You're reading: ​Volunteers in Artemivsk work underground, feel as if on enemy territory

ARTEMIVSK, Donetsk Oblast – A basement behind a weighty iron door serves as a meeting point for a group of volunteers. They meet in evening time, and look like members of a secret conspiracy group, but, in fact, they are Ukrainian volunteers in government-controlled Artemivsk.

This
city of 77,000 people was liberated in June, and dozens of Ukrainian
soldiers walk the streets here at any given time, but there is no
more than 20 percent of the population that support the central
government here, volunteers say. For them, it feels like a hostile
territory.

We
are here on our own,” said Sergiy Nikolayenko, head of a
non-government organization Bakhmut Ukrainian. The name of the group
is the old, pre-Soviet name of the city, and everything in here seems
as if it was taken out of history books.

There
is a portrait of iconic Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko hanging on
the wall next to a national blue-and-yellow flag. There are books in
Ukrainian, traditional knitted dolls, a Christmas star and other
attributes that pro-Ukrainian organizations used for centuries. This
Ukrainian-themed potpourri looks odd in this frontline town deep in
Russian-speaking territory.

The
work these volunteers do is as urgent as it gets, and just as removed
from history. The support Ukrainian soldiers and displaced people,
and even provide counter-intelligence information about Russia-backed
separatists on occasion.

When
thousands of Ukrainian troops broke out of the encirclement in
Debaltseve last week, Lena Sorokina had a very busy night helping the
wounded. She sat by the hospital bed of a young soldier with a long
black fringe, who had his leg broken and a lung pierced by a bullet.
The soldier was exhausted and suffered greatly. Sorokina quietly
talked to him and spoon-fed him.

We
talk to them and they start feeling better after they speak out,”
she said.

Apart
from helping with the soldiers, the volunteers also have to monitor
the medical staff to make sure they pay enough attention to the
Ukrainian fighters. Since the beginning of war, some local medics
with pro-Russian sentiments, especially the nurses, neglected
Ukrainian soldiers, according to the volunteers.

Ukraine
has two allies, military volunteers and civilian volunteers,” says
Vladyslav, a wounded soldier from the 128the brigade, as he speaks
from his bed in a ward of the same hospital. He did not provide his
last name because he is not authorized to speak to the press.

In
a different part of the city, Ruslan Petrenko was driving his car
with several dozen plastic buckets filled with food. He was
delivering the evening meal to the Donbas volunteer battalion, who
are now stationed in a dormitory in Artemivsk.

Petrenko
travels a lot in his car under the bullets to visit and supply
Ukrainian soldiers at the frontlines. He is the man who knows what’s
going on in the area, in real time.

“There
has been a lot said about Debaltseve, but trust me, it’s no better in
Novotoshkivske (in Luhansk Oblast), which is being shelled all the
time,” he says.

Petrenko
supplies soldiers with a lot of necessities, many of which are made
by the volunteers from his group. On a recent night the Kyiv Post
reporter visited the group in their basement, Olga, an activists of
Bakhmut Ukrainian, said she knits socks for soldiers, while her colleague
who sat right next to her, said she sews underwear for the soldiers
and bakes cakes for them. Most of them don’t want to provide their
last names because of fear of reprisals.

Anna
is an activist responsible for helping thousands of people evacuated
from Debaltseve. She is in charge of food, warm clothes and residence
in Artemivsk. She says one of the major problems is lack of a place
for evacuees to wash themselves. The only public bath in the city had
long been turned into a car dealership.

Another
volunteer, called Viktor, showed off a set of maps, which he
personally drew for the soldiers’ needs in Debaltseve. Other
volunteers make military masking nets, collect scrap-metal to turn
into wood-burning ovens the soldiers’ barracks, and iron bars to give
better protection to armored vehicles.

Many
people are helping us secretly because they are still afraid to be
persecuted by separatists,” Nikolayenko, the group’s leader,
said.

Threats
to Ukrainian activists are common in Artemivsk. One female member of
Bakhmut Ukrainian had her name and photo posted in a social network
account of separatists, along with a threat to her life and her
family.

Nikolayenko
said that separatists have a massive net of their informants on
liberated territories because the Ukrainian authorities are too soft
on those, who cooperated with pro-Russian forces and regular Russian
army.

Bakhmut
Ukrainian was created on April 14, just before the city was taken
over by separatists. For a while it existed underground, and its
members saw many groups of local men recruited to fight in Sloviansk,
then a separatist stronghold.

While
under separatist occupation, activists provided vital intelligence to
the Ukrainian forces about the activity of insurgents. They saw the
police and local authorities helping the separatists. They gave
dozens of the names to the Ukrainian security service and were
shocked to see that these people keep walking the streets of the
city, many still in official capacity.

The
activists say that as a result of weakness of the Ukrainian
authorities businessman Sergiy Kliuyev, a former member of the
disgraced Party of Region, whose brother is suspected of ordering the
brutal beating of students on Maidan, won the parliamentary election
in Artemivsk last fall.

The
presence of the Ukrainian state is still not felt here,”
Nikolayaenko said.

Kyiv
Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached
at
[email protected]