As you bump down a specific potholed road east of Dnipro, you have a sense that you are heading into a highly problematic area. Although these are village roads, and all the communities really villages (there are barely any towns of more than a few thousand people), there is constant traffic on the roads, day and night, sometimes it seems 24 hours a day. This traffic is supplying two front lines in imminent proximity: that in Pokrovsk, a city on the essential Donbas war road artery that the Russians are attacking; and that in northeastern Zaporizhzhia oblast, where there are infantry struggles over agricultural land and small settlements. This is the forgotten front line, not much in the news but where vast numbers of troops are dug into various kinds of positions and they are fighting.
Conditions in this region are extremely bad for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who are effectively living in abandoned buildings and driving to work on the front line in their own or civilian cars. No journalists make it down here, the real dirty war (literally) in which any wrong turn on a multitude of village roads can lead you straight to the Russians and there is a constant threat of drone activity because the Russian drone operators, knowing the Ukrainian Armed Forces are using civilian cars effectively to drive to work, and to carry supplies, will now use their drones on any vehicle at all that they see on the roads. Therefore driving anywhere is dangerous although incredibly there remains public transport right up to the front line. You can actually take a bus to Pokrovsk, on the front line, from Dnipro, and there are people living and trying to work in all the villages and communities in the region.
This entire region has become militarised. There are military checkpoints, of course, but as is usual in Donbas they are fairly relaxed. The only living the local community can eek out is selling things to soldiers, so there are the usual military stores and supermarkets right up to the front line where the destruction is relentless. The parties have reached some sort of uneasy and stubborn stalemate over Pokrovsk, whereby the road through the city, an essential artery, is open for some periods of the day but it remains dangerous because the parties are just firing ordnance at one-another from a distance and there is the omnipresent threat of FPV drones. Village life goes on, in many ways, but of course many people have abandoned these villages if they had the means to and now the villages have become armed camps for a large number of military personnel.
The rules for media reporting under martial law in Ukraine forbid me from telling you the locations of any troop movements or the identity of specific troops, so I am going to err on the side of caution and not tell you which battalion I was embedded with there or where it was based but I can talk in general terms about the conditions in the region which are extremely tough for the Ukrainian Armed Forces and they need more support and help. That is the point of this article.
The main issue as far as I could tell is that they do not have enough bullets or ammunition. The Russians, using their “meat grinder” tactics of sending countless people forward most of whom will be mowed down but some of whom will get through and make minor advances each week or so, have the upper hand in the area. That’s because the Ukrainians don’t have enough shells to fire at the Russians as they advance using their meat grinder method. Also drone operator positions need to be destroyed, and this requires artillery; so do opposing artillery positions. So the Ukrainians are outgunned. I was told that when they put in an urgent order to Kyiv for the relevant military supplies it takes six months or even never arrives at all, or the wrong thing arrives.
The next issue is food. The soldiers can buy food in the shops but this is not credible on a daily basis as you may in active operations and you cannot just pop to the shops 20 kilometres away. Front line supplies are limited to poor quality food such as beans and rice. So the soldiers are looking for good quality food, because when you are on the front line eating may be the only pleasure you have (as well as smoking). Donor agencies are constantly promising food supplies but the warehouses that exist to receive these supplies are empty. I was told that there was a list of 20 NGO’s who had promised to send food supplies to southwest Donetsk in the last six months and who had never sent a thing. The prevailing concern is that the food just disappears in a network of corruption and theft on the way from Lviv or Kyiv or wherever it may be produced, and the soldiers never see it. So something is going very wrong with the way that the NGO community operates in supplying donations, because the front line soldiers in southwest Donetsk region aren’t seeing any of it.
The same is true of medical supplies. Most front line soldiers don’t even have IFAKs, never mind the complex medical equipment necessary in stabilisation points and field hospitals to keep people alive pending the drive down the long bumpy road to Dnipro or another city with hospital facilities. Whenever you can find an ambulance - which may be days. The military medical facility I saw, although I cannot identify its location or the personnel in it, was manifestly totally inadequate for the task because it had no equipment, medicines or elementary materials required to stabilise a wounded patient. The numbers of patients reaching the stabilisation point each day was told to me but I have decided that due to martial law restrictions I will not report it. However I will say that it is very significant and the stabilisation points are grossly lacking in basic medical facilities. I know that there are people collecting for donations for medical facilities in Lviv and in Kyiv and I have made a substantial donation myself of medical supplies. The problem is that the vast majority of the supplies being donated in western Ukraine aren’t getting through to southwest Donetsk. It seems that to prevent things from being stolen or sold in the process you have to personally go there yourself with the goods, and if that is what it takes then I anticipate returning to the southwest Donetsk region in due time.
What I don’t know yet is whether these distribution problems, in which essential items just aren’t getting through, is specific to southwest Donetsk or apply across the front line. I suspect the latter but that the issue is particularly acute in southwest Donetsk because there is no journalism or publicity about the region and nobody particularly wants to go there or know about. That’s why I’m writing these words: to wake people up to the realities of the problems for the heroic soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fighting on the fronts in this region.
It is an unusual and perhaps unique area of the front line, in which villages are separated by small roads and you never quite know who has advanced anywhere. The maps are barely adequate and the roads are extremely bad, and the omnipresent danger of drones makes any travel unpleasantly dangerous. Conditions are very primitive for the soldiers serving in the area who try to keep a low profile amidst the remaining civilians in the area but this is really not so easy as the soldiers are the economy in the region now. Every other house may have been blown up and you have to find a place to sleep perhaps in a house that has been hit by a missile. In some villages the buildings have been partially restored after being hit but in others they have not. The roads are unimaginable and unless you are prepared to damage your suspensions irreparably you cannot travel at any reasonable speed along them. So the soldiers need four-wheel drive vehicles too. Again vehicles are being donated but they are not getting through. Somewhere between Lviv (the usual entry point for donations) and this obscure and relatively unknown area of the front line they are being lost, and therefore soldiers are driving around often in old and exhausted cars totally unsuitable for the current state of the roads. This makes driving even short distances uncomfortable and desperately slow, although thankfully Ukrainian car mechanics are an exceedingly creative species who seem to get any banger, no matter how damaged, back on the road in some shape and form.
It is an area in which if you break down someone will immediately stop to help you. It is an area where people are suffering together and will help one-another. The soldiers have a camaraderie between them and welcomed me and my colleague with open arms, gifts, kindness and openness. They happily talked to us about all the problems they face and they asked me to relay them to you the reader. That is why I am writing these words.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces in southwestern Donbas need help and assistance. They need logistical help for aid that is intended for the military but is never reaching them for whatever reason. That includes military supplies, medical supplies and decent food, because right now their warehouses are empty. I don’t know why nothing ever arrives down these dusty, bumpy roads; but it doesn’t. I have been asked to help supply renewed attention to the southwest Donetsk region, where some of the most important fighting of the war is taking place and the soldiers there need our support.