No respite for surviving residents in frontline Ukraine coal town

Dec 05, 2023

The shattered Ukrainian coal town of Vugledar looks abandoned and all but ruined as volunteer chaplain Oleg Tkachenko's armoured van pulls up.

But a simple toot of the horn sees surviving citizens and hungry dogs emerge in ones and twos from the clusters of six- and nine-storey housing blocks.

Tkachenko's van, a red Fiat emblazoned with a shield marked "chaplain", has bullet proof glass and a reinforced cab, but the front grill and bumper have been torn off.

Huge white sacks of freshly-baked bread, punnets of peaches and strawberries, bottles of drinking water and cooking oil are stacked in the back.

Without Tkachenko's weekly visit, the few hundred remaining members of Vugledar's pre-war population of 15,000 would have to survive on rain water and hand-outs from soldiers.

The chaplain is not a member of Ukraine's armed forces, but wears green fatigues and a tactical vest and is waved cheerfully through check points to the frontline town.

He is greeted warmly by a small crowd of mainly elderly or prematurely-weary working age residents, who grab sacks of onions and fistfuls of the herb dill.

The coal mine lies idle and flooded.

Draining pumps were cut off when Russian forces launched their invasion in February last year.

The schools and administrative centre are bombed out ruins; the power and water are off; and the hospital is abandoned on the exposed edge of town, facing Russian lines barely three kilometres away.

Ukrainian army spotter drones buzz overhead and, even during what locals call a quiet three days, the sound of artillery and rocket fire -- outgoing and incoming -- regularly erupts.

- Morale boost -

In January and February this year, Vugledar was briefly in the headlines, as Ukrainian troops fought off a determined Russian assault and reportedly destroyed an armoured column.

The victory was a morale boost for Ukraine's defenders but afforded little comfort to the town's remaining people, cooking meals by the light of head torches in cellars and stairwells.

Away from the frontline, anticipation is mounting that Kyiv's forces are preparing a large-scale counteroffensive to recapture more territory lost to Russian troops.

But in Vugledar there are more immediate concerns.

When rocket fire devastated her sixth-floor flat in a Soviet-era block for mining families, 53-year-old retired nurse Svitlana moved downstairs with her husband and her cat, Timofy.

Their living area is a narrow, windowless corridor under the stairwell, lit by dim USB reading lights powered by a car battery. At night Svitlana moves down to the cellar.

She helps coordinate deliveries -- Tkachenko's van brings both humanitarian supplies and paid-for special orders -- and otherwise passes the time knitting handsome sweaters and playing chess.

There are the remains of an Uragan rocket embedded in the road outside, and scars from clusterbombs on the pavement.

One of her neighbours was killed in November and buried under a wooden cross under the broken windows of burnt-out apartments in earth churned by high explosive.

But she has decided not to leave.

"Where could we go? I don't want to be homeless somewhere else," she told AFP journalists who visited the town on Wednesday.

Vugledar's Ukrainian defenders are a discreet presence. A US-built Humvee cruised and drones could be seen returning to upper-storey windows.

Where flats have been requisitioned, Nissan pick-up trucks donated by foreign well-wishers bear British, Polish or Norwegian registration plates.

The troops have also fought from the streets among the residential blocks. Piles of spent 82mm canisters of high explosive mortar propellant clog the gutters.

Residents sometimes see humanitarian deliveries from the troops, but complain that beyond this, the state plays little role in their battle for survival.

- Coal miners' flats -

"There's no fire brigade, no sanitation, no-one," snorts 54-year-old Yelena, a trader of cosmetics and lotions, who survived a strike on her apartment.

Smiling, she shows off the now faded scar under her right eye where shrapnel cut her cheek, boasting that its near disappearance was a tribute to the efficacy of her luxury wares.

But for irascible retired miner Mykola, 63, the rot set in before the war.

He fondly remembers the 80s, when the then Soviet regime in Moscow allocated the state-owned flats to working families like his.

Now the properties stand ruined, and Ukraine's democratic and economic progress since independence means little to him if bombs continue to fall.

"Better a bad peace than a good war," he said.

dc/yad