TROITSKE, Ukraine — Acres of scorched ground, strewn with black and brown ashes, stretch into no-man’s land beyond the line of trenches near Troitske, a front-line town of perhaps as few as 100 residents, some 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
The once-cultivated fields have turned into burnt-out battlefields, ravaged by wildfires. But these fires aren’t always the result of a random spark setting alight steppe grass dried under a hot summer sun.
Many are set deliberately by Russian-led forces.
In the last two months alone, the soldiers of the 53rd Mechanized Brigade, who man the section of front outside the Luhansk Oblast town of Troitske, have lost at least two of their forward positions because of deliberate arson by the enemy.
And Ukraine’s military say setting fires in the no-man’s land between the opposing lines is an increasingly common combat tactic used by Russian-led forces.
Fields of ashes
“It usually starts when the wind blows west towards us,” says one of the brigade’s soldiers, Vitaliy Makarenko. “The separatists suddenly start shooting mortar flares or tracer bullets into the field. Sometimes it takes just a few tracer rounds to ignite a really big fire dangerously close to us.”
The military say that by setting the fields alight, Russian-led forces are trying to cripple Ukraine’s forward defensive obstacles and mined areas in front of defensive lines, as well as uncovering new fighting positions and command posts.
Once the dry grass blazes up in flames, the fire expands rapidly, driven towards Ukrainian positions by the wind.
The Ukrainian soldiers are in no position to tackle the blazes — as the choking smoke from the fires spreads over the trenches, Russian-led forces open fire, raking the lines with small-arms fire from automatic weapons, while sniper teams hunt for targets amid the reek.
If a fire gets too close to their defensive positions, soldiers sometimes need to drag ammunition boxes back from the forward trenches.
“If they detonate, there will be no one left to go on fighting in the whole squad,” Makarenko says.
One of the dugouts in which he had been quartered at the front now lies in blackened ashes — it went up in flames during an arson assault in late July.
There is always a risk that wildfires could spread to settlements near the lines as well — settlements like Troiske.
The town has escaped the wildfire attacks so far, but the threat is real. Moreover, there are increasingly frequent reports of deliberate arson against Ukrainian-held settlements all along the front line.
On Aug. 22, Ukraine’s military press center said up to 19 houses had burned down in an arson attack on the government-controlled frontline town of Zhovanka, near the Russian-occupied city of Horlivka, while more than 50 abandoned buildings had been ravaged by fire in the government-controlled village of Pisky, near the destroyed Donetsk airport.
The last straw
Those of the war-weary inhabitants of Troitske that still remain in the town say that if fire takes their homes, it would be the last straw — Troitske has already suffered enough from Russia’s war on Ukraine.
More than two-and-a-half years ago, in early 2015, the town was the scene of extremely fierce fighting amid the battle for the nearby strategic town of Debaltseve. Many of the town’s houses were damaged and abandoned.
Troitske, like many other settlements in the area, has never recovered from the shock of Russia’s war. It has become a typical, slowly dying town beside the front-line wastelands of the Donbas, with neglected streets, overgrown with grass, dusty, crumbling sidewalks and decaying, abandoned homes.
The rusty metal gates to the yards of desolate, ruined houses are densely riddled with shrapnel holes from Grad rockets, which were fired on the town during the battle by Russian-led forces in an attempt to force the Ukrainian army out. Most of Troitske’s pre-war population of 1,400 residents fled long ago, and barely 100 of them remain now.
For those that stayed, mainly elderly people with nowhere else to go, life is tough. The remote town is deep in the war zone, and the civilian population relies on the army for many services.
“I’d say that in this town we have the best of relationships with the locals,” says Chief Communications Officer Oleksandr Nazarov. “The civilians often ask our battalion commander for lots of different things. For instance, we sometimes help harvest potatoes from their gardens, or fix their fences, and the local grannies give us some fresh milk for that. Or if someone gets drunk and starts brawling, the soldiers help to calm the guy down.”
“Besides, our battalion doctor is always treating the local civilians, never turning anyone away. Here in Troitske you hardly ever see the police or local authorities, so many people have no one else to turn to for help but us.”
The night before the Kyiv Post visited Troitske on July 29, a local woman who was pregnant suddenly went into labor at 3 a. m., and practically the whole battalion was involved in finding a free car and taking the mother-to-be to the nearest maternity clinic in the city of Bakhmut, about 30 kilometers away.
“We were just one step away from taking her to hospital in an infantry fighting vehicle — seriously,” the soldiers laughed.
War monument
While the last of Troitske’s civilians eke out a meagre living behind the defensive lines, the army maintains its positions in a stalemated war, with no end in sight.
Since the battle of Debaltseve, the frontline in the area has not changed. Ukraine’s military paid a lot of blood to keep control of this territory.
Right behind the forward trenches, just east of the town, the rusting hulk of a destroyed Ukrainian T‑64 tank stands like a war memorial to those killed in action.
The T‑64 was one of two Ukrainian tanks destroyed on Feb. 1, 2015, when a Russian-led armored group launched an all-out offensive on Troitske, striking Ukraine’s 128th Mountain Brigade, which was defending the town. The fighting was so fierce that Ukrainian soldiers were even involved in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy in their own trenches.
In the heat of the battle, a guided missile hit the tank. It went straight through the vehicle and blew up its ammunition magazine, tearing the tank apart from the inside.
The tank’s young commander Oleksiy Ostashevskiy was thrown through the turret hatch by the blast, his body landing some 30 meters away. His two crewmates, Gunner Kostyantyn Tkachuk and Driver-Mechanic Vasyl Denysiuk were burned alive inside the machine. Their remains were only identified 45 days later, by DNA tests.
The remains of the tank have stood where it was destroyed ever since, with a memorial stone and a Ukrainian flag nearby, a grim reminder of the blood that was shed to hold the line of trenches outside Troitske.
Ukrainian soldier keeps watch over enemy lines at a combat post near the Luhansk Oblast town of Troitske on July 29. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Today, major fighting is rare here — the opposing armies have dug themselves deep into the ground and are content to hold their lines. However, as twilight descends on the war zone, there are occasional whistling sounds — bullets zipping high over the Ukrainian trenches.
“The militants rotate their forward units every two weeks,” says Master Sergeant Vitaliy Chernyavskiy as he scans no-man’s land through the sights of an automatic grenade launcher.
“Every new unit at the position usually calibrate their gun sights by shooting at us a bit. It’s not a big deal.”
It’s more serious when the Russian-led troops roll out their artillery and mortars, banned at the front under the Minsk agreements, but still widely used by them. The Ukrainian trenches are frequently shelled by 152-millimeter self-propelled guns firing from the outskirts of the Russian-occupied city of Kadiyivka, previously known as Stakhanov, some 15 kilometers to the east.
Ukraine’s soldiers have nothing to strike back with — all of their heavy and long-range weapons have been pulled back from the front line as required under the Minsk II peace agreements.
And to fend off closer-range attacks, the soldiers of the 53rd Mechanized Brigade have had to improvise.
They have invented a weapon they have dubbed the “Vybachun,” or “the Excuser.” It consists of an 82-millimeter mortar shell manually adapted so that it can be fired from an RPG‑7 grenade launcher in the manner of a simple rocket. The weapon is powerful enough to force back enemy commando squads that creep toward the Ukrainian trenches from time to time, without violating the Minsk restrictions on heavy arms.
“The militants are fine with burning our trenches down, together with the civilian settlements that we defend,” the master sergeant says. “So why should we stay silent?”
