When Russian troops occupied Liman, the city where she was born and where she baptized her two children, in May 2022, Liuba Dmitrieva still believed that her childhood dreams were possible. The ones where she retired from her job as a laboratory technician and spent her twilight years with her husband in the warm Black Sea. I thought of the sun when the Ukrainian army took back control of Limán 14 months ago. Those thoughts faded when she buried her husband this fall. He says he doesn't dream anymore. Curled up on a cot that takes up most of her damp underground storage room that has been converted into her bedroom for almost two years, she closes her very sad brown eyes and says that all she thinks about is that one day will pass. And then another. And the next. “Some predict that this war will end in 2025, but what can we know?” asks Dmitrieva. “Most of us just want to be normal people again,” he laments.
Liman in the Donetsk region, once a bustling railway town of 20,000 people, has survived without gas and water since the first months of the invasion – now with sluggish electricity. The few remaining residents, like 65-year-old Dmitrieva, are fighting back in these small, deep hives converted into shelters against the artillery barrage that Russia is launching against a citizenry that supposedly wants to “liberate.”
Two women wait to collect firewood next to a building damaged in an attack in Limán on December 14. THOMAS PETER (Portal)
The snow-covered ground rumbles on the street. Several explosions are heard in the distance and Dmitrieva, who has gone out to fetch water from the terrace fountain on a particularly bright night because the moon is almost full, wraps herself in her coat, carries the bucket and rushes towards the basement . . His neighbor Vitali, who sleeps in a corner of the shelter, is carving wood. The other corner is Sergei's room. The “very educated” man describes that Vitali, who was a railway worker, set up a small sofa with an open book and an icon on it. They had bed bugs and mice in the damp home. “I had an apartment with landscape paintings and a piano. “There is nothing left,” says Vitali.
The war is a series of eternal days and nights in Liman and other cities in eastern Ukraine, where the wounds of Vladimir Putin's large-scale invasion in 2022 mix with the war in Donbass – which was sponsored by the Kremlin and began back in 2014 – in a harsh territory and particularly punished by history. As the Moscow-initiated invasion enters its third year and the war in eastern Ukraine continues for eight years, many in these underground hives have lost hope.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive in the southern plains and on the Dnieper did not go as expected. Not even on the eastern flank, in dry terrain, plagued by mined forests and destroyed villages. Since the summer, Russia has, at great human and material expense, seized small areas in the Zaporizhzhia region as well as in Donetsk and Lugansk (where it had already occupied a large part of the territory), which Ukraine was able to retake. The losses are also great for Kiev.
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They are neither decisive enclaves nor do they represent a turning point that shifts the balance of power towards Moscow, says a Western intelligence officer, but rather, together with his strategy of arms deliveries and military mobilization, consolidate the idea that Putin is preparing for a long war, whose goal remains to “subjugate” Ukraine. A war that is once again transforming the Donbas – where the Battle of Bakhmut was fought and now the bloodiest battles are taking place in cities like Avdiivka or Chasiv Yar – into the trenches of an endless war.
The battle has become more than ever a battle for position and attrition, fighting fiercely meter by meter, with a bloody mix of 20th-century weaponry – like the Soviet tanks that stitched the streets with rockets and sinkholes , leading to Limán, are littered with 21st-century technologies such as reconnaissance and attack drones that have become indispensable to both sides. “It's very difficult to live like this, it's almost unbearable. Sometimes I think that nothing matters anymore. “Especially for us old people,” says Dmitrieva, straightening her wheaten hair under a hat that she says she never takes off.
A small television and a religious icon in a bunker in Limán, under constant Russian artillery fire.MARÍA SAHUQUILLO
Ukraine begins 2024 with a partial occupation of the south and east, with new massive missile and drone attacks on cities across the country – including those furthest from the front lines – and with an exhausted population. Despite everything, defeatism does not win in the trenches, in the shelters or in the bars, cafes and restaurants of the cities.
The country invaded by Russia is gaining a new European perspective with the start of accession negotiations with the EU. But at the same time it is a tough path of reform to meet its standards and a path fraught with uncertainties given weakening Western support, without which it cannot resist the Russian invader, as Washington has warned. In the United States, infighting (mainly in the Republican Party) is keeping approval of a $61 billion (55 billion euros) package for Kiev on hold. Funds that join another similar package that the EU is trying to push forward and which the Twenty-Seven will debate on February 1st.
Reliant on humanitarian aid
Oleksandr and Katia Marchenko don't go to the animal shelter. His house on the second floor of a small apartment block in Limán resembles a small island of normality. Except for the hallway full of water jugs and the pile of firewood that had piled up on the landing. The couple, who cracked some jokes last February when EL PAÍS visited their home, four months after the city returned to Ukrainian hands, are now smiling a lot less. Oleksandr now spends his days listening to a small transistor while sitting at the work table in what was once one of his daughters' rooms. His wife is knitting a scarf. Every now and then they go for a walk, she says, to collect their pension and buy food for their pantry and also for their cat. In Limán, some small grocery stores have reopened, but many of the remaining low-income people rely on humanitarian aid.
A neighbor from Limán in the storage room of his house, which he uses as a shelter.MARÍA SAHUQUILLO
Meanwhile, the number of volunteers has also decreased. About 10% of those who took part in the initial phase of the large-scale invasion remain, says Iliya Borchuk of the Dnipro Volunteers organization. During the New Year's celebrations in 2023, Borchuk filled his truck with jars, nuts, sausages and gifts and approached Limán.
This year he came for Christmas, but there were no presents. Just cans, some cold cuts and wool socks for some pensioners. “People thought the war wouldn't last so long, and now they're trying to move on with their lives. But above all, he has less money,” says the volunteer. He himself, who ran an artistic circus in Dobripila, another city in Donbass, had to close the company when the war began and began working as a driver for a transport company. A few weeks ago he lost that job too and now works as a delivery driver every day.
On Marchenko Island, just around the corner from a burned-out building and not far from the avenue that leads to the now dilapidated train station, Oleksandr talks about next spring. “We have to go to the country house. There are fat red berries that are ideal for making jam and homemade liqueur,” says the man, beautifully dressed and shaved. His wife grimaces. “Next spring… Who knows what will be left then. Every day I’m afraid it’ll catch fire,” he says. And he concludes: “We had very happy moments there. It is only a few kilometers from here, but in our memory it is as if there was no war there.”
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