Kremlin-backed separatists rain death down on Debaltseve

Debaltseve is a city under siege, the bulge in Ukraine’s shaky front line against separatist militants equipped, trained and often sent from Russia.

Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have fortified the settlement in a bid to stop the Kremlin-backed forces that surround the town seizing the strategic rail intersection, which connects Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts to the rest of Ukraine.

But that doesn’t stop Russian-made artillery from pounding Debaltseve daily with deadly effect. The town’s roads are littered with enormous craters where notoriously inaccurate Grad rockets have torn into the earth and sprayed shrapnel at the town’s inhabitants.

Debaltseve’s shops are shuttered after their owners packed up and left. The roofs of some have been blown off by shells and the windows of others shattered by shrapnel. A school stands abandoned, glass scattered in the ice surrounding it.

An Army spokesperson told the Kyiv Post two adults and a five year-old boy were killed when the city was shelled over the weekend, with another 10 civilians wounded.  He refused to comment on the number of soldiers that had been killed or wounded.

Russian-backed forces use Grad rockets to rain death down on the town in an utterly random fashion, then Ukrainian forces return fire in the direction they came from.

“It’s normal for the terrorists to fire off four or five rockets at any time,” says a 20 year-old militiaman from Lviv, after taking cover from a midday salvo, who did not want to be identified for security reasons.

He starts to show his automatic pistol off like a young boy with a Christmas present before being confronted by an angry local.

“They are not terrorists, they are normal people,” says the man. “You are killing people in Horlivka just like we are being killed.”

The war here is being conducted at arm’s length and it is the civilians caught in the crossfire that suffer most. Both sides fire unguided weapons from distances up to 40 kilometers apart, leaving an enormous margin of error.

At another school nearby, residents whose homes have been destroyed are living in the basement. Lacking the resources or imagination to leave their hometown, they have become deeply traumatized by the daily roulette of life and death.

That trauma is increasingly apparent in the tension between locals and the western Ukrainian soldiers who are defending the town.

“Militaries say that all this is the fault of Putin and that people of Donbas made their choice on referendum,” one woman complained.

“They just say that we should move from here. But we don’t have a place with relatives where we can move. And we don’t want to move. We are patriots and this is our homeland.”

Kyiv Post editor Maxim Tucker can be reached at tucker@kyivpost.com or on twitter @MaxRTucker

Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support from www.mymedia.org.ua, financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action. Content is independent of the financial donor.