In recent months, the city has become, along with Bakhmut (east), one of the two most complicated battlefields on the front.
With an emaciated appearance, pale face and wrapped in dirty clothes, about twenty inhabitants of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka they emerge from their basements to go to collect packages of food distributed in the basement of a building.
No one pays attention to the incessant detonations that resound in this town near Donetsk (south-east) under constant fire from Russian forces.
Loaded with boxes from the World Food Program, they slowly return to their shelters underground, where they live without electricity, gas, or water, but sheltered from the bombing.
the troops of Moscow They have been trying for months to take this city located on the front line, just 13 kilometers from the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, one of the “capitals” of Russian separatists.
around some 30,000 inhabitants lived in Avdiivka Before the war; in mid December only 2,000 remained.
Vitali Barabash, military administrator of the city, describes to the AFP the non-stop Russian attacks. “As of 7.15, they have started to bombard with Grad rockets”, he says, and goes on to list the morning’s attacks.
Numerous buildings are destroyed, without glass in the windows, some blackened.
In a basement near the distribution point, Svitlana, 74 years old, She shares a cold room with five other women and two men, all of them older people. Before the war, they lived on the upper floors.
“Too old” to run away
The beds are covered by thick bedspreads and sleeping bags. On one wall, a battery-powered flashlight casts a dim, whitish light.
“It’s very hard… [Los voluntarios] They suggest that we leave, evacuate, but where can we go? We are too old what can we expect from a new place… (…) this is our basement,” Svitlana told AFP.
In a continuous room, light a small fire that Mycola He feeds with branches that he takes from a pile of firewood. Two detonations resound outside.
“Who knows what it was. I’d say artillery or maybe mortars,” says the man, already used to it.
For Svitlana, “hope is all we have. Most of us are sick, like everyone else here,” she laments.
When the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014, Avdiivka was taken by the separatists, before being recaptured by kyiv forces. Due to its proximity to the front line, it has been one of the hot spots since the Russian offensive began on February 24.
In recent months, the city has become, along with bakhmut (east), in one of the two scenarios of more complicated fights from the front.
“All Civilians in Danger”
In northern Avdiivka, Russians and separatist forces from the Donetsk region cut off one of the two main access roads to the city in June.
They are also positioned in the east and south, where in recent days they have forced Ukrainian troops back.
“Our troops have withdrawn (from the town) of vodyan (…) because it was absolutely impossible to maintain the previous positions”, explains Vitali Barabash.
The Avdiivka military official assures that Moscow has just deployed regular army troops in the city, “better trained” than the separatists.
In his bunkered police station, Avdiivka police officer Rasim Rustam believes that the situation is “really difficult”. “We suffer repeated shelling. All civilians are in danger,” she says.
Resignation reigns among those who wait to get a package of food, as in the case of Lyudmyla, 62 years old.
When asked how he plans to spend the winter in Avdiivka, he answers: “Spring will come. With or without us, but it will come.”
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