The youngest of the team starts towards the piece of artillery with the large 105mm bullet in the arms and slips it into the barrel. The chief piece shouts the orders, turn off with the shoulders of the obice, together with the other servant, and fire. From the cannon a red vampiata starts with a deaf thud, which makes her ears whistle. Immediately after a second blow launched by the Italian artillery of the Oto Melara – a little dated, but always good – his air towards the target. The images taken from the Ukrainian drone of the grain of the grenades on the Russian stations six kilometers away on the Pokrovsk front, the hottest in Donbass, make the idea. The burst explosions raise columns of gray smoke making rush tires of concrete where the invaders are barricaded, who have semicircsed the strategic town. Here is the war.
In Donbass the Russians attack throughout the front line, even 250 times in 24 hours. And in December they recorded up to 1,200 between deaths and injured per day. A hell, with the Ukrainians who are sometimes in a relationship of a fighter to eight compared to the enemy. The obice station supplied by Italy is well camouflaged, among the shrubs rounded by the frost that sprout in an snow -covered landscape, completely surrounded by a net that serves to hide the piece from drones and is raised only to fire. Intermittently, explosions and blows to exit from the other batteries hidden in the clearing are heard. At least five 105 cannons of the Melara have been lined up on this front, which are part of the packages of military aid of our country to Ukraine. SEM, the battle name of the team commander, makes us run fast to avoid the fire against battery or the drones. An abandoned house is the basis of the artillerymen of the 15th brigade of the National Guard. «We are lucky. We feed ourselves, even hot tea and we sleep on branded »says the commander SEM. “To hit the Russians with the artillery we also lived in the forests or inside the caves.”
On the way back the comforting “bip bip” of the drones disorder mounted on the middle of the Ukrainians is interrupted by a terrible explosion On our right, a few hundred meters. The escort officer, as if it were absolutely normal, tells us: “Fab, a gliding bomb of the Russians”, which is launched at a distance from planes up to 70 kilometers. The dimension of the conflict in the trench is increasingly frightening and devastating. Vadim is a veteran who has been fighting from the beginning of the invasion, promoted to the field captain, after spending the last year at the front line in the Donbass. “Near Kalinove the Russians launched a storm of Razzi Grad against us, at least forty,” he says. «First you feel the hiss of a terrifying burst coming from the sky and then the terrible bang that triggers an earthquake. They broke out about fifteen meters from the trench. Stones, earth fly on you and the smoke envelops everything. For the smell of the explosion I vomited. I thought I was dying, but I survived ».
It is no coincidence that disturbing nicknames such as “gear meat” for the massacred soldiers are attached to the trenches. Vadim is a former driver who grew up in the USSR, who had left the service active in 1997 dedicating himself to painting. On the day of the invasion he returned to harness the rifle, but today he is 59 years old. «In the trenches I went to smoke the pipe because the snipers identify the embers of the cigarette lit at a distance. And they shoot you precise, in the head, from 400 meters »ironically the” grandfather “, as per the battle name.
In his platoon of 22 men the youngest was 36 years old, one committed suicide, two have deserted “and others died or wounded” Remember shaking his head. “I would like to forget everything, erase the horror from memory, but I know it’s impossible,” Vadim whispers with a shiver that shakes him. Then he recomposes himself and talks about “Oleksi, who looked in a Russian soldier in the eyes at the assault of the trench, a moment before shooting and killing him”. Two days later the soldier went to the captain to ask for help: «He said that the Russian appeared in his dream, who saw him sitting next to him and spoke to him. I didn’t know what to do. I told him to drain a bottle of vodka. “Russian no longer attack on waves, but they divide into small groups of three and never give up. «I saw enemies advance towards the trench as if they made a walk, walking, with the shotgun. They were completely made of drugs, “explains the captain. To his wife he told the phone that they had put him on the third line, but then “a grenade exploded near me and she understood everything”. In Umanske he saw hell in three continuous days of artillery bombing with the small explosive drones that penetrate the trenches. One of his men, completely drunk, shot him a burst of Kalashnikov. “I’m alive by a miracle,” he recalls. “Before I recharge, I disarmed him jumping on him. «He broke out crying, apologizing and saying that he did not understand why he had done it. I didn’t feel like sending him to the martial court ».
20 percent of Donbass still in the hands of Ukrainians are scattered with rejoic in reinforced concrete for civilians. Close to the front, excavated underground, the first aid centers are secret where the injuries that come from the trenches are stabilized before transferring them to hospitals in the rear. 70 percent of the population fled the cities and villages. Along the desolate roads, the trunks of the trees wrapped for winter frost are tormented by bombings or cannonate. You always travel at full speed, without stopping, because the Russian drones fly everywhere, vultures to hunt for prey. The latest stunt is a thin optical fiber cable connected to the smaller and insidious pilot without pilot, for a dozen kilometers, which transmits the signal to the target. “Impossible to intercept them or disturb them with the electronic war, like the others, but now we also have them,” explains Sueta, battle name of the head of the drones of the 109th brigade of the territorial defense. Red and mimetic bum, it is a tricky that is a craft of the engineer. And it has “600 eliminated Russian soldiers” with four propellers on sale on Amazon, which release hand grenades, as well as “15 pieces of artillery and as many tanks” centered by the largest Ukrainian Kamikaze aircraft. “The Russians launch the Iranian Shads, suicide drones that fly to droves above our heads in this area and then hit the big cities, outside Donbass, such as Kharkiv and Dnipro” says Viktor, a young brigade press officer with earrings and mustaches.
The inhabitants of the plane, the inhabitants of the Donbass have been habit of the lugubrious howl of the air alarm. They don’t even run towards the shelters. They raise their eyes to the sky only when they feel an explosion and accelerate the pace. The alarm sounds in Kramatorsk, but the noise of the bombing, mitigated from the distance, comes from nearby Sloviansk. The two cities are the Ukrainian Piave line in Donbass.
The firefighters are turning off the firefighters in the steaming rubble of homes Corn to the Sloviansk hill. Low and humble houses gutted within 200 meters by a bomb that broke out in mid -air or by an intercepted missile, because you don’t see a crater. The destruction is total, but by miracle there are only four wounded. Most of the people were not at home.
Svetlana cries in front of the small building destroyed from where relatives and friends bring out what you can recover Between clothes, cutlery and a large bear bear. “Where will I go with this cold and my two children who are only 6 and 15 years old?” The young mother wonders desperate. Tatyana and her husband, with a patch on the forehead, are in shock. The couple lives with a pension that is equivalent to 170 euros, in two, per month. “We watched the TV and the walls trembled like leaves,” says the old woman with shiny eyes. «The windows of the windows have broken and my husband fell to the ground. I screamed him: are you alive? Enough, we can no longer. Didn’t Putin have enough of our blood? It is time to end it with this war ». The majority of the population, according to a survey, wants to negotiate peace. 38 percent, increasing compared to the previous months, would be ready for territorial concessions.
Two splinters in one leg, a broken eardrum, captain Vadim, considers himself lucky. After a year on the front line, he serves in the advanced command in front of a dozen screens with the filming of the drones, which serve to collect information on the battlefield. The war continues to see it every day, but further away. On Donald Trump and the freezing of the conflict explains that “if they order me to continue fighting I am ready to die. A ceased the fire, however, will allow us to breathe and organize the army better. We must see the terms, but many soldiers in the trenches want the truce. They can no longer. “
