The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 17NEWS
KyivZaporizhzhyaDniproOdesaBlack SeaSea of AzovUKUKUKUUKUKUKUKUKUUKUKUKUKUKUKUUUKUKKKKRRARARARARARARARRARARRARRARARARRARRRARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAININIINIINININININININIINININNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEE RURRURURURURURURURUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAAA
DonetskLvivSumyChernihivMariupolCrimea LuhanskSignificant fighting in the past 24 hoursRussian-controlled Ukrainian territory before Feb 24Claimed Russian control Russian troop withdrawalsAssessed Russian-controlled Assessed Russian advancesTERRITORY IN PUTIN'S SIGHTS4.1m
population
estimate5th
biggest city in Ukraine
and the capital of
Donbas is Donetsk65%
of the Donbas
population follow
the Christian faith26,517 km^2
area of Donbas74. 9 %
of Donetsk Oblast
residents speak Russian
as their main languageABCThe economy is
dominated by heavy
industry, such as coal
mining and metallurgy
(technology of metals)Facts about DonbasMykolaivKhersonKharkivBakhmutKramatorskSource: Institute for the Study of War
and AEI’s Critical Threats ProjectW
ith a final glance at the
deserted central square of
her hometown of Bakh-
mut, Yevgeniya Martyn-
enko picked up her small
purple suitcase and
stuffed it in the back of the
minivan as her mother
Elena climbed into one of the front seats.
“I’m not so scared of dying,” said Martyn-
enko, who works in a jewellery shop.
“But I don’t want to be raped.”
For years, they had done everything to
stay in this remote corner of Ukraine —
seven miles from the “contact line” sepa-
rating government-controlled land from
the pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and
Luhansk — and over which a vicious con-
flict has been simmering since 2014.
But when word emerged of summary
killings and sexual violence after Russia’s
retreat from Bucha and other occupied
areas, Martynenko, 29, began suffering
panic attacks and stopped sleeping. Then
their windows were blown out by shelling
that hit a Ukrainian military base across
the road. They decided to get out.
Last week the head of the local military
administration called for civilians to
leave before what they expect to be a Rus-
sian offensive to take the east of the coun-
try, focusing on the regions of Donetsk,
where Bakhmut lies, and Luhansk.
Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign
minister, said last week that the fight for
the east would resemble the battles of the
Second World War.
Martynenko and her mother, 58,
crowded on to the minibus with two
volunteer drivers, another two women —
one using a crutch — and a seven-year-old
girl, and drove down sunlit streets, past a
warehouse that had been turned inside
out by a Russian bombing attack, for
what might be the last time.
On the potholed highway, they joined
a stream of thousands of overloaded
Ladas and ancient buses on the long road
west, through endless loamy black fields,
under constant threat of bombardment.
Many of those fleeing had written
“children” on pieces of paper and stuck
them to the windows in an attempt to
protect their families from attacks. They
were right to be concerned. A guided mis-
sile attack on the railway station at
Kramatorsk on Friday killed at least 50
people and injured more than 100 as they
waited for a train out of the city. Another
railway station near Kharkiv was also hit
by Russian bombardment, cutting off an
escape route used by thousands. A shell
struck a humanitarian aid distribution
point in a small town near Bakhmut.
This, it seems, was just the beginning.
Three commanders in Ukraine’s mili-
tary and territorial defence forces in the
east said that Russia was aiming to take
control of the Donetsk and Luhansk
regions, using a pincer movement to cut
off Ukrainian forces. They believed the
Kremlin would attempt to secure a
victory by May 9, celebrated in Russia as
the day when the Soviet Union defeated
the Nazis in 1945.
“Everyone can see from the number of
troops, from satellite shots that they’re
gathering everything they can ... we
understand the danger,” said Captain IlkoBozhko, army spokesman for the east. He
believed the Russians were willing to go
to any lengths — and suffer any losses — to
achieve their objective. “They don’t
count their meat, their servicemen, they
think women will give birth to more, ” he
said. “They will flatten an entire village
with its population... they don’t care.”
This, he said, was what had prompted the
evacuation. It was “to avoid situations
like Bucha. To avoid situations like
Mariupol.”
Major Andriy Shulga, spokesman for
territorial defence in the eastern region,
said rockets, missiles and artillery attacks
had increased in the past few days, partic-
ularly targeting infrastructure. “The Rus-
sians are regrouping because they
couldn’t take the territory they wanted
the first time around,” he said. “Nowthey’ve changed the tactic of trying to get
around the whole east [of Ukraine] and
encircling it.”
Yet so far, he said, they had not been
successful. “They’re trying to get through
on the east and south all the time, and
they’re losing a lot of people there
because they can’t move further,” he
said.
Before the attack, he said, the Ukraini-
ans were moving personnel to the east-
ern lines, which are already heavily forti-
fied after eight years of conflict. A drive
through the east towards Bakhmut last
week showed enormous, new entrench-
ments dug along the highways. Reserve
forces, commanders say, are arriving
every day.
Major Oleksiy Zakharchenko, head of
civilian co-operation in the easterndistrict, said Ukrainian military leaders
had been watching how the Russians
fought in the north and south, and tai-
lored preparations for a fight in the east
accordingly. “They’re trying to attack
with big columns — and locals are reach-
ing out to tell our military guys, to tell us
that this column is moving and that it’s
significant ... so we destroy it.”
He added: “There’s no logic in what
they’re doing. They’ve proven many
times that the Russian army does not do
critical thinking. They’re just sending peo-
ple and they’re being killed. Fortunately
for us, they’re not capable of logic.”
While the roads out of the east were
jammed with cars — some broken down
on the side of the road — other people
were escaping on trains, which in many
areas are still running despite the threatof attack. At the railway station in the
eastern city of Dnipro, crowds waited to
board a service to western Ukraine. Most
had come from further east, carrying
what little they could take — a plastic bag
of bread, a suitcase stuffed with clothes
for a family of four, a cat in a basket.
“My husband is serving in the army
and he said we have to leave now,” said
Yana, 35, standing with two of her chil-
dren at a platform. “There have been a lot
of rockets recently and we just have to be
prepared for everything. Almost every-
one we know left in the last two days.”
All of them were going to western
Ukraine, from where some would travel
to other European countries. Stanislav,
41, was at the station with his wife,
ex-wife, former mother-in-law and chil-
dren. He had come from their home in a
small town in the Dnipro region to see
them off.
“I’m in the territorial defence, so I’m
staying here,” he said. “But we are afraid
that there will be an attack so we are evac-
uating the women and children. There
has been so much shelling in the last few
days. And we saw what happened in
Bucha.”
Most of their friends and neighbours
had already left, he said. “We stayed until
the last moment but we knew we had to
go now,” he said. “We’ll probably be iso-
lated and taken by the Russians.”
At the railway station in Pokrovsk, 90
miles east of Dnipro, Vika, 22, stood
watching a crowd try to push on to a
packed train. She was six months preg-
nant, and her husband was in the mili-
tary. She had held out here through five
weeks of war. But now, with the shelling
growing closer and the battle for Donbas
looming, she was going to Poland. “I’m
very afraid, and very worried for my
baby,” she said.
Yet others have chosen to stay. In
Bakhmut, as dozens were piling on to
evacuation buses in the deserted streets,
a young couple walked along in the
spring sunshine with their baby in a
pram. Valentina, 31, stood near by. “I
don’t believe in evacuating,” she said. “It
looks more like a wave of panic. I don’t
know where I’d go or what I’d do.”
As the sun began to set, the evacuation
bus from Bakhmut arrived in Dnipro after
an eight-hour drive through endless
queues and checkpoints. Martynenko
and her mother climbed out, and headed
for a quiet hotel. The next day they would
get on the road again, heading even fur-
ther west, towards the Carpathians.
Sergiy Mytrofansky, 40, one of the two
volunteer bus drivers, said that despite
everything, some people were still not
taking the Russian threat seriously.
Mytrofansky, a father of three from Irpin,
evacuated his family when the war
began, then came back to help rescue
others when the Kyiv suburb became the
front line of the battle for the capital, and
the site of Russian atrocities.
He and his colleague Sergiy Voronov,
who both volunteer with a group called
ChildrenWeWillMakeIt, originally cre-
ated to help children with rare diseases
find treatment, have been criss-crossing
the countryside since then, bringing peo-
ple to safety.
“We’re both coming from a place
where they already had Russian occupa-
tion, and we’ve already seen what is
going to happen here, when it does,” he
said.
“These people will hide, look for base-
ments, then they’ll try to evacuate and
they won’t be able to. You just want to
shake them and say, ‘Get out of here.’”
@LouiseElisabet
Additional reporting: Viktoria SybirTerrified of atrocities, refugees are fleeing a Russian offensive to seize Donbas
They’ll
flatten
villages.
They
don’t
careI’m not
scared
of dying,
I don’t
want to
be rapedPacked into trains and cars, people
are desperate to leave. Yevgeniya
Martynenko, left, had panic attacksLOUISE
CALLAGHANPhotographs by John BeckWAR IN UKRAINE
JOHN BECKExodus
from the east