Inside Donetsk, while residents flee the attacks on the Ukrainian region, Putin wants control

The Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine has long been in Moscow scenes. According to what was reported, Vladimir Putin wants to freeze the war against Full control of this.

Russia is already controlled by 70 % of Donetsk and almost all of the neighboring Luhansk, and it offers slow but fixed developments.

I go to the city of Dobubilia in the front line with human volunteers, 8 km (five miles) from Russia’s positions. They are on a mission to bring patients, the elderly and children to a safer floor.

Initially, it goes like an hour. We rushed into the city in an armored vehicle, equipped with drone screaming equipment on the surface, and hitting 130 km/h (80 mph). The road is covered with a long green network that blocks the vision from the top – its protection from Russian drones.

This is their second journey from the morning, and the streets are mostly empty. Few of the remaining residents leave their homes only to collect supplies quickly. Russian attacks come daily.

The city looks already deserted and was without water for a week. Each tiger building has been damaged, with some drop to rubble.

In the previous five days, Larz, a 31 -year -old German, and Fari, a 19 -year -old Ukrainian, worked for the charitable company Universal Aid, dozens of trips to evacuate people.

A week ago, small groups of Russian forces penetrated the defenses around the city, which raised fears that the front line of the so -called “Castle Belt” in Ukraine – some of the parts of the most defending the Ukrainian front – may collapse.

Additional forces were transferred to the area and the Ukrainian authorities say the situation has settled. But most of the Dububilia residents feel that it is time to go.

With the arrival of the evacuation team, Vitali Kalinichenko, 56, is waiting for his apartment block, with a plastic bag full of property on hand.

“All windows have crashed, look, they all flew on the second floor. I am the only one remaining,” he says.

He wears a gray shirt, black pants, and his right leg. Mr. Kalinichenko refers to a hole outside some pink shrubs, where the Shahi drone crashed a few nights earlier, which destroyed its windows and cut its leg. Another drone engine is located in the garden of a neighbors.

Since we are about to leave, Laarz discovers a drone as we cover again under the trees. A plane drone detector appears with multiple Russian drones in the area.

A older woman in a summer dress and a straw cap with a shopping cart. He warns her of the drone, and she rushes her pace. He explodes beating nearby, and his voice is frequent on the nearby apartment blocks.

But before we can try to leave, there is still another family rescued, just around the corner.

Laarz passes on to find them, while turning off the desire equipment in the lethargy vehicle to provide battery power. “If you hear a drone, these two switches are in the middle control unit, run it.” Justice is effective only against some Russian drones.

A series of explosions hit the neighborhood. A woman, outside her to bring water with her dog, works for the cover.

Larz returns with more vacation, and with drones still in the air above, it comes out of the city faster than it has arrived.

Inside the evacuation convoy, I sit next to Anton, 31. His mother remained behind her. She cried while leaving and hoped to leave very soon.

In the war, the front lines turned, the cities were lost, won and lost again, but with Russia’s progress and the fate of the region hanging on the negotiations, this may be the last time from Anton and others who were evacuated seeing their homes.

Anton says he has not left the city before. On the engine roar, ask him whether Ukraine should abandon the Donbas – the largest resource -rich region that consists of Donetsk and Luhansk.

“We need to sit at the negotiating table and after all they solve this conflict in a peaceful way. Without blood, without victims,” ​​he says.

But Vary, 19, feels differently. “We can never trust Putin or Russia, whatever they say, and we have experience in that. If we give them Donbas, he will not stop anything but give Russia more space for another attack,” she told me.

The situation in Donbas is increasingly framed for Ukraine, as Russia is slowly progressing but with a feeling. President Voludmir Zelinski mocked suggestions that he could be lost by the end of this year, expecting that it takes another four years until Russia will occupy the exact remaining.

But Ukraine is unlikely to recover an important area here without new weapons or additional support from the West.

This part of Donetsk is crucial to Ukraine’s defense. If you are lost or granted to Russia, the neighboring regions of Kharkif and Zaborisia – and beyond – will be at greater danger.

The cost of charity is measured in the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and body parts.

Later, I drive the car to a field hospital near the cover of darkness. The activity of the drone does not stop at all, and the affected war cannot be retrieved, and the dead, safely at night.

Russian losses are much higher, and perhaps three times the largest number or more, but it has a greater ability to absorb losses from Ukraine.

The wounded began to reach, and the cases that grow steadily grow more dangerous with the night extension in the morning. The losses are the fighting in Boukerrovsk, a city that Russia is trying to seize for a year, and is now partially surrounded. It is a major city in Donetsk’s defense, and the fighting was brutal.

The first man arrives with consciousness, wounding a bullet to a gunfire. After that, another man comes in his forties covered with shrapnel. It took two days and three attempts to save him, such as the intensity of the fighting. After that, the man whose right leg was almost bombed was by a drone blow on the road from Boucrovsk to Mirnourad.

The surgeon and SNR LT DIMA, 42, is transmitted from the patient to the patient. This is a medical installation unit, so its function is to correct the injury as quickly as possible and send it to a major hospital for more treatment. “This is difficult because I know I can do more, but I don’t have time,” he tells me.

After all this massacre, I also ask him if Donbas should be delivered to bring peace.

He says: “We have to stop (the war), but we do not want to stop it like this.” “We want to return our lands and people, and we must punish Russia for what they did.”

It is exhausted, the victims were heavier, and dozens a day, because Russia’s incursion, and injuries are the worst doctors that doctors have witnessed since the war began, mostly because of drones.

“We just want to go home to live in peace without this nightmare, this blood, this death,” he says.

On the drive from that afternoon, between corn fields and sunflower, miles of newly -filled thorny wire. They run alongside high banks of red ground, deep trenches and elegant lines of anti -tank dragon pyramids. Every designer to slow any sudden Russian progress.

It is believed that Russia has more than 100,000 soldiers standing, pending the exploitation of another opportunity, such as previous violations about Dobubilia.

These new fortifications carved in Ukrainian dirt are deteriorating here in Donetsk. The remainder of the region may be delivered so far through diplomacy, but until then, Ukraine is still stained with blood and exhausting, bent on fighting for every inch of it.