Katerynivka, Ukraine: In trenches dusted with snow and tinged with soot, men search for enough mobile phone signal to hear the latest from the distant capitals that will decide their fate.
Moscow, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna. Sometimes Kyiv. But only sometimes.
These Ukrainians are far from the Russian ships headed to a naval exercise off the coast of Ireland, far from the American-built fighter jets streaming to the Baltics and far from the US aircraft carrier steadily sailing the Mediterranean.
Civilian participants in a Kyiv Territorial Defence unit train in a forest near Kyiv.Credit:Getty Images
As Western-supplied weapons land by the planeload in Kyiv, soldiers and civilians alike wait here with helpless anticipation for decisions made by people who know little about the lives of those on the eastern front lines – a battle-weary region along whose border Russia has massed tens of thousands of soldiers. It’s a troop buildup that US President Joe Biden said could result in the largest invasion since World War II.
The soldiers in Zolote 4 have been defending against Russian encroachment for years. They are just a few hundred metres from pro-Russia separatist fighters, who are on the other side of a checkpoint that no one can safely cross. The soldiers assume that’s where the snipers are, though they’ve never seen any gunmen.
After three days with no shooting, “all of a sudden they opened up with grenade launchers and firearms. One mortar shell flew over and fell in the field behind us,” said Oleh Surhov, a Ukrainian soldier who fled Crimea in 2014 after the Russians seized the peninsula.
“Two more hit between ours and the next position. In 15 minutes, everything was quiet again. Why? What for? Nobody knows. And that’s how it is around here.”
Surhov joined the fight soon after he evacuated his wife, children and grandchildren to western Ukraine.
Zolote 1 through to Zolote 5 got their names decades ago during the Soviet era – ‘zolote’ means ‘Golden’ – when they were labelled as units of the local coal mining operation. Now 1 through to 4 are in Ukraine and 5 sits less than a kilometre away, across the checkpoint.
Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians are participating in voluntary groups in preparation for a potential Russian invasion.Credit:Getty Images
The sense of waiting for someone else’s decisions has also infected the nearby village of Katerynivka, which bears the scars of eight years of shelling. It has newer trenches, which are heated by rough wood stoves whose warmth draws nearly as many dogs and cats as soldiers. The luckiest trench cats get taken back by soldiers when they rotate off the front.
“We joke that hope is the last thing to die. All of us are waiting for peace. Neither our children nor grandkids can visit us,” said Liubov, a local woman who wouldn’t give her last name. “We talk on the phone and that’s enough. Let’s wait until peace comes.”
If war comes instead, it is as likely as not to strike first in eastern Ukraine, where the pro-Russia separatists have been in control since 2014.
In Russia, across the border, more than 100,000 troops are gathering, and thousands more are going into position for what Russia says are military exercises on Ukraine’s border to the north with Belarus.
Ukrainian servicemen walk to their positions outside the village of Verkhnotoretske in the Donetsk region of eastern UkraineCredit:AP
Moscow denies it is planning an assault, but the United States and its NATO allies are preparing for a possible war, bolstering their presence in the Baltics and putting 8500 American troops on higher alert for potential deployment to Europe. Britain and the US have sent multiple planeloads of weapons to Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have accepted the help, but have found themselves on the sidelines of several rounds of high-stakes diplomacy that have not yet yielded a breakthrough.
“Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said early this month after one such meeting.
On Monday, the White House summoned European leaders, including NATO’s secretary-general, to a videoconference about Ukraine to discuss US ideas on how to respond to Russia’s demands.
Ukraine wasn’t invited to the videoconference. And Ukraine’s president was left to fume on Twitter last week when Biden mused aloud about how to respond to a “minor incursion.”
Ukrainian and Russian diplomats were meeting on Wednesday in Paris to discuss the prospects for a stalled 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
If Ukraine sometimes seems to be an afterthought for the powerful countries deciding its fate, the country’s east is even farther from the centres of power.
In Vesele, a separatist area in the eastern Donetsk region, little has changed since the fighting in 2014. Signs still warn about minefields. Concrete block buildings have only crumbled further in the years since they were shelled, and no one has come to tow away the cars hastily abandoned under gunfire.
A woman walks with her dogs on territory controlled by pro-Russian militants Slavyanoserbsk in eastern Ukraine.Credit:AP
“There is practically no one here because everything is broken. There is light, gas, water supply, but there is no life,” said Vladimir, a local man who refused to give his last name. He estimated Ukrainian troops were about a kilometre away, and he wanted them gone so people could decide their own fates.
“If they would completely leave and liberate” the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, “then we could decide. I think nobody wants (to be a part of) Ukraine here,” he said.
But he, like most in the east, believed those decisions were in someone else’s hands.
AP
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