On Google Maps, it just doesn’t exist. About 10 kilometers of road literally wiped off the map.
And yet there we were – monitoring officers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission – at the end of March this year with a grey overcast sky and patches of snow a reminder of a winter just passed; and there it was, the M04 motorway, stretching into the distance across Yasynuvata.
Other than us, the road was empty, just tank tracks visible in the tarmac the only indicator that here – sandwiched between Yasynuvata and Avdiivka and with the northern suburbs of Donetsk city to our back – was the epicenter of the violence, suffering and intransigence that has come to define Donbas.
It was here in this area that the sides had moved their positions forward, in some places with less than 50 meters separating them. It was here that the OSCE SMM has seen heavy weapons in violation of the Minsk agreements.
And inevitably – given this deadly cocktail of non-compliance – it was here that some of the worst violence was witnessed, in particular in late January/early February 2017 when the OSCE SMM recorded almost 10,000 explosions in this area in just 24 hours.
Even beyond the headlines, here in this area hundreds of cease-fire violations are ordinarily recorded on a daily basis. Here in this area that accounts for just 19 kilometers of the almost 500 kilometers of contact line about a third of the total number of ceasefire violations are registered by the SMM (119,729 out of 401,366 in 2017). SMM ground patrols and four static cameras in the area, day and night continue to record the crashing sounds of mortars and artillery rounds shattering the peace; and the crashing sound of broken promises as heavy machine guns are let loose.
Whether in the southeastern suburbs of Avdiivka or close to Mineralne on the northern edge of Donetsk, they hear and see artillery and mortars impact, shattering everything before them; shattering flesh and bones, homes, dreams and agreements meant to cease the madness; agreements – like a mirror image of the road we were on – that exist mostly only on paper.
It was also here – specifically at the filtration station, which we had just visited, that the full wider impact of all this violence has come into sharp focus.
On very real access roads to the facility – mapped or otherwise – workers from the facility had in the previous few weeks been attacked on numerous occasions. Three weeks after our visit to the area, another attack would result in the injury of five of them, one critically, and the temporary closure of a plant supplying drinking water to over 300,000 people on both sides of the contact line.
Since then, the sides have provided explicit security guarantees – essentially promises that they wouldn’t fire – and OSCE SMM monitors from the Donetsk Monitoring Team have been mounting daily mirror patrols in the wider DFS area. But still the brave women and men operating the plant, and the OSCE SMM civilian monitoring officers, have continued to be exposed to small-arms fire and shrapnel from exploding mortar and artillery rounds. Getting to work and back home sometimes involves running a gauntlet from men hidden in bunkers and dugouts all across the area. With every bullet or mortar round fired, faith in such promises is weakened; another failure, in a long list stretching back almost four years, to match words with deeds.
Eastern Ukraine has for the past four years been a place apart; a place of contradictions, where reality for some people mixes easily with fiction; where word and action are like the twains that never meet; where promises litter the landscape as much as the mines and UXO that we were promised would be removed; a place where the protection of the civilian population – everybody’s ostensible raison d’etre – is a duty of care honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
This contradiction is everywhere along the contact line, with armed men killing men, women and children ostensibly to save and protect those same men, women and children.
All along and on both sides of the line, there has been a searing shared experience of suffering; and an utter failure, equally shared, to protect by those who claim they are the protectors. So far this year, almost 80 civilians have been killed or injured, a number that only touches on the wider calamity that is experienced every day by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people; people who only want to get on with their lives but whose lives instead have been shattered or turned upside down.
Children in particular in a thousand cumulative ways have been the most targeted.
While artillery gunners may seek to dislodge enemy positions, and men in suits ordering them to do so may wish to dislodge political opponents and political positions, it is the children of eastern Ukraine who have been dislodged from everything that childhood should entail. For many of them, not old enough to know anything but conflict, their short lives have been surrounded by death.
Since the beginning of 2016, nine children have been killed; killed by shelling or explosive remnants of war; killed by squabbling adults who instead of protecting the most vulnerable, have littered their playgrounds with mines and unexploded ordnance; indiscriminate weapons just waiting for curious young minds to wonder what the shiny metallic object in the sand is.
Indiscriminate weapons of death – hidden, unmarked or unfenced – even though the sides have promised to supply the OSCE SMM with maps for the purposes of fencing or marking them off to lessen the danger to children. Like the stretch of road in Yasynuvata – real but unmapped, like a denial of fact.
In addition to the nine children killed, another 71 have been injured since the beginning of 2016, many with injuries that will never heal. In a recent incident, near Krasnohorivka, three children, one of whom had his fingers blown off, were injured. The psychological scars in the absence of medical expertise will never be known, and even with such expertise, I wonder, as the father of three children, can anyone ever fathom the depths of pain children undergoing such trauma must feel.
These 80 children are, however, just a fraction of the total number of child victims of this conflict. Trauma, fear, insecurity and uncertainty reach out to thousands of other children; children whose classroom windows are lined with sandbags; children in Avdiivka who sleep in basements when violence laps precariously close to their homes; children in Zaitseve who face armed men and mines every day as they visit their grandparents; children denied the basic necessities of life – like water; children whose plight is the direct result of a failure on the part of adults whose responsibility it is to protect them.
For every effect – whether a child amputee or a shell-shattered home without water or gas – there is a cause.
That cause-effect relationship is evident everywhere in eastern Ukraine. It’s heard from people on both sides of the contact line – in Yasynuvata, in Avdiivka, in the northern suburbs of Donetsk city and surrounding villages, from the 300,000 people threatened with the cut-off of water because men in uniform or those ordering them decided to shoot and injure the workers maintaining the plant supplying the water. It’s heard in the once quiet neighborhoods of Staromykhailivka where on just one night recently 13 homes in an 800-meter radius were damaged and four residents were injured because of a failure to comply with the weapons withdrawal and ceasefire provisions of the Minsk agreements. It’s heard in Myrne where a man recently had his hand blown off because mine action – promised by the sides – has not taken place. It’s heard at Stanytsia Luhanska Bridge, as old women are forced to cross over a steep ramp, carrying heavy bags, as others – mostly men – refuse to open new entry-exit checkpoints. At Shchastia, an intact serviceable bridge exists, but both sides have yet to remove the rows of anti-tank mines laid across it. In Zolote, some basic infrastructure is required, yet it remains closed. Meanwhile, thousands of people cross Stanytsia Luhanska every day, forced through a grotesque grueling obstacle course with many collapsing, some even dying in the process.
In immediate terms it is the mortars and artillery shells raining down that cause much of the suffering; it is the mines in the ground and the ever-present security measures that play havoc with people’s daily lives.
It is the noise of men, however, that is the sound that mostly explains why this plight continues: the sound of bickering among mostly men in suits – grandstanding instead of standing up for those they have a duty of care towards – arguing, shouting, insisting at the point of a gun on continuing down the road to the dead-end that everyone else can see. Intransigence, non-compliance and a military logic that have left real people all across eastern Ukraine – and indeed sometimes and in some ways, wider afield – carrying the can.
In the Minsk agreements, these men agreed on a roadmap, one that they have consistently failed to make real on the ground. As well as cutting real people off from basic services and even basic human rights – in particular, the right to life – the failure to make real the Minsk agreements has also seemingly cut off those responsible for its implementation from reality. Their world is devoid of real people or real places; a map in their heads, with all imaginary roads leading back to the same violent place.
In what sometimes feels like a parallel world – living in real towns and traveling on real roads – there are other people – real people – many women, mapping out ways forward, maintaining contact across the contact line, and keeping lines of communication open when others are throwing up roadblocks. In the OSCE SMM, we see them every day: fearless women – in the midst of fear and violence – leading by example: teaching life-skills when others trade in death.
On the M04, on the H20 that crosses it and other roads in the Yasynuvata-Avdiivka area – on the map or otherwise – there was nothing imaginary about what we saw in March – burnt-out vehicles and empty boarded-up houses, many pockmarked by bullets and bombs, standing silent testament to reality; reminders that fact cannot be covered by fiction; that promises are only real when translated from paper into reality; that words need to be matched with deeds; that a roadmap like Minsk needs compliance; that children are not some politicians’ pawns but are somebody’s son or daughter; just like yours and mine. Real people in real places, even if not on a map.
