Trench warfare on Ukraine eastern front: frozen, boring and very deadly

If the snipers don’t get you, the mines dropped from separatist drones might just do the job.

Ukrainian soldiers stand in a trench near the front line in the village of New York, formerly known as Novhorodske, Ukraine. Picture: Getty Images

War grinds slowly on the eastern front. Between a whitened ground of frozen steel and skies of looming lead, death may come by a sniper’s bullet or booby-trapped drone.

Yet cold and boredom are more familiar entities to the soldiers huddled in bunkers beneath hundreds of miles of trenches, where sentries stare out across the winter snows on no man’s land that falls to minus 13C at night.

Well-versed with a sense of endless conflict, few Ukrainian soldiers here have the inclination to predict their destiny.

“It is senseless to even talk about what may or may not come; whether Russia will or won’t ­attack us; who will be our allies; whether we will have to fight alone or not at all,” says a lanky warrant officer in his 50s, nom de guerre “Grey”.

Seated in a bunker outside the shell-torn Donbas village of Pisky, 10km northwest of Donetsk, he adds: “It is a waste of energy. The war goes on. Trenches. The cold. That’s our reality.”

Far from the frozen trenches and occasional shooting, Russian diplomacy jousts hard amid ­reports of cyberattack and missile movement, but on the front those with most to lose only laugh when asked to predict the outcome.

“We have shelter, we have food, we have weapons: the rest will be revealed in time,” Grey says.

Fixed in place since February 2015, more than 500km of trench lines separate Ukraine troops from Russian-backed separatists in the east. Above ground, life is a bleak concourse of duckboards, sandbags and fortification. “Beware! Sniper!” signs abound, and no soldier is stupid enough to stick their head over the parapet, preferring to use trench periscopes instead.

In the bunkers, however, the troops on their nine-month rotations have eked a home of sorts. Christmas lights are woven through racks of bunk beds – the Orthodox festival is still just close enough to justify celebrating; wood stoves keep the cold at bay; cooks stir stew beside racks of ­AK-47s and video games, and no position seemed complete without a cat to keep the vermin down.

“It is quiet until suddenly a sniper takes one of us,” says “Zemljak”, 35.

He lost one of his soldiers three weeks ago, shot in the head as he moved too slowly along a shallow stretch of trench line. “Another was wounded a few days later,” he says.

But if the snipers don’t get you, the drones might just do the job.

An airborne company sergeant major, Yozhak, stationed in the frozen steppes outside Novhorodske, produces a cylindrical mine, slightly bigger than a can of Coke, which his men had disarmed after it was dropped by a separatist drone on his unit’s positions. On impact with the ground, the mine self-righted on a mini-tripod and sprung tendrils of trip wires from its cap.

Sixty-six Ukrainian soldiers were killed last year. There have been 13,000 deaths, including ­civilians and separatist fighters, since the start of the war eight years ago.

The soldiers express loathing for their separatist enemies across no man’s land, calling them “trolls”, “goblins” and “zombies” and claiming they despise them more than the Russians.

“Betrayal from our own people is worse than our dislike of the Russian invader,” Zemljak says.

He describes how one day the body of a Ukrainian marine, a friend with whom he had shared a barracks dormitory for three years until the start of the war, had been found among the corpses of a separatist patrol Zemljak’s unit had ambushed. “I couldn’t believe it. A man whom I had known so well, for so long, but who then betrayed his country.”

As the wind howled outside, a mood of pathos stole into the shadows of the bunker. “Each one of us has lost something,” he says.

“Six years ago my wife left me as she said she couldn’t wait any longer for me to come back.

“She took my daughter with her. I’ve never seen her again.

“This goes on forever. A home, a friend, land, family: we’ve each lost something. We fight for freedom and are proud to do so, but we live in the frozen earth, with personal loss and [an] unknown future.”

The Times