The militiamen of Wagner want the symbolic victory. In the emergency room, bloodstained floors and heartbreaking cries of the wounded. Zaporizhzhia and Kherson also affected
FROM OUR REPORTER
BAKHMUT-LYMAN (DonBASS) “To get back to Bakhmut yesterday we took a different route than the one we took two days ago. It runs parallel, but narrower, almost like a cattle track that crosses tiny, semi-abandoned villages and is hidden for long stretches among bushes. The reason is simple: it is safer than the other, less exposed to artillery, Russian drones find it difficult to identify moving vehicles. Ambulances, the few remaining civilians and the soldiers themselves use it, and for the most part continue to reach their front-line units in private cars. The contraindication remains that, if the first has a dual lane and allows you to travel fast, 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 that is worth little, because in reality the Russian bombings are now hitting everywhere, bullets of all kinds fall all around Bakhmut with the intention of blocking all communication routes.
If we can, now we travel with armored vehicles, explain Alexander and Euvgheni, two thirty-year-olds from the anti-aircraft unit positioned among the isbas of Chasiv Yar, the last village before the suburbs of Bakhmut. They do not hide their concern by pointing to the trees cut down by the explosions. The Russian units have been reinforced with some just moved 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 south-west, the Russians also hit Nikopol and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant area, causing damage to gas pipelines and electricity grids; in Kherson they bomb a cancer center. The two soldiers confirm here on the field what British intelligence has been explaining in recent days: the Russian commands 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 to try to consolidate in Donetsk using the Wagner militia units. If this happens, it would be the first Russian success after the defeats suffered in the Donbass between September and October, as well as the retreat from western Kherson on November 11th.
Besides, you don’t need to go far to understand the extent of the Russian counterattack in the east. Yesterday afternoon we reached the Lyman hospital, the town located about fifty kilometers east of Bakhmut and liberated from the Ukrainians at the end of September, where dozens of seriously injured were stabilized by doctors before being sent urgently to the large health institutions of Dnipro and Kiev. The center is deserted, the destruction is immense: of the more than 30,000 original inhabitants, perhaps a couple of thousand remain. The cold (last night it was minus ten) added to the lack of electricity, heating, water and gas, keeps people away. But in the bomb-damaged emergency room of the hospital, activity is dramatically feverish, as evidenced by the blood-stained floors and the heartbreaking cries that come from the operating room. Within half an hour in front of us the legs of four soldiers who had jumped on mines were severed. One was armless. In the corridors a soldier with a flashy bandage around his head was waiting to be examined. I have a splinter in my brain, he whispered. Another was shaking out of control, in full shock. On average we receive more than one hundred wounded every day, the majority serious or very serious. Here we only operate emergencies without anesthesia, otherwise they would risk dying under the knife, says Serhji, the surgeon, who is only 28 years old and already has the experience of a primary.
December 3, 2022 (change December 3, 2022 | 21:50)
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