PISKY, Ukraine -- About 10 men in camouflage sitting inside a shabby Soviet-era bus fell silent and listened intently as one of them started to pray. “God, please let us arrive at our destination safely,” the fighter-priest said.
These people were combatants of the Dnipro 1 volunteer
battalion who were part of a column heading toward Pisky, a village of some 500
houses located one kilometer from the Donetsk airport.
Since July, when Ukrainian forces took Pisky, this hamlet has
become a crucial redoubt of supply and reinforcement for the Ukrainian troops defending
the Donetsk airport, named after Sergei Prokofiev, the famed Russian composer
and pianist.
Dozens of soldiers have been killed in fighting there since.
Totally destroyed by months of fighting, the airport has assumed
more of a symbolic than strategic significance, embodying the Ukrainian army’s
spirit of resistance.
After passing several checkpoints, the column of fighters
came to a bridge, an important fortification at the entrance to Pisky. Soldiers
surveying the territory from the bridge have had to sleep in holes they dug
using old winter jackets and coats as blankets.
On the next day, Yevhen, one of the newcomers, who arrived with
the column, showed the Kyiv Post areas near the bridge that the Kremlin-backed separatists
were shelling with Grad multiple rocket launchers. Aged 32, he used to be a
lawyer in Donetsk before joining the Dnipro 1 battalion with the nom de guerre
of Jackson.
He refused to give his last name fearing for the safety of
his relatives, who were still in Donetsk. He believed the enemy composed of no
more than 20 percent of local, while the rest of them were either Russian
mercenaries or regular Russian troops.
“I’m fighting here for my family,” he said. “I don’t want my
daughter to live in DNR (the self-proclaimed separatist Donetsk People’s
Republic).”
A mixture of army soldiers and fighters from volunteer battalions defend Pisky, including the 95th airborne brigade, 93rd mechanized brigade, and the Dnipro 1 battalion, which has official police force status with the Interior Ministry. They are joined by volunteer battalions called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Right Sector, both of which don’t have official government recognition.
All of them reside in abandoned houses that were vacated by residents
escaping from the war in summer. Part of their duties includes taking care of
abandoned dogs and cats. In one of the houses, Dnipro 1 soldiers take turns
cuddling a big ginger cat, which they call either Earl or Host.
Most of the houses are damaged from shelling and the roads
are pitted by armored vehicles and trenches. Earth embankments with piles of
litter serve as barricades. The barrels of armored vehicles and machine guns
are seen pointing in the direction of Donetsk. The sound of shelling and smell
of ash is felt everywhere.
A tank belonging to the 93th brigade is slowly turning around in
the middle of the street and makes several shots in the direction of the
airport. The soldiers of Dnipro 1, who were digging in trenches, stopped for a
moment but then continued. They said enemy snipers were firing at this street
just 30 minutes ago.
It’s advisable to cross this street only by running because
snipers target it. Still, people live here, probably the last civilian
residents of Pisky.
“Initially I glazed the broken windows, but the shells were
hitting them again, so I gave up and now just cover them with cardboards,” said
Valery, a 65-year-old pensioner, who can’t leave the village because he has to
look after his elderly and sick mother.
Valery refused to give his last name because at the end of
his street there is already an area that is controlled by separatists. Valery
said when his house is shelled he and his mother just crawl under the bed or
table. They survive in Pisky thanks to food from his garden and assistance from
soldiers.
Further down the street the three fighters are manning and
oiling their guns and bringing masking nets to the observation point, located
atop of a big, heavily damaged house. They are men from the OUN battalion. They
claim the separatists’ sniper is nearby but they can’t pinpoint him.
Meanwhile, Right Sector fighters have made a big house that
belonged to the local police chief their base. The majority of them have
nothing to do with the eponymous political party; they just volunteered to
fight for their country.
“This is a strange war, where we don’t see the enemy. We just
shoot at them and they shoot at us,” said Vasyl Chobotar from Ternopil.
While the newcomers in Pisky looked serious and concentrated the
soldiers leaving the village for a short break were relaxed and cheerful
despite their visible tiredness.
Oleksiy Vovk, 40, of the Dnipro 1 battalion, said Pisky was the
third tough place in almost eight months of his service. Before that Vovk had
to fight against Russian troops in nearby Novoazovsk, a town located south of
Donetsk. He also got into a deadly ambush while driving at the head of a Ukrainian column that the Russian army shot at on the way
from Ilovaisk. He was captured by Russian soldiers who later gave him over to
DNR rebels and then released in a prisoner exchange.
Vovk, who worked as a driver in Pershotravensk, a mining town in
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, doesn’t consider himself to be a hero. But he was
planning to return to Pisky soon, believing the war had to be stopped in
Donbas, otherwise it could spread to the entire country.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
