(Popasna) From the basement of a partly destroyed building, three soldiers emerge, their features drawn: in Popasna, the Ukrainian army resists despite incessant Russian bombardments on this city in eastern Ukraine.
Posted at 3:09 p.m.
The artillery strikes slam. Their echo resounds on the bars of buildings of a western district of this locality, of approximately 20,000 inhabitants before the war.
The entrance to the city offers a landscape of desolation.
There’s nothing left of a gas station except its smashed and burned roof. Tree branches litter the streets. Buildings are gutted. None are intact. Glass, pieces of wood, doors and scrap metal dot the floor, like after a tornado.
Only the sound of the powerful explosions interrupts that of the rain which falls without stopping.
A few rare people still live there, buried in cellars.
Like the three soldiers met Thursday by AFP.
“The guys have just come back from the fight, they are resting,” explains “Semenovytch”, in his fifties, who calls himself by a pseudonym.
One wears fatigues pants and a blue twisted sweater. He has an emaciated face, dark circles under his eyes.
Another, over sixty, field jacket open, long gray beard, looks exhausted. He disappears into the black background of the cellar to go back to bed.
Camouflaged fatigues and parka well worn, a blue cap on his head, squeezed by a small headlamp in the harsh light, Semenovych “says he does not know” the latest news, “there is no internet here, nor telephone network”.
“We will resist”
“The Russians try to advance two or three times a day. It’s good that it’s raining today, the bombardment is less intense. Sometimes it’s 24/7, sometimes it’s a bit quieter at night,” he says.
The Russians are attacking “infrastructure, buildings and civilians. It’s not a war, it’s a genocide. I don’t know what else to call it,” he says.
The soldier assures him: “We keep our positions and we hope for victory. We will resist”.
In the back room of a completely destroyed convenience store, in the same building where the soldiers are resting, four bullet-proof vests, two helmets and an RPG7 rocket are placed on the ground.
On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that ‘artillery units’ struck a Ukrainian unit in Popasna, giving a toll of ‘more than 120 unit personnel’ killed and ‘eleven armored vehicles’ destroyed. . Figures impossible to verify.
Popasna is a strategic lock located less than 4 km from the Donbass limit, part of which has been controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists.
If this city falls, it will be a breach opened by the Russians to go back 50 km to the northwest, and reach the twin cities of Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, the de facto capital of the East controlled by Kyiv.
About fifty kilometers north of these two cities, the Russians have already taken Izium and are at the gates of Severodonetsk. As in Popasna, these localities were the target of intense Russian bombardments.
“I saw it with my own eyes at Izioum. The Russians are using scorched earth tactics. I don’t know why they hit this city so hard,” a Ukrainian soldier, who calls himself “Benya,” told AFP when asked about the tactics of the Russian forces.
Wounded in Izium, he was treated for a concussion in a hospital near Kramatorsk.
“When we approached, they (the Russians) didn’t go into battle with us, they hid behind the artillery,” he said.
In Popasna, the bombardments, Olena Charpaï is “really afraid”.
She will be 60 at the end of the month and would have liked to quietly enjoy her nursing retirement.
“Never Silent”
But, since March 6, she lives with four other people in a cellar of 15 m2in the same building where the Ukrainian soldiers are resting.
“I need silence to go out, but it’s never quiet, because it always bombs somewhere,” she says, stroking Souris, her 14-year-old gray cat.
She no longer goes to her apartment on the ground floor, all the windows of which have been shattered.
In the basement, in the tidy little room, with four sofa beds and lit with lamps connected to vehicle batteries, there is still something to eat.
“Sometimes the soldiers bring us bread,” she says. For water, they collect that of the rain.
In his building, an old woman died of a stroke and a man was killed by shrapnel. They were buried in the back garden of the building.
“There is a family with children in the building opposite. They did not want to be evacuated, ”says the sixty-year-old.
Olena Charpaï would have liked to be evacuated.
On Thursday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced a resumption of evacuations with humanitarian corridors, notably in Popasna.
But “the buses don’t come anymore”, regrets Olena.
Outside, a salvo of Russian artillery smashes the city again.