NOVOAIDAR, Ukraine – As sub-zero temperatures begin to take grip, eight soldiers huddle in a big military tent amid the vast fields of Luhansk Oblast, seeded with mines instead of crops.
They are National Guard troops sent to defend positions against Russian forces and their separatist proxies in a war that has already taken more than 8,100 lives, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
They don’t know what kind of winter awaits them in Novoaidar region, which had a pre-war population of 25,000 people. Last winter proved disastrous for the Ukrainian army on the battlefield, with Ukrainian troops giving up the former Donetsk Airport in January and suffering more catastrophic losses in Debaltseve in February.
Under a second Minsk agreement in February, both sides were obliged to stop shelling, to remove the high-caliber weapons from the war front by 2016 and allow for effective international monitoring by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Instead, as the new year approaches, the Ukrainian military is now sending howitzers back to the direction of Russian-controlled Donetsk in response to constant shelling from Russian-backed separatists.
Russia, meanwhile, shows no sign of returning control of 400 kilometers of border back to Ukraine by year’s end, as politicians have extended deadlines for enactment of all provisions of the Minsk accords into next year.
So soldiers are dug in.
No roads lead to their position – only a muddy track across a field, and it can be reached only by military vehicles, which supply the soldiers with the water, food and diesel fuel for their electric generator. But the supplies are scarce, so the soldiers are mostly relying on each other for everyday needs.
“Kolya and Slavik, they are like sons to me,” said Oleksandr Perepelytsia, 43, pointing at two soldiers in their 20s. His two own sons have been recently called to the army and will start their service most probably in January. Perypelytsia’s service is ending in February so most probably he will miss their leave.
“Or maybe I’ll see my sons here, which will be very nice,” he said, sitting on his bed, which has a Ukrainian flag hanging above with words of supports written on it by schoolchildren. A white-and-grey cat snoozes on his bed.
There are three military wood-burning heaters, a big table with children’s drawing pinned to the tenting above it, two benches, two dozen water bottles, and two sacks with potatoes in the tent.
Rubber boots dry by the soldiers’ beds and thick woolen socks are hanging to dry on strings. The chef, Slavik, is carefully rolling up the pancakes with jam for the dinner.
But a machine gun in the corner, the bulletproof vests and the military reports crackling from the radio indicate war is close at hand too.
Before Russia started waging war on Ukraine last year, Perepelytsia drove a combine harvester in a village in Mykolayiv Oblast in southern Ukraine. The other soldiers sharing the tent come from the same region. Most went to the war zone as volunteers.
“I did it because I love Ukraine,” said Mykola Tabakar, a modest 23-year-old, who was a conscripted soldier when the war started. He then volunteered to serve in the war zone, and was lucky to survive an attack at his checkpoint near Mariupol in January 2014 when a pro-Russian saboteur blew up a car, killing two Ukrainian soldiers.
Tabakar said it felt quieter here than in Mariupol, but still far from safe. The soldiers hear shelling almost every day from Triohizbenka, a village some 10 kilometers away that the enemy attacks despite there supposedly being a ceasefire.
After attacks on Ukrainian troops recently escalated, President Petro Poroshenko in mid-November allowed Ukrainian soldiers to shoot back if they are in direct danger.
The area is also full of enemy patrols. About two weeks ago the separatists attacked a checkpoint nearby, killing six, said captain Viktor Neyilko, 52, the commander of this group. “Yesterday I found someone’s footprints and the marks of car tires in a forest not far from us,” he added.
In daytime, the soldiers in turn patrol the area, while at night they keep watch around their tent, rotating every four hours. “We cannot go any further at night as we don’t have any night vision devices,” Neyilko said.
Apart from those on duty, the soldiers go to bed when it gets dark to save fuel for their generator and get up after a sunrise. Even their pets have tasks. The cat, called Margo, has proved to be a good mouser, and the dog Lucie is a great help to those on watch duty.
Mykhailo Lanin, 31, is cutting wooden chips for a backgammon set and remembering his fallen comrades.
Last winter he served near the town of Vuhlehirsk, and his unit was rotated just weeks before Ukrainian troops became trapped in the Debaltseve pocket there. “I had a friend from a territorial defense unit from Kirovohrad also serving there. There were 130 guys there, but only 32 of them came back,” he said, adding that some of them were killed, others were captured or had deserted.
Lanin said the supplies from the National Guard are now better than last winter, when the soldiers relied almost totally on volunteers. “But the government still promises more than it does for us,” he said.
The soldiers the warm winter jackets and boots at their military base in Mykolayiv. Recently they were also supplied with winter boots produced in Poland. But almost all of them have a second set of camouflage gear that they bought by themselves.
Lanin puts on his winter overalls, a jacket, takes his Kalashnikov and a torch and goes into the freezing wind to start night guard duty. Before the war, he produced furniture at a factory in Pervomaisk of Mykolayiv Oblast.
Neyilko, the commander, shows pictures of his son and grandson, who live in the outskirts of Moscow.
“My son has lived there for 11 years, he has a house and a job. It’s not easy to leave it and come back,” he said. Neyilko volunteered for the National Guard after his neighbors started lambasting because his son lives safely abroad when they had to send their children to war. “I went to fight instead of him,” he said.
The soldiers know they will celebrate the winter holidays in this tent, but hope to see their relatives by spring, as their period of service finishes in February. They are already building plans for civilian life but know there will be some things they will never get used to again.
Draft dodging is one of them.
“I know how many young men in my village are hiding now from military service,” Perepelytsia said. “When I come back I’ll find them and beat them up.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
