You're reading: Sergeant recalls exit from Debaltseve, talks about troubles at the front line

Although Kostyantyn Zubov was not in Debaltseve when his fellow servicemen were leaving the town under enemy fire, he was just 18 kilometers away in Popasna, and saw the soldiers who had just left the trap on Feb. 18. They were headed to Artemivsk, some 46 kilometers away.

This was not a planned exit. Crushed and shredded into pieces, they had seen how their comrades died,” this is how Zubov describes the soldiers who exited Debaltseve.

He said Ukrainian artillery gave them very little support, the flanks were not covered. “They (commandment) rounded up (thousands of) people in the trap. They were shot point blank. I don’t know if it was because of uselessness of the commandment and what sort of maps they have there, and in whose interest this all was,” Zubov says.

The 35-year-old sergeant sits in the Kyiv Post office, his fists clenched, his eyes traveling from one point on the wall to the other as he speaks. He popped over just before his train back to the front lines in the east.

Zubov’s unit spent almost a month close to Debaltseve in Donetsk Oblast. The sergeant himself has already spent a year in the army. He comes from a dynasty of soldiers, and says for him it’s natural “to defend the country,” including his ill mother.

But despite his bravado, it’s clear that Zubov is bitter and disappointed with how Ukrainians are fighting this war. His top gripe is military commanders in Kyiv. He has a lot of questions to ask them.

“Why were we retreating and didn’t attack when there was a chance?” Zubov asks. “Why was there an order not to shoot when we saw the Russian humanitarian convoys full of equipment?”

He says that despite President Petro Poroshenko’s claim that he had given the order for the army to exit Debaltseve, the order was actually not given from above. It was a decision taken by commanders in the field on the night of Feb. 17.

“I can report now that this morning the Ukrainian Armed Forces together with the National Guard completed the operation on the planned and organized withdrawal of some units from Debaltseve. They took all the arms with them,” Poroshenko said on Feb. 18.

Zubov’s recollection is different, though: They lied. It was a defection as the soldiers have left everything – ammunition, their belongings, equipment.”

There is also a major communication problem in the army, he says. “There was a large group of (Russian) troops there in Debaltseve,” Zubov said. “And there was no proper interaction among our units, because of Russian electronic countermeasures. The defense wasn’t planned either. They cut us off,” he says, adding that poor planning of the operation resulted in loss of many human lives of his comrades.

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On Feb. 20, Yury Biryukov, head of the Phoenix’ Wings volunteer group and a presidential adviser, said at least 179 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Debaltseve during the last month. Zubov admits the real figure could be much higher.

Ukrainian officials lie about losses,” Zubov says. “The losses are major, there are many people missing, but the figures on TV are a lie.”

The army is also very poorly equipped, the sergeant complains. “Supplies are at zero level. The uniforms are useless, poorly made, the die goes bad very quickly, it tears up and it’s cold. It’s has a semblance of a foreign uniform, but the quality is poor,” Zubov says.

He says that the food rations are reasonably good, but boring. “The dry rations aren’t bad, but if you eat it all the time, you can’t look at it anymore. It’s rice, buckwheat, crackers, coffee, tea with sugar, jam, honey and pate. It’s tasty, but not if you eat it all the time.”

Despite the hardship of the war, the sergeant is determined to fight till the end.

I don’t want this nation to perish,” says Zubov, who was born in Russia and moved to Ukraine with his parents. “But now best of us are dying.”

Zubov was close to death a number of times at the front line. In June, for example, he was flying in a plane just ahead of the IL-76 with members of of the 25th Dnipropetrovsk Airborne Brigade that had been hit by the Kremlin-backed fighters, killing 49. The aircraft was downed by two two Igla man-powered, air-defense systems as it approached the Luhansk Airport.

We were flying in the first aircraft, we were lucky then,” he said. “Their (separatists’) air-defense system missed the target. And after that we collected the bodies of our comrades within a two-kilometer radius.”

He has stories of civilian life from the war zone that are also quite terrifying. In one case, Zubov’s unit was stationed in a village close to the Russian border in Donetsk Oblast. During a patrol he saw a boy who fell into an ice-hole. “When I tried to rescue him he asked me whether we came to his place to kill them,” Zubov recalls. “His mother told him so. After such a situation, you understand how horrible all this is.”

Despite the new peace agreement that was signed in the Belarussian capital Minsk on Feb. 12, Zubov says there’s little hope for actual peace. He is certain the separatists won’t stop in Debaltseve in their attempts to seize more ground. Their target is the strategic port of Mariupol and its 500,000 inhabitants as it would open a way to Crimea, Zubov says.

Despite the war, Zubov already knows what he’d like to do after it’s over. “I don’t have a family,” he says with a sad smile. “Maybe it’s better in case something happens to me, but I’d like to leave someone after me.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]