Documenting bombings, investigating disappearances, evacuating civilians: in Chassiv Yar, a town very close to the front line in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian police officers are working tirelessly.
Apart from sandbags which protect the entrance, nothing distinguishes the police station installed on the ground floor from one of the many Soviet-style buildings which dot the center of the town.
Inside, on the desk in a windowless room, stacks of official forms filled out by hand sit next to computers.
“This morning, five military wives have already called, their husbands having disappeared,” Major Dmytro Kouzmenko, senior inspector, told Agence France-Presse.
In Chassiv Yar, the strikes are almost constant – the last one occurred without causing any casualties, according to him. And for each one, “our team of investigators writes and documents everything,” he adds.
This 39-year-old man with the build of a rugby player believes that his tasks have not changed that much since the Russian invasion, other than that “the workload is much greater” and of course “more linked to the war”.
The conflict also forced them to move, as he and his colleagues had to be based in the neighboring town of Bakhmout, now associated with the longest and bloodiest battle of the invasion.
They had to leave it at the beginning of March, when the situation became too dangerous, to retreat to Chassiv Yar.
” Risking his life “
In and around Chassiv Yar, located on a height, Ukrainian artillery fire never stops. The city is regularly the target of Russian strikes.
“The hardest part of our job is risking your life. Last year, I was injured near the Bakhmut police station. I received three pieces of shrapnel,” said Major Kouzmenko.
In Tchassiv Iar, devastated, only 600 people still live, all adults, compared to 12,000 before the war.
The major said he was “glad that people showed common sense and got their children out” of the city.
Evacuating miners from bombed localities is the result of “careful and difficult work, complex measures which fortunately proved effective here, but this is not the case everywhere”, he laments.
Those who stay are mainly elderly people who “have nowhere to go” and who know that starting their lives again elsewhere will be difficult, explains Lieutenant-Colonel Kemran Azermanov, deputy police chief of the Bakhmut district. Staying in Chassiv Yar nevertheless represents enormous sacrifices. “There is no electricity, no telephone network, no water. In winter, it will be even more difficult,” he adds.
But some believe that residents also stay because of their affinities with the Russians. Under condition of anonymity, a police officer recounts how, in Bakhmout, certain parents awaited the arrival of the Russians and hid their children in cellars so that they would not be evacuated by the Ukrainian police.
Major Kouzmenko assures him that the city is “not divided” and that the police are ready to help all residents.
Sale of alcohol prohibited
Law enforcement investigates disappearances of civilians or soldiers, and responds to residents who have left and are worried about their homes or their loved ones who have remained.
They also fight against the sale of alcohol, banned in the Donetsk region. “People are trying to bring it in here and sell it for a lot more […]. We ensure that alcohol does not reach the soldiers,” explains Dmitri Kouzmenko.
But the “main job” of the agents “consists of documenting war crimes, mainly bombings,” notes Kemran Azermanov.
Among the dozen police officers who take turns every 24 hours in Tchassiv Iar, Lieutenant Vassil, 29, is a criminologist.
During each bombing of the city, “we are always the first to record everything at the crime scene,” he explains.
“The hardest thing is to see how our cities, where we were born, where we lived and worked, are turning into ruins, that people are left homeless, that many are dead,” he said in a tone of voice. severe.
“How and when will life return to normal? It’s not at all clear. But we try not to think about it, we do what we have to do,” says the young man.