by Lorenzo Cremonesi
Wagner’s militiamen want the symbolic victory. In the emergency room, blood-stained floors and heart-rending screams from the injured. Zaporizhzhia and Kherson were also affected
FROM OUR REPORTER
BAKHMUT-LYMAN (DoNBASS) – To return to Bakhmut yesterday, we took a different route than two days ago. It runs parallel but narrower, almost like a cattle trail, crossing tiny, semi-abandoned villages and hiding among bushes for long stretches. The reason is simple: it’s safer than the others, less exposed to artillery, Russian drones have a hard time identifying moving vehicles. Ambulances, the few remaining civilians, and the soldiers themselves use it, and continue to reach their front-line units for the most part with private cars. The contraindication remains that if the first has double lane and allows you to travel quickly, while this other is tormented by holes and stones, a civilian car cannot exceed 40 per hour, it becomes an easy target to hit. A reasoning worth little, because in reality the Russian bombing raids are hitting everywhere now, bullets of all kinds are falling around Bakhmut with the intention of blocking all lines of communication.
If we can, we now travel in armored vehicles, explain Alexander and Euvgheni, two thirty-year-olds from the anti-aircraft unit stationed between the isbas of Chasiv Yar, the last village before the suburbs of Bakhmut. They do not hide their concern by pointing to the trees felled by the blasts. The Russian units were reinforced by some just transferred from the Kherson sector: they are men used to fighting, they don’t panic when we return fire. We also note intense preparations for a major offensive, accompanied by extensive bombing of the country’s infrastructure, they explain, after inviting us into the trench dug on the shore of a now frozen lake. Further southwest, the Russians also attacked Nikopol and the area of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, causing damage to gas pipelines and electricity networks; In Kherson they bomb a cancer center. The two soldiers here in the field confirm what British intelligence has been saying over the past few days: the Russian commandos have concentrated the attack on a stretch of front about fifteen kilometers long, with the intention of taking Bakhmut from both the north and the south and closing try to consolidate in Donetsk with the help of the Wagner militia units. Should this happen, it would be the first Russian success since the defeats in Donbass between September and October and the withdrawal from western Kherson on November 11.
Also, one doesn’t have to go far to understand the scale of the Russian counterattack in the east. Yesterday afternoon we reached the Lyman hospital, the town about fifty kilometers east of Bakhmut and liberated from the Ukrainians at the end of September, where dozens of seriously injured people were being stabilized by doctors before being urgently transferred to the major health facilities of Dnipro and Kyiv. The center is deserted, the destruction immense: Of the more than 30,000 indigenous people, maybe a few thousand are left. The cold (it was minus ten last night), combined with the lack of electricity, heating, water and gas, is keeping people away. But the hospital’s bomb-damaged emergency room is in a dramatically fevered state, as evidenced by the blood-stained floors and heart-rending screams from the operating room. Within half an hour ahead of us, four soldiers who had jumped on mines had their legs severed. One was armless. A soldier with a conspicuous bandage around his head was waiting in the corridors to be examined. I have a splinter in my brain, he whispered. Another was shaking out of control and in shock. On average, more than a hundred injured people reach us every day, most of them seriously or very seriously. Here we only operate on emergencies without anesthesia, otherwise they risk dying under the knife, says Serhji, the surgeon, who is only 28 and already has the experience of a primary care physician.
December 3, 2022 (change December 3, 2022 | 21:50)
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