Standing for hours in the freezing dark – then all hell broke loose
Ukrainian troops holding the line at Kramatorsk airbase say the attack came with no warning
Asoldier cradled the head of a comrade lying by the side of the road in eastern Ukraine while someone else hitched a howitzer to an armoured personnel carrier. Had he been shot? A shelling? Caught beneath the tracks of the reversing armoured vehicle? It was impossible to tell, and there was no time to check.
The first hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were lost in a blur as civilians and soldiers quickly, but on the whole very calmly, responded to an invasion most of them had believed was too insane to ever be launched.
Convoys of green-painted fuel trucks rumbled out of the darkness and disappeared again, going to who knows where. Like beasts waking from hibernation, tracked vehicles lumbered from place to place leaving fresh white marks on the tarmac of the roads.
Somewhere near the wounded man, an anti-aircraft system stood in the road and scanned the sky. Soldiers with newly applied colour-coded patches for identification clambered onto a lorry opposite a service station with a growing queue of civilian cars seeking fuel for the journey west to safety.
Yevgenny, a 23-year-old private based at Kramatorsk airfield 50 miles north of Donetsk, was one of the first to come under fire. Commanders put his base on high alert in the early hours of the morning and the squad was ordered into a network of trenches and bunkers and told to expect attack.
For hours they stood in the freezing dark, battling jangling nerves. Then at around 4.40am – 20 minutes before Vladimir Putin announced on Russian television that he was taking the country to war against Ukraine – a salvo of mortar shells whistled high over the perimeter fence and exploded about 200ft from their trench.
“It came with no warning at all, no sirens or anything,” the soldier said.
The platoon’s adopted stray dog ran straight into the muddy concrete bunker, “then came the aviation and everything else. All hell broke loose.”
Another soldier wryly described what followed as a “salute” or fireworks display: “It was at night time, but with the fire it was bright like daylight.”
“Explosions, bullets flying, tracer. We have our air defence systems and they were working,” said Yevgenny as he drew deeply on a cigarette. “We put up a fight. It was my first time under fire and for the first 10 minutes my mind was blank, then things became clear.”
It was impossible to tell from their bunkers and mud-filled trenches exactly what was hitting them. The soldiers thought they were missiles because of the whoosh they made; the last significant blast before things
‘No one expected it. I thought there would be an attack, but not a full-scale invasion. Putin has gone mad – he is out of control’
quietened down mid-morning was presumed to have been an airstrike because it was “very accurate”.
Yevgenny’s small platoon survived without taking casualties. But by mid morning they were not yet sure what had happened elsewhere. They liked to think that their air defences had taken down a Russian aircraft, but had no way of knowing. All they could do was continue to follow the orders that had been issued in the middle of the night.
With no time for breakfast, they tried to steady their nerves and fill the hunger by chain smoking. “It’s the waiting that’s so heavy,” said one of the men. “When you’ve got something to do it is one thing. But stand and wait, stand and wait. It weighs you down.
“No one expected it. I thought there would be an attack, but not a full-scale invasion. Putin has gone mad. He is out of control.”
Kramatorsk airfield is one of the key command centres for Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation holding the line against pro-russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It was typical of the targets across the country smashed in to by Russian ballistic missiles early on Wednesday. But the mortars are especially concerning.
Kramatorsk has been firmly under Ukrainian control since separatists and Russian militants led by the former FSB officer Igor “Strelkov” Girkin were chased out of town by the Ukrainian army in 2014. It lies 20 miles from the frontline – well out of even the heaviest mortar range – meaning that the attack could only have been fired from inside supposedly friendly territory; possibly from inside Kramatorsk itself.
Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies have warned repeatedly that in the event of invasion, Russia would activate sleeper cells and commando units. The men here were convinced they had been activated.
The Kalinovka ammunition dump in the Vinnytsia region of central Ukraine exploded on Wednesday morning. “They came from the town,” said Yevgenny. “We think it was people in the town brainwashed by Russia.”
Given how loyalties remain split in much of Donbas, it is quite possible.
In Kramatorsk in Slavyansk, many people are determined never to live again under the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. Strelkov’s thuggish, lawless occupation in 2014 – and the way he and his henchmen murdered several locals as “collaborators” – is well remembered. The night before the invasion began, a crowd marched through Kramatorsk with Ukrainian flags to show defiance against Russian attack. Their message was simple: Mr Putin’s claim to be “liberating” the people of Donbas is a lie.
But there are also those who make little secret of their resentment of the Ukrainian armed forces. In the town of Schastye in the Luhansk region, where shelling began on Sunday, a man told The Daily Telegraph he believed the Ukrainians were attacking themselves as a “provokatsiya” or false-flag attack.
These soldiers who survived Putin’s first bombardment were hungry, tired, and taking in too much nicotine. They were also unimpressed. “We are on our land and defending our homes,” said Yevgenny with a shrug. “The Russian soldiers have no motivation for this.”