2023-12-31 02:26:59
Sunday, December 31, 2023, 01:18 | Updated 01:26h.
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Martial law is clear. Tonight, no one will be able to set off firecrackers or fireworks in Ukraine. «In times of war it can damage psychological health. This is due to the fact that the effect of the explosion of fireworks is similar to the sound of the explosions of projectiles and rockets,” the regulations cite. Therefore, any attempt to preserve this tradition to say goodbye to the year can cost Ukrainians a financial penalty or even a prison sentence if the celebration is massive. Ask the Chernihiv couple who celebrated the woman’s birthday on October 4 by lighting some fireworks and she was sentenced to five years of partial arrest.
The ban reminds citizens that the country is at war. It is his second New Year’s Eve under the threat of the Russian war machine. And she comes to her with fear in her body, horrified by the enormous display of force that Moscow made on Friday with a massive bombing of a dozen regions of the former republic. Yesterday, oblast authorities asked their neighbors not to be distracted by the festivities, to stay close to shelters and to pay attention to air raid sirens. There is a deep fear that Moscow wants to enter 2024 with blood and fire, especially after the Ukrainians responded yesterday with an intense bombardment of Russia’s Belgorod that caused 14 deaths and 108 injuries.
On the Donbas front, the German cake is the king of the end of the world. For many soldiers, tonight will be the culmination of a dinner where cooked beets with potatoes and legumes are guaranteed. But sweet is sweet where the bullets whistle. The cans of condensed milk fly along with the cookies. Sometimes, in the newspapers, articles by nutritionists appear who advise moderating this hobby among soldiers. In any case, military food rations are very acceptable, say the same experts.
Volodymyr, 46 years old and a member of a mountain assault brigade, is in charge of preparing borsch, the traditional Ukrainian soup, in a trench on the Zaporizhia front. He also has some chickens and ducks. New Year’s Eve dinner will be similar to this one, but with the cake and a few more extras. The meager hiding place where he cooks is barely a hole dug into the ground. Many soldiers prefer not to go into shelters inside the trenches. In the event of a nearby explosion, they can sink and become trapped.
The missing
The kitchenette is covered with a tarp so as not to give away the position to the Russian shooters who are guarding just a few meters on the other side of the battlefield. During this time of year there are few hours of light. Darkness falls fast. The boots are heavy because the dirt adheres to them. If it’s a good day, that is, the thermometer is above zero degrees, the mud bogs everything down. And yet, there are those who have the humor to place inside the casing of a Russian bomb, as a flower pot, some fir branches collected from the numerous trees that have been severed by the missiles, says Ukrainian ‘Pravda’ reporter Yaroslav Havas.
If the information circulating among the troops is true, life in these trenches may be unbearable for a civilian, but it is undoubtedly better than what the invaders have on the other side of the battle line. According to the head of the Armed Forces himself, Valeri Zaluzhnyi, «the Russians no longer even take the bodies of their own. There are mountains of piled up corpses whose decomposition is so advanced that they blend in with the mud. The Kremlin has not provided the number of missing people in its ranks so far, although protests by families who have no news of their loved ones since they boarded a train bound for Donbas in 2022 are becoming more and more recurrent.
The Ukrainian Government, on the other hand, jealously hides its number of military casualties, but it did acknowledge this week the existence of 16,000 missing persons. Of them, it is assumed that many are in morgues. The warehouses store an “astronomical” number of corpses and a large number have not been identified because their families fled abroad at the beginning of the invasion on February 24, 2022 and it has not been possible to compare their DNA. For this reason, the Executive will begin next Tuesday a campaign in the countries that have received the main refugee quotas to find those family clans where some members are missing, swallowed up by the war, and obtain their genetic samples.
A funeral in kyiv for a Ukrainian soldier AFP
The stench of death, of corpses exposed to the elements and of garbage accumulated in the trenches after so many months of fighting are common smells, says Mykola near Bakhmut. He says he is holding on because “among the occupants and our families there is only us.” His description of the front is reminiscent of historical accounts of the two world wars. And there are more coincidences. «They are rats. We are friends with them, we feed them bread. We even have an almost domesticated one that lives with us in the shelter,” says Volodímir in the digital ‘UP’.
The ditches are littered with rodents. Dozens of towns have been abandoned and the grain fields have not been harvested for almost two years, which has multiplied the colony of mice that bite the military’s clothes, gnaw the keys of the cell phones and break the cables. of electronic equipment, including computers, transmission and artillery systems, as happened in World War II with communication systems. Exposure to the urine of these animals, who are not at all squeamish about biting soldiers, has also caused a true epidemic of leptospirosis. Hence, Volodímir and his companions dedicate themselves to “taming” rats, because they are in charge of keeping the mice away.
Call up
«If someone is waiting at home, there is someone to turn to. This is a great incentive to continue here, even in these conditions, although I will not deny that I want to get into a hot bath, hold my son in my arms and take my wife to a restaurant,” says Oliv in ‘Obozrevatel’. His words reveal the great problem that Zelensky’s Government will face in 2024: the exhaustion and relief of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who in February will enter their third consecutive year of combat. Moscow maintains 617,000 troops deployed in the occupied territory, which offers an idea of the readiness and training needs of Ukrainian forces.
Ruslan, a rifleman stationed in Zaporizhzhia, admits that “we are all very tired. But if we put an unprepared soldier here, he will last a week and then panic. The bombings, the constant threat of death, wet wipes instead of a shower, an open-air toilet, there is no place to even wash clothes… It’s very hard,” he explains to ‘Censor.Net’.
Mykola agrees that “fighters must recover. The call is more relevant than ever,” especially because “there are many years of war left,” speculates Colonel Oleksandr Gramarchuk, a veteran of Donbas, where he arrived in 2014. “Many make a big mistake by underestimating the enemy,” he warns. The Russians have spent more time and resources than us training their troops. Regarding the future, I do not operate in the categories of optimism or pessimism. I’m realist. The end of war, according to the classics, is victory or defeat.
Ukrainian soldiers on the front line in the Zaporizhia region EFE
«Imagine how we look at those who look for excuses not to fight»
At the front, they are carefully reading the news about the new draft law on mobilization, which reduces the years to be called up to 25 years, establishes harsh penalties for Ukrainians who try to escape enlistment and reduces the physical or other reasons for not go to war. Sniper Andriy Rybalko finds it “very sad that many people have no idea who is at the front. The bruise is present in everyone who fights for a long time and no one has gone looking for casualties. None were professional soldiers. But these people have been fighting for almost two years. Imagine how tired they are and how they look at those who find excuses not to go defend their land,” he laments.
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#Years #Eve #rats #dead