Editor’s Note: The following content documents a trip to the war zone of eastern Ukraine alongside employees of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNCHR) and the charity organization Proliska. The content is independent of the organizers.
MAYORSK, ZAITSEVE, and AVDIYIVKA, Ukraine — In the merciless cold of late December, crowds of people carrying well-worn travel sacks get out of arriving buses and slowly line up at a military checkpoint on the road ahead.
Grim and mostly silent, many holding children by hands, they put baggage on wooden benches in the dust and wait for the military to check their belongings. Trying to take refuge from the freezing wind raging in the open field all around, the passengers wrap themselves up in coats and breathe on their hands.
This is the Ukrainian side of the ill-fated Mayorsk point of entry, some 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, one of few locations where civilians can legally cross the front line of Russia’s war in the Donbas. Each and every day, up to 9,000 people exit and enter the Kremlin-occupied half of once deeply integrated region, split by war since 2014.
A barely significant outskirt of a small railway station before the war, this place has become a symbol of suffering, with long queues of civilians tortured by hours of waiting to cross the frozen red line, some dying from heart attacks and exhaustion. To make matters worse, the crowded checkpoint occasionally becomes a target for artillery shelling and fighting between the opposing armies.
Fortunately, the checks this time don’t take too long.
After having a brief look at bags stuffed mostly with newly purchased food and clothes, Ukrainian border officers let the civilians move on to passport control windows in cabins made from shipping containers.
Ahead is nearly 2 kilometers of highway running through neutral territory, heavily mined on the roadsides and occasionally closely watched by snipers. Shuttle buses take the weary passengers to a forward checkpoint run by Russian-led forces in the suburbs of the major Russian-occupied city of Horlivka down the road.
New buses are constantly arriving from the occupied zone as well — as they have ever since the front line became frozen in 2015, with not a smallest sign of change in sight.
And while fruitless negotiations have continued for years in Minsk, local civilians trapped between hammer and anvil of war, notably elderly people left on their own, are suffering from immense poverty and deprivation, expecting no hope in the future.
This is the war zone of the Donbas — where time stands still.
Frosty nights
Crossing the entry point, especially in winter, is no easy task, and not one that a person undertakes without good reason.
People cross the lines to see their relatives beyond the war front, or go shopping in supermarkets and shops in Ukrainian-controlled territory, where products are better and cheaper, or, what’s most importantly — to collect their meager pensions in Ukrainian banks.
The risky transit has produced many tragic stories.
For instance, overnight into Dec. 14, 2018, just a few days before the Kyiv Post visited Mayorsk, Russian-led forces let 44 civilians through their checkpoint just 10 minutes before the Ukrainian entry gates were closed for night.
As a result, the group, which included five disabled persons and three children, was stuck in no-man’s land on a frosty night.
Moreover, very soon the night erupted with fighting between the Ukrainian forces and the militants in the area, as Yevhen Kaplin, leader of the Proliska charity associated with the United Nations Refugee Agency, told the Kyiv Post.
Fortunately, the Ukrainian border guards admitted the civilians into a warming tent at the checkpoint, after which the charity volunteers reached out to Ukraine’s united war zone military staff.
“Eventually, at midnight, the Joint Forces commander General Serhiy Nayev gave an order to bring the Border Guards personnel back to the entry point and let the civilians into Ukrainian-controlled territory,” Kaplin told.
“It was way too dangerous to let those people stay in the tent for the frosty night, especially when sounds of fighting were being heard all around.”
Unfortunately, other incidents at the Mayorsk checkpoint have not had a happy ending.
On Jan. 11, 2019, up to three male civilians were reported to have died on the same day of heart attacks while standing in queues on the Russian-controlled side of the entry corridor.
Stove in apartment
But even beyond the entry point of Mayorsk, close to the neutral zone, there are people still living in crumbling housing blocks, battered and neglected amid the years-long stalled war.
Walking though the deserted streets of damaged houses, surprisingly, one can come across long aluminum chimneys poking out of windows, sometimes producing trails of weak smoke.
These are the last remaining civilians trying, to get their homes warm in winter by firing up makeshift stoves right inside their own apartments.
One of them is Olena Uzkova, a 25-year-old lone mum rearing her infant daughter Liza in an unheated flat just a few hundred meters from the combat line.
She is in fact alone — the child’s unemployed father barely helps Olena.
The only hope she can rely on in her situation is humanitarian aid provided by the Red Cross and the United Nations and minor childcare benefits from the Ukrainian government.
“Surviving here is very hard, especially if you don’t have a job,” Olena says.
“And very few people still living here have actually got one. Those having at least a small possibility of getting a better life leave this land forever.”
In the whole 5-story apartment she lives in, only eight people, including three children, are still there. Her kitchen window at the makeshift stove faces the long-abandoned railway line, from beyond which the wind occasionally brings the sounds of bursts of gunfire.
“What’s even worse is the absence of healthcare here,” Olena says.
“If something happens with my kid, I can’t be sure doctors will come. Even buying medicines is hard — there are no pharmacies nearby.”
She’s been living in these conditions for nearly a year and a half.
“Foolish war”
For thousands of elderly people, often abandoned by their own relatives, living in the embattled war zone is a hell they would wish on no others.
Viktor Kalinkin, a 66-year-old resident of the town of Zaitseve, divided in half between the Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces, lost everything he had in a moment.
On May 9, 2018, a sudden artillery shell hit followed by raging fire razed his house to ashes.
“I survived only by a miracle,” he recalls. “I managed to get out of the fire with only my slippers on. Everything inside, including all my documents, burned out totally.”
All that is now left of his house is a scorched foundation crowned with crumbling debris.
But fortunately, his neighbors were goodhearted enough to let him move into an abandoned house next door, where he survives the cold winter and earns his living by doing minor day-to-day jobs for his elderly fellow residents.
“This used to be a nice town, buzzing with life,” Victor says as he watches his empty street in the dying light of a winter evening.
“Lots of neighbors, lots of companionship, lots of kids rushing in and out over there. But now we the old are all alone here. There was a time when were used to having no electricity at all for more than a year.”
“It’s a nightmare to be so close to the war front every day, and I feel that I’m losing hope to see the end of it all.”
69-year-old Stefania Kutsenko, a long-time vegetable harvesting team leader, also lost her home as her house in the town of Zhovanka became inhabitable after multiple artillery hits. Her new shelter in the village of Bakhmutka near Zaitseve is still located dangerously close to the combat line.
“It’s a foolish war,” Kutsenko says in trembling voice as she rubs a tear from her eye.
“I have lived the whole life here, and I couldn’t imagine such gory hate coming to this land. How many crying mothers are missing their soldier boys at home without even knowing in what pit they lie in, killed in action?”
Meanwhile, the night comes down upon the battered village, and echoes of the first bursts of gunfire and blasts make themselves heard through Kutsenko’s living room window.
Losing hope
Even harder is the life for those who is doomed to live just next to sadly-remembered Promzona — formerly an industrial zone of the city of Avdiyivka some 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv and one of the worst killing zones of the front line.
Oleksiy Shekhovtsov, a 69-year-old former locksmith, is one of them.
He lives on Yasinovkiy Lane — the last civilian street before the scorched combat zone of mutilated garages and textile factories, which has been steadfastly defended by Ukrainian troops since 2016.
Constant fierce attacks by Russian-led forces one day resulted in the razing of Shekhovtsov’s house to the ground in May 2017.
“An artillery shell hit us,” he says. “I guess it was a fire-based projectile. The whole yard went up like a match. (Ukrainian) soldiers came running and shouting: ‘Old man, are you alive?’ They were trying to get me and my old wife out of the fire.”
As a result of the shelling, all that was left of his household was a heap of scorched timber and a summer kitchen.
An old and decaying barn 2 by 3 meters in size became the couple’s new shelter.
Shekhovtsov’s wife, being unable to stand the nightmare of constant fighting at the Promzona, eventually died of a heart attack.
“For me, all hope is gone, I’ve had enough,” he says as he lights a cigarette, sitting on a bench near his ruined house.
“Now I’m just waiting for a moment to be set free,” he adds, looking up into the gray winter sky.
His neighbor and frequent conversation buddy, Vladyslav Putalov, lives in even more horrible conditions.
Another surge of fighting at the Promzona turned his own house into rubble, forcing him to live in a basement closet, in almost total darkness, for months.
He is now almost completely deaf due to shock wave damage to his ears from the shell bursts.
Further down the street, life hangs on in one more house.
There, two elderly sisters, Klavdia and Diana Beliyakova, live all alone just a shout away from where fighting breaks out almost every night.
By pure luck, their old house remains nearly undamaged. Almost all of the shells that hit their property exploded in their kitchen garden, leaving deep craters.
The walls of their fragile shelter are covered with heaps of dry tree branches.
“They believe that those branches can protect them,” says one of the United Nations team members as he smokes in the houses’ backyard. The UN Refugee Agency came to visit the old women and deliver a new package of humanitarian aid on Dec. 18.
“That is their last straw of hope of survival.”
“What a damned nightmare.”
