Soldier Town

Welcome to Kramatorsk

You’ve probably guessed that this Substack has been operating with a bit of a time delay. For the past two weeks I’ve been in Donetsk region, volunteering with a supply and evacuation team, Universal Aid Ukraine.

Kramatorsk, 20km from the front line, is soldier town. It’s functioning, but in the centre about half of the business are boarded up and closed (boarded up and open is a common business model in Kharkiv), and heading out of town almost all the businesses are abandoned. Pedestrians are scattered here and there in the town centre, and about a quarter of them are soldiers (who I don’t photograph, for obvious reasons): often standing in clumps beside vans, or at coffee kiosks, or queuing in the post office, likely to collect drones or other valuable items bought and dispatched by volunteers who have conducted online fundraisers. I’ve heard far fewer explosions here than in Kharkiv on average, only a couple of window-rattlers one night a week ago. In a way, it feels strangely safe and peaceful here, as if the boards on the windows of undamaged buildings were closed eyelids.

On the whole I try not to post photographs that dramatise Ukraine as a forsaken wasteland, but sometimes that’s just how it is. The bottom right picture is the town’s main square.

The vast space creates, to a Londoner, a soothing sense of being able to see any threats that may approach. Nobody’s going to speed by on a scooter and grab your phone when nothing is moving within a radius of 50 yards. And hey, there’s plenty of table space at the local restaurants that remain open.

But the strange peace is a temporary illusion, because the Russians are coming. You’ve probably seen in the news that they are pushing forward all along the eastern front. Of particular relevance to Kramatorsk is that they are now on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, and grinding street by street west, towards the centre. The problem with that is obvious from a topographical map of the area. The top red box is Kramatorsk, the bottom one Chasiv Yar - the highest ground in the area.

If the Russians take Chasiv Yar, then push forward just a little bit further, they will come within artillery range of Kramatorsk (about 15km). Then the city will not just be getting shaken by the occasional 1a.m. glide bomb as currently happens, but smashed all day every day. The Russians will turn Kramatorsk into dust, before steaming in. As they did with Bakhmut, just to the east under the elevation scale on the map above.

(Fortunately the West knows that this isn’t a serious problem. We can just wait for the Russians to exhaust themselves killing people in the east, and they won’t get any further. There are already North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, but North Korea’s a bit of a joke. We can just keep telling Putin he’s a naughty boy; and when China, seeing the way things are going, overtly allies with Russia, ramps up weapons supply and sends some of its two million soldiers, we can tell Xi Jinping he’s a naughty boy too…)

Coming within range of artillery, other than briefly on a specific humanitarian mission, is my cue to get out of town, as it is for many other foreign volunteers. The stakes for the locals are rather higher. Every day at around 10:15 my phone receives an automated text from the government: Dear citizens of Donetsk region! Protect yourself and your loved ones! Evacuate! followed by contact details.

Universal Aid Ukraine

UAU - pictures below from their website - was founded by two Germans and has been operating in Ukraine since not long after the war started, and in Kramatorsk since October 2022. There are two main parts to their work: evacuations from, and supplies to, settlements in the line of advance and/or under fire. The UN and big aid agencies don’t generally bother with settlements that have fewer than about 200 people. Nor do they operate close to the front line, because it’s too dangerous for paid staff. So it’s volunteers or no one.

Some shots of UAU delivering aid over the past three years

At the moment UAU head out on missions once or twice a week. They used to be busier, but paradoxically the increased chaos impedes work. Not only is it more dangerous, but local authorities are increasingly jumpy about foreign volunteers, and fewer people want to be evacuated.

How does all that make sense? The danger angle is obvious – more of that later – but also local authorities don’t want to be held responsible if people get themselves killed. Experienced volunteers seldom do, but if I was a local bureaucrat or a guard at a blockpost (‘blockpost’ is Ukrainian for ‘military checkpoint’ and is used in all languages out here) I’d be wary. For example, if you pass the last blockpost and don’t stop in the village to which you are delivering supplies, you’ll end up in Russian-held territory. And soon afterwards, in the Western press with the epithet ‘hero’ and in the foreign-volunteer WhatsApp groups as ‘idiot’.

But why do fewer people want to be evacuated as the Russians advance? Because abandoning your home is hard. It takes a while to accept the necessity, and the faster danger approaches, the less time there is to make that adjustment. For a long time, Chasiv Yar was a place where you could evacuate from if you chose – either via the government system or by calling one of the numbers on the many stickers that volunteer groups put up around towns and villages – or hang on with some hope of survival. Today it’s too late. Volunteers don’t go into Chasiv Yar because even if they’re willing to take that level of risk, the military won’t let them. That means the people in villages to the west of Chasiv Yar need evacuation… But the front was stable for so long that the locals have got used to life under occasional artillery fire with few utilities or services. Ramping up to Abandon your entire life NOW or men will come to your door and rape and kill you is sometimes just too much to take in, especially for elderly people.

Some people do resolve to evacuate, but with the Russian advance accelerating, it may well be after the place in question is simply too dangerous for volunteers to visit.

Evacuations, from the UAU archive

And, yes, the increased danger. Specifically from drones. UAU explained to me that in the past two years the situation in what in Ukrainian is called the ‘pre-front’ area has changed because of developments in drone technology. Two years ago if a recon drone spotted you, you had about fifteen minutes to get out of the way before the Russians managed to aim their artillery at you. The Russians have now managed to reduce that to five minutes.

Russian logic is that every single person in Ukraine, from military commanders to foreign volunteers to grandpas on bicycles, is on Russian territory illegally, so they’re all fair game.

Ethics

There’s one final complication that people outside the country might not think about but that looms large here. Evacuations are clear-cut: obviously it’s right to help people flee from death. However, supplying them with aid is, in a sense, the opposite: helping them stay put in the face of death. And this isn’t just a problem for their own safety, but for the military. A house occupied and used as a base by Russian soldiers is a target; a house occupied and being used as a base by Russian soldiers that has an old lady still living there too… is also a target. The Ukrainian army can’t just decide not to fight because civilians who were given a chance to leave haven’t done so, or the Russians would simply advance unimpeded behind a human shield.

There’s no easy answer. But the longer I spend in Ukraine, the more resonant Sam Vimes’ advice seems to be: “You do the job that’s in front of you.” Though this isn’t the kind of volunteer work where you just turn up and pitch in. You need in-country experience and a useful skill; ideally the ability to drive at 150kph along a dirt road in the worst-case scenario of being chased by a drone, but failing that, a level head and the ability to speak a local language will do.

Next post: a write-up of our mission taking 400 hygiene kits to Yampil, along with Dutch group Stella Pax.

We drive across a pontoon bridge on the road to an isolated village