It started out like any other typical day in Donbas. I was woken at 6am in an uncomfortable bed in a concrete bunker in Sloviansk. I said “Good Morning!” to my room mate, who yelled "Not really!” at me. It turned out I had been snoring heavily all night and he couldn’t get to sleep. Still that was better than in the other room down the hall, where one of my colleagues had been forced to sleep on a series of cushions he had torn off the wall of the room because it spared him sharing a double bed. We were sleeping in a so-called hotel made of reinforced concrete and our first appointment was at 8am in a coffee shop in a town down a heavily militarised road straight towards the front line. This is how a regular day out in Kramatorsk might typically begin.
There was no breakfast, no drinking water, no coffee and nothing else. We did however manage to have showers but there had been all sorts of international messages sent overnight about one of our team members and should he be in Ukraine at all. After crisis managing this issue, we set out for our first meeting before dawn had broken and in the freezing November weather. It was all a bit ghastly but at least the relentless booming sounds of the air defences, typical in Sloviansk, had not been heard overnight. We all felt a bit peculiar but we were restored with a coffee after a fairly uneventful drive past a variety of military checkpoints none of whom had the slightest interest in us. This is a good thing, because extended delays at military checkpoints is something to be avoided in free Donetsk, on the front line of the war in eastern Ukraine.
By 9.30am we had driven to Kramatorsk, right on the front line of the conflict, with a view to being shown round a shelter for people who had been evacuated from their homes or who had just fled amidst the terror and the shelling. There was a constant stream of people and a series of beds, in a municipal building that for reasons of operational security I will not describe. We were waiting to meet our contact outside this flimsy building when I casually observed to one of my colleagues that this is a fairly quiet day in Kramatorsk. About one second later we were struck by a huge booming sound the likes of which I have never heard before; an enormous high explosive warhead, coming from a Russian Krasnopol artillery system, had struck a site not far from us. We all shook at the sound, and we were partially deafened for a moment. None of us hit the deck, but we involuntarily ducked - as though that was going to make any difference. Then we couldn't help but laugh, as this enormous crack of sound had taken place just moments after I said it was a quiet day. It was anything but; there were six high explosive warheads striking the city within moments of one-another. This is just another regular day out in Kramatorsk, on the front line of the war in Ukraine.
Seeing the facilities for evacuees, we were humbled by the hard work of the individuals who labour there on a thankless task of taking in and providing shelter and food for the dispossessed and those suffering so much on the front line of war. The manager of the facility gave us a tour and spent some time with us, talking through the challenges facing humanitarian work so close to the front lines with the Russian invaders. Amazingly, the civilian population of Kramatorsk that remains continues on with work of this kind despite the atrocious conditions, in which there is the constant thumping of shells that sets of car alarms, shatters windows and causes shrapnel to blow in all directions. A good 50% of the buildings in Kramatorsk show the marks of war, and the rest of the city feels dilapidated. The city is truly on the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine but somehow carries on, with its large market being a place to buy and sell products and maintain a basic economy. There are also supermarkets and a handful of other shops. Everything just carries on, despite the city being within the sites of the Russians whose goal is to overwhelm and surround the city and thereby complete their occupation of the region, known as the Donbas. It’s all just another regular day out in Kramatorsk.
Then we met some colleagues for an early lunch, amidst the sounds of artillery fire and air defence. We chose a restaurant not on any maps, and enjoyed simple and hearty Ukrainian fare in an unmarked homely atmosphere: food cooked by elderly ladies and served up to us and to soldiers alike, taking a break from their front line duties. There was no alcohol for lunch; there is no alcohol permitted for sale in free Donetsk, in order to preserve decorum amongst the soldiers based there. So we drank tea and coca cola, and by 1pm we were exhausted. Just another day in Kramatorsk.
We were told that our hotel accommodation we had reserved for the night was inadvisable, because the Russians routinely target the hotels to kill foreigners and soldiers. So we didn’t stay there. Instead a colleague let us stay in their spacious apartment, although I was nervous about local people seeing all these foreigners pile into a Soviet era apartment block in central Kramatorsk. Then at some point, at about 2.30pm, I fell asleep. I hadn’t slept well the previous evening and I was feeling ill from food poisoning. I woke to my colleagues inviting me out for dinner at 4.30pm: most restaurants in Kramatorsk stop serving at 6.30pm. The official curfew is at 9pm but it's best to be indoors by 7pm because it's at night that the risk of shelling or drones really begins.
The foreigners and NGO workers have almost all of them fled Kramatorsk now, in the summer of 2024 that has been a particularly hot fighting season in the Donbas. Only a few hardy souls remain, and they are doing the work of heroes, as are the members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that defend Kramatorsk and the surrounding settlements and cities with such vigour. I didn’t go out for dinner as I was sick and therefore not hungry. My colleagues sloped back from dinner by 6.30pm, and then we all chatted about the war in lieu of anything else to do. We heard the bangs and booms of air defences and who knows what outside, and the relentless wail of air raid sirens throughout the night, but it didn’t matter. We were going to sleep well, and get up at 6am the next day for another round of this hell and horror.
All in all, it was just another regular day in Kramatorsk.