Schastye, Donbas: Oleg Kurilov snapped his laptop shut as the first tell-tale vibrations hummed through his living room.
Without thinking, he dived for the basement and lodged himself under the stairs – and remained there for the next hour of bombardment.
About 20 Grad rockets slammed into the village of Muratove on Tuesday evening (Wednesday AEDT), in the first tremors of what threatens to become one of the most violent wars in Europe since 1945.
A man leaves his house after it was damaged by artillery shelling in Novoluhanske in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday. Credit:AP
Panic was spreading throughout the country after separatists requested help from Moscow to repel “aggression” from the Ukrainian army and the US warned that an all-out invasion was “imminent”, with almost “100 per cent” of the required force for a push to Kyiv gathered on the border.
“The people are scared. I’m scared,” said Kurilov, a Ukrainian military veteran who fought for two years in the long war here before returning to civilian life as the mayor of the village.
“Krymsk was never a quiet place,” he said, referring to the front line village a few kilometres down the road. “But there was always small stuff – machine guns, grenade launchers, maybe a mortar sometimes. Nothing heavy. Grads are new here.”
Grads were the terror of the 2014-15 war. Their sudden reappearance on the line of contact has been read as a grim sign of what is to come if Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashes his invasion.
Flames and smoke rise from the thermal power plant, which, according to local authorities, was damaged by shelling, near the frontline in the town of Shchastia in the Luhansk region, Ukraine on Tuesday.Credit:Emergency Ministry/AP
These unsophisticated, Soviet-era, multiple-rocket launch systems mounted on the back of trucks can loose off 40 high-explosive rockets in a couple of minutes.
They are indiscriminate, inaccurate and extremely effective. Concentrated fire from several trucks can wipe out every living thing in a grid square the size of a few football fields.
Both Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces used them in 2014 and 2015, with devastating consequences for the civilian areas they hit.
The Muratove attack was apparently untargeted – an act of casual terror, careless aim, or sheer indifference rather than the focused destruction for which the Grad is noted.
The rockets smashed up one empty dacha, shattered the windows of another house without hurting the frightened owner, and left a crater in an allotment. No one was wounded, but fear spread through the village.
“There were about 600 here before the shelling. Now, I don’t know. Two hundred have left for sure,” said Kurilov of the farming community of which he is the elected head.
Asked what he would do if a full-scale invasion began, he shrugged. “Me? I’ll stay. I’m a military reservist. I’ve nowhere to run.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree mobilising reservists. Kurilov said he was expecting his call-up.
A surge of shelling has erupted up and down the line of contact in the past three days. It lacks the intensity of preparation for an offensive, but has targeted civilian infrastructure.
In the frontline town of Shchastia – which means happiness – the echo of artillery and mortar fire reverberated through deserted streets on Wednesday.
“We haven’t seen anything like this since 2014-15,” said Andrei, a builder who has been sleeping with his family in the humid basement of a neighbouring block of flats since Sunday. “When did it start? I’m not sure now. I think this is the fourth day we are down here.”
The main targets of the firing seem to be outside the town itself, but two people were wounded when mortar rounds crashed into these flats on Tuesday afternoon.
One of the first barrages from the Russian-backed separatist so-called Luhansk People’s Republic on the opposite bank of the Siversky Donets river struck the nearby water pumping station, leaving almost the entire town without running water.
On Tuesday, an apparently targeted strike blew up transformers at the power station where most of the town’s adult population works. For now, there is still some power. Shells hit the plant again a day later.
Residents in the flats closest to the river that marks the front line braved the shelling to queue to fill plastic bottles at a hand-pumped well in the middle of a dusty courtyard.
“We go in the day because they start fighting around 6am or 7am then quieten down,” said Olga, Andrei’s wife, 37.
Since the end of the worst fighting in 2015, locals say Shchastia has been a relatively tranquil corner of the divide between Ukraine and the Luhansk People’s Republic. A few years ago, a bridge destroyed in the war was rebuilt to allow civilians to cross the river. On the Ukrainian side, a permanent checkpoint complete with shops and fast food shops appeared.
It was a picture of how the eight-year conflict might have looked if the sides had allowed it to freeze amid the years-long diplomatic deadlock over implementation of the Minsk peace agreements.
Families and communities remained divided and the threat of war was always there.
But for a while it was possible to move back and forth as the line of contact slowly evolved into an unofficial border – and the heavily armed armies dug into opposing river banks tended to control their trigger fingers.
In the meantime, the people of Donbas – whatever their political sympathies – managed to rebuild something like a normal life.
Putin has put an end to that. By recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics as independent of Ukraine, he has deliberately ripped up the Minsk agreements and set the stage for renewed war.
This time, he seems determined to provoke a conflagration more violent than the catastrophes of the 2014-15 war.
In the south, troops, helicopters, and amphibious landing craft have been amassed in Crimea.
To the east, Russia’s First Guards Tanks Army is drawn up on the border just 40 kilometres from Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s most important industrial and cultural centres – and likely to be the first target of a Russian invasion, US officials warned last night.
Then to the north, in Belarus, another force is poised to strike south towards Kyiv itself.
Ukraine has at times seemed slow to respond to the growing threat. But finally, its army seems to be getting ready for serious action.
The London Telegraph witnessed tanks and armoured vehicles being unloaded on Wednesday. Convoys of fighting vehicles and troop trucks have begun to move along the roads – but it still seems woefully inadequate to face the invasion force Putin has amassed across the border.
The people of Donbas know about war.
They know how to prepare their basements with food and water, how to tell when fire is incoming or outgoing, and whether they need to hide or can stand in the street and talk because it is flying in another direction.
What they don’t comprehend is why there has to be another one.
“How should we know about that?” said Svetlana Dunayeva, a pensioner who lives in the block of flats above Andrei’s basement shelter during a pause in the shelling. “We used to be able to travel. But that’s all decided by politicians.”
The Telegraph, London
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