Inside Donetsk while residents flee attacks against the Ukrainian region, Putin wants to control

The Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, has long been in the views of Moscow. Vladimir Putin wanted to freeze the war in exchange for his total control.

Russia already controls 70% Donetsk and almost all neighboring luhansk and makes slow but regular advances.

I head to the city of Dobropillia de Donetsk on the front line with two humanitarian volunteers, just 8 km (five miles) of the positions of Russia. They are on a mission to bring patients, the elderly and children to a safer land.

At the beginning, it happens like a watchmaking work. We speed up in the city in a armored car, equipped with drone equipment on the roof, reaching 130 km / h (80 mph). The road is covered with high green nets which obscure the visibility from above – protecting it from Russian drones.

This is their second morning trip, and the streets are mainly empty. The few remaining residents leave their homes only to quickly collect supplies. Russian attacks come daily.

The city already seems to be abandoned and has been without water for a week. Each building that we pass has been damaged, some reduced to the ruins.

During the previous five days, Laarz, a 31 -year -old German, and Varia, a 19 -year -old Ukrainian, who works for the universal charitable Ukraine, made dozens of trips to evacuate people.

A week earlier, small groups of Russian troops crossed the city’s defenses, arousing fears that the front line of the so -called “fortress belt” in Ukraine – some of the most defended parts of the Ukrainian front – can collapse.

Additional troops have been precipitated in the region and the Ukrainian authorities say that the situation has been stabilized. But most of Dobropillia residents think it’s time to leave.

While the evacuation team arrives, Vitalii Kalinichenko, 56, waits at the door of their building, with a plastic bag full of hand in hand.

“My windows were all broken, look, they all stole on the second floor. I am the only one to stay,” he said.

He wears a gray t-shirt and black shorts, and his right leg is bandaged. Mr. Kalinichenko points a crater beyond certain roses where a Shahed drone crashed a few nights earlier, breaking his windows and cutting his leg. The engine of another drone lies in a neighbor’s garden.

While we are about to leave, Laarz identifies a drone above and we recover again under the trees. Its portable drone detector shows several Russian drones in the region.

An older woman in a summer dress and a straw hat passes with a shopping cart. He warns her against the drone and she accelerates her rhythm. An explosion strikes nearby, its sound resonating nearby buildings.

But before you can leave, there is yet another family to save, just around the corner.

Laarz goes on foot to find them, turning off the drone jamming equipment from the vehicle to slow down to save the battery. “If you hear a drone, these are the two switches of the intermediate console, turn it on,” he said, disappearing at the corner of the street. The jammer is only effective against certain Russian drones.

A series of explosions hit the neighborhood. A woman, to get water with her dog, short covered.

Laarz returns with more evacuated, and with drones still in the air above, leaves even faster from the city it has arrived.

Inside the evacuation convoy, I sit next to Anton, 31 years old. His mother stayed behind. She cried when she leaves and he hopes that she will leave too early.

In the war, the front lines change, the cities are lost and won and lost, but with Russia advancing and the fate of the region which clings to the negotiations, it is perhaps the last time that Anton and the other evacués have seen their houses.

Anton says he never left the city before. During the roar of the engine, I ask him if Ukraine should give up the Donbas – the greater region rich in resources made up of Donetsk and Luhansk.

“We have to sit at the negotiating table and after all resolving this conflict peacefully. Share, without victims,” ​​he said.

But Varia, 19, feels differently. “We can never trust Putin or Russia, whatever they say, and we have an experience. If we give them the donbas, that will stop nothing but will only give Russia for more space for another attack,” she told me.

The situation in Donbas is more and more perilous for Ukraine while Russia progresses slowly but regularly. President Volodymyr Zelensky made fun of the suggestions that he could be lost by the end of this year, predicting that it would take four more years for Russia to fully occupy what remains.

But it is unlikely that Ukraine will resume an important territory here without new weapons or additional support from the West.

This part of Donetsk is essential to the defensive of Ukraine. If they are lost or given with Russia, the neighboring regions of Kharkiv and Zaporizhia – and beyond – would be more at risk.

The cost of conservation is measured in the life of Ukrainian soldiers and the parts of the body.

Later, I lead to a nearby country hospital under the cover of darkness. The activity of the drone never stops, and the injured war, and the dead, can only be recovered safely at night.

The Russian victims are much higher, perhaps three times more or more, but it has a greater capacity to absorb the losses than Ukraine.

The wounded begin to arrive, the cases becoming more serious as the night extends in the morning. Victims are fighting in Pokrovsk, a city that Russia has been trying to grasp for a year and is now partially surrounded. It is a key city of Donetsk’s defense, and the fighting was brutal.

The first man arrives conscious, a ball wound in his chest from a shooting. Next comes another man in his forties covered with shell wounds. It took two days and three attempts to save it, such was the intensity of the fighting. Then, a man whose right leg was almost completely blown away by a drone strike on the road from Pokrovsk to Myrnohrad.

The surgeon and SNR LT Dima, 42, move from one patient to another. It is a medical stabilization unit, therefore his work is to repair the injured as quickly as possible and send them to a main hospital for subsequent treatment. “It’s difficult because I know I can do more, but I don’t have time,” he said.

After all this carnage, I also ask him if Donbas should be returned to bring peace.

“We have to stop (war), but we don’t want to stop it like that,” he said. “We want to come back to our territory, our people and we have to punish Russia for what they have done.”

He is exhausted, the victims are heavier, dozens a day, since the Incursion of Russia, and injuries have been the worst that doctors have seen since the start of the war, mainly because of drones.

“We just want to go home to live in peace without this nightmare, this blood, this death,” he said.

On the journey this afternoon, between the fields of corn and the sunflowers, miles of newly not flowed barbed wire in the sun. They run alongside the raised banks of red earth, deep trenches and lines neat with pyramids of concrete of anti -tether teeth. All designed to slow down any sudden Russian progression.

Russia is believed to have more than 100,000 soldiers, waiting to exploit another opportunity such as previous violations around Dobropillia.

These new fortifications sculpted in the Ukrainian land graph of a deterioration situation here in Donetsk. What remains of the region can still be given by diplomacy, but until then Ukraine, bloody and exhausted, remains determined to fight for each centimeter.