Week one in the Donbas: Part 1
For the past week and some change, I have been living in a small village in the Donetsk Oblast. The Donetsk region has been at the heart of the Russo-Ukrainian War ever since pro-Russian separatists seized control of the region in 2014, declaring it the Donetsk People’s Republic. Ever since then, a war between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed forces has gripped the Donbas. In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. Three days later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, claiming to be conducting a “special military operation” to support the Russian-controlled breakaway republics with the goal of “demilitarizing” and “denazifying” Ukraine.
Driving through many of the villages in this region, you see evidence of the destruction: demolished houses riddled with artillery and shrapnel holes, caved-in rooves, burnt-out cars, and tanks litter the roads. Fighting has been waged in this area for so many years, not even the residents know if some of the damage is from Russia’s latest invasion or the first. They do say the fighting that has been waged here in the past year and a half cannot be compared to the previous years of fighting. The scale of destruction is so much bigger.
This map shows the battle for territory as it stands today. The city of Donetsk, the administrative hub of the region, has been fully under Russian control since October 2022. Ukrainian forces remain on the outskirts of the city fighting to regain control.
After Donetsk first fell, the working capital of the region was moved to Mariupol. After Mariupol fell, Kramatorsk became the de facto administrative center. With Russian forces claiming victory in Bakhmut, just over 20 miles from Kramatorsk, that title could also soon be in jeopardy.
I am staying in a village relatively unscathed by fighting.
I arrived here tagging along with Rebekah Macioroswki, a combat medic I have been in touch with for a few months now. She’s been in Ukraine for over a year, taking up the mantle to assist the war efforts after years of working abroad in various trauma zones. She is one of the main subjects of the documentary I am here filming, one of the few Western volunteers making a tangible difference on the ground.
When I first met Rebekah, I was tagging along with a group of Americans and Poles delivering much-needed aid to her clinic in the Donbas. After returning to Ukraine, I asked her if I could come to stay at her stabilization point to film their work. I had been to the clinic a few times since my first visit but found it hard to really capture the reality of how they were living and the community they had built. They clearly don’t get many foreign visitors and two foreigners coming in with a camera naturally turned the attention and focus away from them and onto us. If I really wanted to show people what life was really like on the frontline, I would have to live it.
I had been nervous to ask Bekah to join them, I knew how much they were dealing with from our numerous conversations and didn’t want to be a burden or get in the way of the life-saving work they were doing. I sent a long message detailing why I wanted to come, and how I could help, giving her every opportunity to tell me no.
“If you want to embed, embed,” She answered immediately. “I’ll help you.”
That’s Bekah in a nutshell: always eager to assist, no questions asked. She gave up a comfortable life in Denver to move halfway across the world in order to help total strangers every single day. I already knew the kind of person she was, it’s exactly why I wanted to work with her and was relieved she had agreed so quickly.
The very next morning, she picked me up in Kyiv and we headed east. She had just arrived back in the country after flying home to the U.S. for her younger brother’s graduation.
Things were almost going according to plan, but it turned out her old stabilization point was no longer her home. Her unit had rotated away from the front for training and a new unit had just arrived. She has packed all of her things before leaving for the U.S. and was now coming back to Ukraine essentially homeless. That community I had wanted to film had been disbanded and dispersed, which is of course one of the realities of life on the frontlines of war.
But Bekah is not here alone. During her time here in Ukraine, she has built herself an extensive and extensive network of connections and loved ones.
After two days in Pokrovsk, she announced “We have a house!”
This house, it turned out, was part of an infantry unit’s connection of safe houses in a village near Donetsk, several miles from the frontline.
Some of the soldiers who had been staying there were rotating out and it would soon be available.
We departed for the village and entered the unit’s current command center where the company commander was living with several of his men. It turned out “our” house was still occupied so we would have to stay there for a few days.
It was a small two-room house housing five men. The house had electricity but no running water. They drank from store-bought water bottles and washed their dishes with boiling water. They welcomed us with open arms, constantly trying to feed us and offering coffee, tea, and sweets. We were given two twin beds to share between the four of us and spent several nights cuddled together, thankful to these men who had nothing but still tried to give us everything.
The village itself is idyllic and picturesque, flanked on both sides by stretches of mustard fields and rolling hills.
Within a few days, the company commander Alex announced our house was now available. He walked us over to the house, which turned out to be a compound of two houses. We were given the top floor of one house, with Alex and his deputy, Dima, taking the first floor. The other house is sprawling and clearly the main house of the two but also smelled like some farm animals had also made it their home. In the kitchen, dirty dishes with the meals of its former army inhabitants remained on the dining table. A dirty scale caked with blood lay in the middle of the floor and makeshift IV holders carved out of old water bottles were strung up from various wall sconces and hooks. The men who had lived here before had clearly been using it as a makeshift clinic to treat wounded men evacuated from the frontline.
Two weeks later, the dirty dishes remain as does the bloody scale and wretched smell. But on the second floor, a beautiful porch opens to the surrounding pine trees and is set up with comfortable furniture- a rarity in this area where many of the houses have been plundered for anything useful. I have turned it into my office, a quiet oasis from the commotion of our small house turned command center and home to five. I write this post from there now, in the background birds are chirping, and the sounds of war boom sporadically in the distance. It’s a sound I’ve become quite numb to, within a few days of learning the difference between the sound of an incoming missile versus outgoing. Most in this area are outgoing.
Our actual house is quaint and charming but took two days of deep cleaning to make it livable again. Its previous occupants, I was told, had fled to Crimea after Russia annexed that territory in 2014. After a few days, the men had managed to connect the well water to run throughout the house giving us what they call “tactical water”. Tactical water is not to be drunk under any circumstances but meant we could wash dishes and brush our teeth. Several days later, we returned from a day filming in Bekah’s first village-now completely destroyed- to find Dima had installed the water heater that another soldier had brought back from another destroyed village. Tomorrow, he says, we will have hot showers.
The main thing I have learned in my time here is the generosity of the Ukrainian people. These soldiers, especially those in the Donbas, truly have nothing. They are fighting a war of attrition at what feels like the edge of their world in a region that has been at war for almost 10 years. They feel forgotten by the central government, they have limited supplies, limited ammunition, and they are exhausted. And still, they are kind and welcoming and clearly so grateful for the presence of Americans bearing witness to their reality.
Note: Landscape pictures are general images from the area, not our actual village, in order to protect the location of this unit.
