Live Ukrainian war, last minute
Putin's 'rainbow bomb' "Everything would stop working: from mobile phones to TVs"
With an emaciated appearance, pale face and wrapped in dirty clothes, about twenty inhabitants of the Ukrainian city of
Avdiivka
emerge from their basements to go to collect packages of food distributed in the basement of a building.
No one pays attention to the incessant detonations that resound in this town near
Donetsk
(southeast) under constant fire from Russian forces.
Loaded with boxes from the World Food Program, they slowly return to their shelters underground, where they live without electricity, gas, or water, but sheltered from the bombing.
Moscow
troops
have been trying for months to take this frontline town, just 13 kilometers from the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, one of the "capitals" of Russian separatists.
Around
30,000 inhabitants lived in Avdiivka
before the war;
by mid-December
barely 2,000 remained.
Vitali Barabash,
the city's military administrator, describes to AFP the non-stop Russian attacks.
"Starting at 7:15 a.m., they started bombarding
Grad with rockets,"
he says, going on to list the morning's attacks.
Numerous buildings are destroyed, without glass in the windows, some blackened.
In a basement near the distribution point,
Svitlana, 74,
shares a cold room with five other women and two men, all elderly.
Before the war, they lived on the upper floors.
"Too old" to run away
The beds are covered by thick bedspreads and sleeping bags.
On one wall, a battery-powered flashlight casts a dim, whitish light.
"It's very hard... [The volunteers] ask us to leave, evacuate, but where can we go?
We are too old,
what can we expect from a new place... (...) this is our basement," he explained to AFP Svitlana.
In a continuous room, he builds a small fire that
Mycola
feeds with branches that he takes from a small woodpile.
Two detonations resound outside.
"Who knows what it was. I'd say artillery or maybe mortars," says the man, already used to it.
For Svitlana, "hope is all we have. Most of us are sick, like everyone else here," she laments.
When the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014,
Avdiivka was taken over by separatists,
before being recaptured by Kiev forces.
Due to its proximity to the front line, it has been one of the hot spots since the Russian offensive began on February 24.
In recent months, the city has become, along with
Bakhmut
(east), one of the two
most complicated battlefields
on the front.
"All Civilians in Danger"
In northern Avdiivka, Russians and separatist forces from the Donetsk region cut off one of the two main access roads to the city in June.
They are also positioned in the east and south, where in recent days they have forced Ukrainian troops back.
"Our troops have withdrawn (from the town) of
Vodyan
(...) because it was absolutely impossible to maintain the previous positions," explains Vitali Barabash.
The Avdiivka military official assures that Moscow has just deployed regular army troops in the city, "better trained" than the separatists.
At his bunkered police station, Avdiivka police officer
Rasim Rustam
believes the situation is "really difficult."
"We suffer repeated shelling. All civilians are in danger," he says.
Resignation reigns among those who wait to get a package of food, as in the case
of 62-year-old Lyudmyla.
When asked how he plans to spend the winter in Avdiivka, he answers:
"Spring will come. With or without us, but it will come."
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