NOVOLUHANSKE, Ukraine — For Larysa Kotova, a 54-year-old housekeeper living in the Donbas frontline town of Novoluhaske, some 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, a quiet winter afternoon on Dec. 18 ended up with terrifying shock and nearly certain death.
At about 5 p.m. local time, when she was cooking supper at home, the sky over the town suddenly poured down with the rain of fire and destruction.
“All hell broke loose in a split second,” Kotova recalls. “A massive blast somewhere very close to us turned the whole house upside down, our doors and windows were swept off. I nearly went faint from the shockwave; my husband Oleksander was in shock so much that could not eke out a sound as he was opening his mouth to scream.”
The family’s garage and livestock storage flashed up in a moment. Many other buildings all over the town were also seen blazing in the winter twilight; the first arriving fast response fireteams could not tackle with all the emergencies, no matter how hard they tried.
Local civilians, primarily males from intact houses, immediately volunteered to save their neighbors and help rescuers. Very soon, they started finding indicative fragments of Grad rockets near the numerous impact holes – a deadly, indiscriminate and merciless weapon of Russia’s war in Donbas still widely used by both sides.
At least dozen Grad rockets had hit the residential areas on that day, according to emergency services.
For the Kotovs, shocked and scared to death, it took all night to save at least their dwelling house from the raging fire. As it turned out, one of the rockets had exploded between their garage and a house next door, causing devastating destruction for both households.
“Half of our properties turned into blackened debris,” Larysa Kotova says as she looks at a scorched, twisted metal framing that used to be the family’s old Volkswagen van. “It’s a miracle that both of us survived by some unimaginable luck.”
The water, electricity, gas, and heating supplies were crippled amid the attack; Novoluhanske, with its nearly 3,000 residents, plunged in the dark amid frosty weather. In general, as many as 77 buildings were badly damaged or ruined, including local school and kindergarten, according to local emergency services.
Eight civilians were wounded, with one child being among them.
Later on the day, Ukrainian military deployed in the area confirmed that Novoluhanske was shelled with Grads by the Russian-backed militant forces located near the occupied city of Horlivka some 15 kilometers southwest of the frontline town.
Contested town
Novoluhanske, a typical Donbas countryside town populated mainly by self-employed farmers and livestock breeders, lays within the Ukrainian-controlled half of the war-torn region, at the so-called Svitlodarsk Bulge, which is north of the ill-fated city of Debaltseve.
From the town’s northern outskirts, there opens a picturesque landscape of high-raising chimneys of the Vuhlehirsk Power Plant, one of the most strategically important objects of the Donbas frontline, and a huge cooling pond near it.
Just one year ago, Novoluhanske was still occupied by Russian-backed forces affiliated with the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic”. However, on Dec. 23, 2016, it was suddenly liberated after a blitzkrieg combat sortie by Ukraine’s 46th Special Forces Battalion “Donbas-Ukraine”.
Nevertheless, hardships of war were not over for the war-weary townspeople; the very action zone of Russia’s war in Donbas still unfolds just less than a kilometer to the west.
Many of the local residents told the Kyiv Post on Dec. 20 that the shelling upon the town’s residential areas had seriously intensified after Russian-backed militants were knocked off the town farther east. Concerning the recent attack, many other claimed that prior to Dec. 18 shelling, there had been extremely heavy fighting between the opposing fronts outside of town.
Meanwhile, all of the witnesses asked by the Kyiv Post asserted that the Grad rockets were fired from somewhere south or southwest of Novoluhanske, from the direction where the Russian-backed troops were deployed.
“I am absolutely sure about this,” a local civilian Valeriy Nikulin told the Kyiv Post. ” Those Grads were fired from Horlivka, there’s nothing to say.”
One of the impacted rockets swept off a corner of his house and devastated his yard’s premises, breaking the gas and water pipelines. He demonstrated numerous fragments of Grad rockets found around his damaged house.
“You’d better ask Zakharchenko why are they doing this to us,” he said, meaning a puppet leader of Russian-led forces in Donetsk Oblast Oleksander Zakharchenko.
Emergency works
As of Dec. 19 morning, most of the town was still cut off water, electricity, and heating.
Considersing the difficult situation, Ukraine’s prime minister Volodymyr Groisman announced on his Facebook page that the autorities were up to evacuate civilians.
However, it never started. Instead, emergency services, police and public utilities workers initiated all-hands jobs to save Novoluhanske. Virtually in each street, day and night, the workers, sporadically assisted by civilian volunteers from the hardline nationalistic organization National Corps, were repairing gas and water supplies, and helped fixing damaged houses for the elderly people.
Early on Dec. 19, an emergency warming center was deployed near the township council, where up to 50 people at a time could get warmed, eat hot meals and drink tea in two tents. As soon as the Red Cross trucks came to the town, long lines for humanitarian aid foodpacks and building materials emerged in the streets of Novoluhanke starting from 5 o’clock in the morning.
However, though the attack was destructive, Novoluhanske came back to life again very quickly, the Ukraine’s Emergency Sevice Colonel Vyacheslav Husinsky told the Kyiv Post less than two days after the shelling.
“I don’t think there will be an evacuation here,” he said. “By Dec. 20 noon, water, heating and electricity supplies were restored for most of the town, except for the most affected streets and houses. And for example, no one of the local residents came to our tents to get warmed or have a meal so far.”
“The situation in the town is not easy, but it is under control. There are no humanitarian disaster, though there are still lots of work to do.”
Still, many of residential houses and apartment blocks of Novoluhanske stay unrepaired, with some of them badly ruined and made inhabitable after direct hits. So the townmen need to sign up in long lines to get free essential building materials, such as glass, roof slate or ciment, from local authorities.
Many of the locals have nowhere else to go, and cannot wait for aid for too long. The shattered windows are simply nailed up with membrabe sheets or sythetic bagging – just in order to preserve at least some heat inside the chilling houses.
In the evening on Dec. 21, Ukraine’s emergency service announced that all public utilities supplies have been completely restored for the whole Novoluhanske.
