no talk of negotiations or the end of the war, and no news from outside reaches them. There are only Russian troops there. “They have many more people, and it seems that they have unlimited ammunition. They push, push and push.”

Yakimets serves in the 33rd Mechanized Brigade, which is fighting alongside the 79th Airborne Assault Brigade and the 46th Airborne Brigade in the Kurakhove sector. Russian troops are besieging the town, which is barely holding out, and trapping Ukrainian troops in the south of the locality. “The situation is very difficult, but we are still holding out,” says 33rd Brigade spokesman Nazar Voiterkov. “The Russians are superior in terms of troops, weapons, and machine guns,” he explains in the same village where Yakimets is recovering with a few men. “We are short of personnel,” he adds, saying that for every Ukrainian soldier there are 10 Russians.

Volodymyr Kozatski, 55, lived in Kurakhove until November 27, when he and a neighbor saw the opportunity to take their bikes to the next village, from where they were evacuated. There are few people left in the town. About 3,000, according to the AP news agency, out of the 18,000 who lived there before the war. Mostly elderly people, who cannot move, says Kozatski at the transit center for evacuees where several NGOs and organizations such as UNHCR collaborate. “It is impossible to stay there, the bombing is constant.” As is harassment by Russian drones, which makes it impossible to leave the house.

Kozatski, who worked in maintenance for a gas company, declines to comment on the negotiations. “I’m not a politician,” he says. But he does add with certainty: “The war is not going to end soon.” People in this eastern Ukrainian region, which together with Luhansk is part of Donbas, remember well that the conflict with Russia over its territory has been going on for 10 years. Since August 1, 139,725 people have fled Donetsk, including 28,546 from areas on the front, according to the regional administration. Some 318,000 people live in Ukrainian-controlled areas, 54,677 of them in areas with active fronts, according to data collected by UNHCR and updated to December 6.

Junior Sergeant Voiterkov also does not want to talk about politics, but he does not believe in negotiations. “Russia is a terrorist state. You cannot keep peace with them. They will take advantage of the opportunity to recharge their batteries and come back, because their plan is to capture all of Ukraine. They can freeze the war for a few years, but it will start again, and it will be worse,” he says, while artillery fire from his own side can be heard in the background. Another officer, who prefers to remain anonymous, warns: “The Europeans will have to face the consequences of the peace they are pressuring Ukraine with, because after the pause [in the conflict] there will be World War III.”

In Iskra, the first village in Donetsk off the Zaporizhzhia highway, less than 20 miles from the front, soldiers are approaching the post office to collect parcels and buy some basic necessities. A 28-year-old military medic, code-named Hungry, pauses before loading a box into her car and admits that the situation on the battlefield is dire: “We are losing a lot of people and the Russians are advancing very fast. They seem unstoppable.” At the front, she confirms, there is no talk of negotiations. She is hopeful that the war will end soon — “we have had enough,” she says — but she too does not trust the politicians.

A 33-year-old soldier, whose military codename is Citroen, is one of those who opposes negotiations with Russia, because he also believes that Moscow will not give up its efforts to occupy the entire country. “The enemy will get stronger and will attack again and again, village by village.” Citroen is a sapper on the Velyka Novosilka front. He says that his brigade continues to hold its position, but the enemy continues to attack there too, with a ratio of forces of one to 10.

His colleagues smoke next to their car, an old, battered Lada parked in front of the shop in Iskra, without anti-drone equipment. On their cell phones, they show a photo of an armored vehicle they had, in front of which a comrade killed by a Russian attack, is posing. They do not want to talk about the intentions of the U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump, to end the war even before returning to the White House on 20 January. Nor about the possibility of making territorial concessions to Russia to agree a ceasefire. Citroen does: “If it were up to me, I would say no. I don’t support the negotiations. What was all this for, all these lives lost, this high price? We want to rest, but we do not forget our friends and comrades who have died,” he concludes while finishing a cigarette. “And that is why we will continue to fight.”

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