Ukraine War Day #730: Signs Of Life In Avdeevka – Part II

Dear Readers:

Continuing my review of this account, by military correspondent Alexander Kots, of his visit to the recently liberated city of Avdeevka, near Donetsk. Kots is embedded with the Pyatnashka group of Russian Special Ops, and part of his job, as a non-combatant, is to help distribute humanitarian assistance to those few civilians who stayed behind and toughed it out in this front-line warzone.

Where we left off: We saw that there were a few surviving civilians here and there, a few battered but surviving homes, a pockmarked and broken, but still functioning church.

“Now We Only Listen To Russian Radio”

In the next section of the article, we meet a woman named Lyubov Nikolaevna, who still lives in her country house. In their house-to-house search for both civilian survivors and possible Ukrainian soldiers hiding out, the Russian soldiers find Lyubov carrying hay into her small barn to feed her cows. Lyubov used to have 7 cows, but couldn’t find enough feed for them all, so now she only has two. She also kept bees, but, as a parting gift, a shell from the retreating Ukrainians destroyed her small apiary. Along with her greenhouse. And that isn’t her only beef against the Ukrainians: Back in 2016 they killed her 19-year-old grandson. Why? Just for their own amusement. Or perhaps target practice. The young man was studying in Donetsk, at a Medical School. But every summer he would come out to the countryside, to visit with his grandmother. The bullet hit him in the back of the neck, exiting from his forehead. He just fell down dead right there, in the garden. The Ukrainians were up on the hill, in the neighboring house, 400 meters away.

Lyubov says that her daughter lives in Russia. “For a year and a half we were not able to communicate. I even asked my daughter not to call me. Because I figured they would monitor our phones and, once they saw that it was a Russian number, they would think I was a spy. I wouldn’t say that the Ukrainians ever gave me any offense. [yalensis: except for that small incident when they murdered your grandson?] If they hadn’t shelled us, everything would have been okay. Just recently I was chatting with my neighbor, and we were trying to figure out what motivated them to go and fight. Although I have to say, when all of this started, back in 2014, I told everyone, Nothing good is going to come of this, until the Russians intervene.”

Kots: Where did you get your news from?

Lyubov: From the radio. Right now you can only get Russian stations. About 10 days ago the Ukrainian stations simply stopped transmitting.”

Graffiti scrawled on the wall of the pumping station: “You shut off our water. So we shut off your Avdeevka!”

“And before that?”

“We were still able to catch Russian stations.”

“Hey, I know you!” A woman walks up to us. Her name is Galina Vasilievna.

Kots: “You do?”

Galina: “I saw you on TV!”

Kots: “So, you have Russian TV?”

Galina: “From time to time. Sometimes we were able to plug it into the solar battery. We would sit and watch Soloviev, Zhenya Popov, I think that’s where I saw you. Well, as you can see, everything around here is just rubble. But you know, Russia has arrived at last, and that’s we feel good now, in our hearts.”

“They Lacked Our Spirit”

Kots interviews a soldier from the Pyatnashka group, he goes by the call-sign Telma the Elder. “They just lacked the kind of spirit that we have,” Telma says, about his Ukrainian counterparts. “As for us, there is no way backwards for us, only forward always, forward! We operate according to our own principles.”

Kots: I have met several soldiers here who also fought in the “Bakhmut Meatgrinder”, so I am curious to ask them which one was tougher?

Telma: Artyomovsk was a living hell. This was our first contract. But now, with that experience under our belts, we found this one a lot easier. We already know how to clear buildings, how to storm buildings, where they might be hiding, and so on. The grandmas and grandpas here were crying with joy, they were so happy to see us. They waited 10 years for us. They told us how the Ukrainians made fun of them. But we are not going to leave them ever again.

[to be continued]