ILOVAISK (Donetsk Region), August 18 (RIA Novosti) - For over a week, the Ukrainian Army has been trying to seize the small town of Ilovaisk, located 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Donetsk. Regular artillery attacks have turned the town into rubble, forcing the residents to hide in basements without food or water. Local residents here hope that a humanitarian aid convoy will arrive from Russia, and still cannot believe that the cargo has not yet crossed the border.
A TASK FOR A BUSYBODY
We are leaving for Ilovaisk with a humanitarian relief mission. Independence fighters will deliver bread and canned food to local residents. Some of them criticize the independence forces, claiming that without them, the Ukrainian Army would not bomb cities and cause civilians to suffer. But the truth is that the independence fighters are the first to arrive at the scene of artillery attacks and to help the wounded. They hand out food to civilians and evacuate them from the war zone.
We load bread inside a small truck covered with huge graffiti that reads “DNR. Doc. Pronyra.”
DNR stands for Donetsk People’s Republic, and Doc is the call sign of the truck’s driver, a short middle-aged captain of the republic’s state security agency. In fact, he looks very much like his own truck.
Pronyra (Busybody) is the name of the truck, which is wildly popular at every roadblock and checkpoint controlled by independence supporters, because it delivers aid to the “hottest” spots of the self-proclaimed republic, and because it can reach even the most impregnable fortress.
Today, we must break through into besieged Ilovaisk. The main road from Donetsk is covered by snipers, and stray rockets from BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launch systems and mortar rounds can land here. Ukrainian military units control the main entrance to the town from Donetsk, and they will be very happy to spot the truck with the Donetsk People’s Republic initials and its driver, Doc, wearing the orange ribbon of St. George. Kiev artillery also shells Ilovaisk every 15 minutes.
Therefore, Pronyra will have to use a detour a dirt road unbeknownst to Kiev forces, but sometimes used local defense forces.
We are approaching Ilovaisk. Grad rockets and mortar rounds are exploding along the road. It’s unclear whether the Ukrainian soldiers have spotted us, and if they are trying to hit our truck. Somehow, you don’t want to think about this.
A shell has exploded nearby, and a dense black pillar of smoke billows from the buildings. This would make a good snapshot, but we can’t stop because another shell could hit the ground at any time.
The dirt road has ended, and we are driving past damaged homes with collapsed walls and burnt-out roofs, smashed windows and demolished fences. This is what the outskirts of Ilovaisk looks like today.
NO MORE TRAINS
Black smoke is rising from the railcars. Ilovaisk used to be an important railway hub, but all rail traffic has stopped over the past few weeks. Numerous railcars standing idle at a local train depot show the scale of the hub. This train depot is also a major fire hazard, because even one burning car could result in a huge fire.
We have reached an unobtrusive-looking Soviet-era building, which is, in fact, a bomb shelter. The sturdy bomb shelter is quite comfortable, but its builders likely never suspected that it would be used during a civil war, and that Donetsk Region would be bombed on orders from the government in Kiev, the former capital of Soviet Ukraine, rather than by the United States and NATO countries.
Dirty and tired people emerge from the shelter and take the bread delivered by independence fighters. A third-grade school pupil named Tanya with tidy braids looks out of place in this line.
“Tanya, when will you go to school?” I asked the girl, who is spending her summer vacation inside a dirty basement and standing in line for humanitarian relief aid.
“I don’t know, maybe on October 1,” she replied.
One can only guess whether Ilovaisk and Tanya’s school will be around in October.
Vitaly, 44, was a miner only a short while ago, and his wife used to work at the local train depot. Both are unemployed, because the mine and the depot are closed, and so they decided to hide here. “We’ve been staying here for over a week, and we eat whatever food God gives us. Self-defense fighters deliver some food, and we also bring food from home,” Vitaly explains. Every visit to their home is like a military operation. First, they run from basement to basement, trying to avoid being hit. While at home, they pack their bags tight with food and dash for the safety of the bomb shelter. No vehicles are available, and all local stores have been closed.
MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS, GRAD ROCKETS AND MORTAR ROUNDS
Over the past three weeks, artillery attacks and air strikes have killed 62 people in Horlivka. One air strike has killed 15 people in Zugres. Between three and 10 people are killed in Donetsk daily, and three to four times more are wounded. The latter need professional medical care, but there are no doctors left in some areas.
The total number of Ilovaisk casualties can be estimated based on the daily killings.
“We have to bury our neighbors in the front lawn,” says one of the women from the basement of a Khrushchev-era residential building on Shevchenko Street.
“There are no vehicles to take the dead bodies to the cemetery, which has also been destroyed by bombs,” she complains.
Donetsk Region still reels under hot spell.
We enter the basement with bread bags in hand. The basement looks as any basement should. It is cramped, filled with junk, dusty and humid.
“We are being attacked by tons of flies and mosquitoes. Do we deserve to spend our old age in a basement after working all our lives?” the women shout.
“We spent four days without electricity, and our men then crawled inside the basement under fire and installed wires. We can now cook some food, whenever available, on an electric stove, but before that, we had to light bonfires,” they added.
Life inside the basement does not seem to be extraordinary. Most windows have already been shattered inside the residential building, and the tenants have gathered an impressive collection of fragments from Grad rockets and mortar rounds. As we look at these specimens of war that have rained down on local residents, the artillery bombardment resumes, and we rush inside the basement once again.
People inside the basement who have no network or phone connection do not know what is happening in the outside world. They want to know who is winning, who controls Ilovaisk and Donetsk, whether the humanitarian convoy has reached Luhansk at least, and, most importantly, when the attacks will stop.
We don’t know what to say. All we can do is send their addresses to the evacuation committee of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
Pronyra and Doc still hope to visit the neighboring town of Shakhtyorsk today, but there may not be enough bread for the people there after today’s trip to Ilovaisk.
People here hope to see the Russian humanitarian convoy. They hope that it will reach the town through the war zone under fire. But, most of all, they hope that someday all this will end, and that Ilovaisk will once again become the sleepy town it used to be.
