War in Ukraine: “Please, God, let him live”

SIEVIERODONETSK, Ukraine – A woman got out of the ambulance, crying and her hands covered in blood. Police took him to their first aid station when he asked for help for his wife, who was lying in the ambulance.

“Please, God, let him live,” said the woman, Olha. “You can’t imagine who he is. He’s a golden man.”

But the stretcher bearers had already left.

Olha’s husband, Serhii, died at noon on Tuesday, another victim of relentless shooting and skinning rained down by Russian forces on this frontline city for three months.

Sievierodonetsk, a mining and industrial city, is located in the heart of Donbas region from eastern Ukraine, which puts it heavily on the sights of Moscow.

Rejected in the capital, kyiv, Russian forces turned the full force of their efforts to the east, aiming to occupy most of the territory along the Russian border, even if it meant value to them.

Sievierodonetsk was also strategically critical for the Ukrainians, and they spent several weeks in intense defense of it.

Earlier this month, Russian forces suffered severe losses as they attempted to cross the nearby Seversky Donets River and stabilize their position.

In Sievierodonetsk, that means months of trauma as Moscow tries to surround the city and besiege it.

Russian forces are now in place on three sides.

Traveling to Sievierodonetsk was dangerous.

To get here on Tuesday, a team of New York Times reporters drove with a police escort to small towns and farms to avoid artillery fire from Russian positions and then quickly crossed a single lane bridge This is the only route left in the city.

Debris from the Russian bombing scattered on almost every street.

The fins of the rocket protruded from the craters in the asphalt.

A broken electric pole and wires were hanging across the street.

And the burnt cars, shredded by shrapnel several times overturned, were left somewhere thrown by the explosion.

A truck is hanging indefinitely on the side of a bridge.

For the police of Sievierodonetsk, it is just one day.

Officers maintained a police presence in the city, as well as in the nearby city of Lysychansk, carrying supplies for the remaining residents, collecting the dead and injured, and evacuating people away from the front line.

“Many of them were uninhabited, but when the war started, they became heroes,” Lugansk region police chief Oleh Hryhorov said of his officers.

“Many of them stayed because they really understand that this is your duty”.

Although most of the region for which Hryhorov was responsible was occupied by Russian forces, he was able to maintain a headquarters in Sievierodonetsk and led a force composed mainly of natives from eastern Luhansk and the Donetsk regions claimed by Russia as itself.

Many of them lost their homes eight years ago in the war in eastern Ukraine and now they have lost everything. for the second timesaid.

As the Ukrainian army struggled to defend the city, fighting with artillery and tanks to fend off Russia’s advance, the police force tried to address the needs of the civilian population.

Inside a warehouse, workers made lists of those in need of help and those seeking evacuation.

A row of blankets on wooden pallets served as a first-aid station.

In the courtyard, people are filling buckets from a tanker truck.

Meanwhile, the Russians have stepped up their bombing in recent days and it seems close. a new attacksaid the police chief.

Now even civilians who have chosen to stay in their homes, rejecting earlier offers to evacuate, are asking for help to get out, Hryhorov said.

Police now remove between 30 and 40 people a day.

The risk is also rising for his officers, who number more than 100 in the two communities.

On Tuesday, he met with his staff to strategize what to do in case the Russians surrounded him.

For now, they will stay where they are, he said, because no one else will support the people.

From a population of 100,000 before the war, there are still thousands of people, many living in cellars and communal bomb shelters, others at home in apartments or small wooden cabins in the middle of gardens and streets. full of trees.

Some have retired.

Some lack the means, or inclination, to escape.

Others are still sympathetic to the Russian government.

Many seemed overwhelmed by the events.

While a group of officers were releasing food supplies for families in apartment blocks in the old part of the city, two women approached the police commander.

They wanted to evacuate, but cared for their mothers, who were lying in bed due to strokes.

“I have no money, no money,” said Viktoriya, 49, who began to cry.

“I have no relatives and I don’t know where to go.”

Viktoriya contacted a U.S. aid group that offered help when the city had phone and internet connections, but, she said, they never came.

His mother, Valentina, is 87 years old and cannot walk, he said.

As he spoke, sniper fire whistled near their heads.

The police commander bent down and turned to look for the impact.

But the two women seemed indifferent to the gunshots, as well as to the explosions that sounded nearby.

The second woman, Lyudmila, 52, said she lived in an apartment on the fourth floor and did not dare go down to the basement during the shelling because she could not bear to leave her mother alone upstairs.

“I have to feed him by hand,” he said.

“We sat down and felt scared and didn’t know what to do.”

Once a shell hit the building and partially burned one of the apartments.

“We will not promise, but we will try,” the police chief said, responding to the women’s request to evacuate.

Police teams detained those who wanted to leave in small groups and took them to a rally point, where they were taken in an armored bus.

The operation is fraught with obstacles and uncertainty, including the start of new bombings, which stop any movement.

But when teams met at police headquarters in Lysychansk to plan the next evacuation, they said the latest delay was caused by a group of refugees asking for additional bail.

Other officers take care of those where help arrives it’s too late.

Three policemen, bravely firing bullets, set out to collect and bury the dead in Lysychansk.

They drove a white van toward a house where a 65-year-old woman, called by neighbors Lola Masha, was lying on her back in the yard, her arms outstretched under a blanket.

His dog growled and barked from his cage as officers placed him in a body bag and threw him on a stretcher.

Grandma Masha has diabetes and the war made it difficult to get her medication, said her neighbor Lena, 39.

Her son left with his family and never returned when he fell ill, Lena said.

Like most people interviewed for this article, he preferred to give only his name, for security reasons.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” he declared.

“It was a complete war. stupidBut no one asked my opinion.

Police picked up another corpse, a 60-year-old man named Sasha who lived in a small wooden house with an overgrown garden near a military base.

“There was an artillery fire and then he died,” his 51-year-old neighbor and friend, Mikhail, said in outrage.

“She’s sick, but where do we take her in an emergency?”

Sievierodonetsk has a hospital.

But the lone doctor there who treated 30 patients, was heavily bombed and virtually inaccessible, people in the city said.

Police officers headed to the cemetery on the outskirts of town and locked their van in a line of narrow trenches dug with a backhoe.

They removed the bags from the truck and relentlessly dumped them into the ditch where about 10 body bags were already lying.

They were buried 150 civilians for three months, said the presiding officer, who gave only his name, Daniel, 26.

Only a few relatives were present to arrange proper funerals, and others went to mass graves.

“It’s scary to get used to,” Hryhorov said.

His way of dealing with the war was to focus on one task at a time, he said.

“And tomorrow is another day, and there will be some new activities,” he said. “Perhaps, each of us should do what we should, and the result is a common success.”

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