The forgotten front

Updated

Life and death on the battlefield on Europe's doorstep.

The war in Ukraine is grinding on despite an official ceasefire.

Photojournalist Christopher Bobyn documented the Ukrainian soldiers and citizens mired in Europe's frozen conflict, in a nation dangerously in flux, forgotten by the West and paralysed economically and politically.

(Warning: This story contains graphic images.)

The front

"The ceasefire is on", announces a Ukrainian soldier stepping into his unit's quarters from an evening smoke, on the frontline near Mariupol, a major city in the south-east of the country, on the Azov Sea.

The room of Ukrainian marines erupts in laughter and groans, since his reference is to the artillery shelling that echoes through the room and drove the soldier inside.

It's the type of humour that comes not so much from nerves, but routine.

Along the Mariupol front, shelling and sniper fire is a daily occurrence, despite Ukraine's official state of ceasefire since the start of September, which was supposed to result in the withdrawal of heavy weapons and the presence of roving international monitors.

It's clear though from the loud thuds nearby that things are not, in fact, all quiet on this eastern front.

The soldiers' playful defiance also speaks to Ukrainian disposition in the face the ghosts that haunt the Ukrainian psyche and inform its resistance to aggression and subjugation.

The war in Donbass is only the latest round of suffering in Ukraine. The country's 20th Century history is one of oppression and death marking successive generations:

1.5 million killed during World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution

5 million starved to death by the Holodomor - Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-33

1.6 million deported to Soviet gulags between 1938-40

5.3 million killed in World War II, of which 2.25 million were Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Such slaughter and maltreatment has left Ukrainians with the indelible marks of victimhood and resilience.

It's a resilience found in the Ukrainian marines stationed on the coast of the Azov Sea. Many were present in Crimea to witness, helplessly, its annexation by Russian troops.

Now they're tasked with guarding Mariupol: the major strategic target for a separatist outbreak, should one come.

Mariupol's port and massive steel works would provide the self-declared republics of the Donbass with profitable industry, and rather conveniently, a friendly land bridge between Russia and Crimea.

So the marines are dug in around the city limits, a thin line of conscripts and regular soldiers who have no idea when they might leave their pockmarked bunkers and trenches.

For some units defending Mariupol, conditions can be somewhat better, like those stationed in the holiday homes requisitioned by the military as frontline barracks.

Entire seaside towns have been levelled in heavy post-ceasefire fighting, thousands of visiting tourists but a distant memory amid the burned-out summer flats. But the surviving summer villas make for perfect outposts.

From one such home, both marines and the CIMIC (Civil-Military Cooperation) unit operate. The marines man the front, while CIMIC services it, delivering donated aid and gifts from private citizens to frontline soldiers and civilians who refuse, or are too poor, to leave.

Among the CIMIC troops is an actress turned volunteer soldier, Alla, a woman who has gone from TV to trenches.

"My friend was an officer and said I should serve my country, and I agreed," she explains.

While conscription has seen the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces swell to 280,000 from just 130,000 in December 2014, women are not subject to the draft and must volunteer.

Now the only woman living with 20 men, Alla's comrades built her a makeshift private room from bookshelves and shower curtains.

"They're good boys, my friends. I trust them. They even help me wash my hair since we don't have running water and I need someone to hold a water bottle."

Enjoying a morning coffee after a sleep on beach chairs once used by tourists, a marine officer asks, "What does the West think about Putin in Syria? Do they remember our problems here now?"

It's a constant question for men on the front all too aware of global events, and interest, moving on.

Over a second coffee the officer delves into the Ukrainian perspective of their own war.

"This war is becoming clumsy to describe. First it was to be closer to Europe, then became for independence and our territory, then something against Russia, and now, it's hard to say."

The frustration in his voice is echoed by most Ukrainians now, whether they are fighting separatists or fighting to eat.

With an economy in free-fall and mounting human and financial costs of the war, it's becoming harder for participants to understand just what is being accomplished by holding a line that carves up Ukraine to the dissatisfaction of all parties.

"So, now we sit here and just take it from the other side, and we are told to wait like that. So we wait," the officer laments.

Gone are the months of active fighting and movement, or bravely holding off enemy onslaughts to the celebration of media and countrymen.

Surgical support

With strained resources, Ukraine is dependent on foreign assistance and charity to shore-up the financial and technical shortcomings of its war effort.

Ukraine's large diaspora communities in Australia, Canada and the US are especially crucial.

While some diaspora aid undoubtedly goes to supplying arms to the under-equipped military, much is delivered as food, clothing and medical care for the internally displaced, widowed and wounded.

For the third time since the war began 18 months ago, 20 volunteer Canadian doctors and nurses have travelled to Kiev to perform complex surgeries on wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

They bring with them both better instruments and expertise than is available in Ukraine.

Among the doctors are burns and plastic surgery specialists to treat the horrendous wounds.

While they operate in Kiev's military hospital, they also teach local medical students to use new techniques and tools.

Complex facial reconstructions and muscle re-alignment operations are performed on men who otherwise were only minimally treated in the field.

Over 10 days the Canadians perform 80 reconstructive surgeries for 60 patients, then leave their equipment behind for Ukrainian doctors.

The face of war



Many of the soldiers treated by the Canadian team are not regulars, but conscripts, drafted into the Ukrainian military by president Petro Poroshenko's decree for compulsory military service.

While the quality of training and equipment is dubious, four waves of mobilisation managed to put an extra 100,000 Ukrainian men into government boots in one year.

Incidentally, Canada also supplied 70,000 pairs of those boots for a military unable to clothe its new ranks.

Among the wounded conscripts sitting in Ukraine's military hospital is Andriy, 28. He was injured by a landmine while serving his rotation in Donetsk, "one week before my birthday", he adds with irony.

Now he waits for plastic surgery to reduce the deep scars running from his forehead to chin, and to remove the shrapnel still in his face.

The rough distinctive "x" pattern of his scars reveals the simplicity with which he was treated by field doctors.

Also in pre-op is Sergey, 37, another landmine victim. After a month on the front, his Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier exploded. He lost his left hand in the blast, his nose and face were also cut.

He's travelled 300 kilometres from the Chernigiv region to have the Canadian team treat his wounds.

However, as a carpenter before mobilisation, his primary concern is not the appearance of his wounds but being unable to carve wood with only one hand.

The army provides him with no compensation, and now after one short month as a soldier Sergey is dependent on volunteers to provide for his 12-year-old daughter.

Love in a time of conflict

In the sprawling Soviet-era suburbs of Kiev, Katja, 30, now lives with her in-laws and her two daughters, two-year-old Tasha and nine-year-old Anja.

Her husband Maxim was drafted by the Ukrainian marines and now serves on the Mariupol front.

"It's horrible for me without him. I don't need a big house or lots of money, but I need my husband here to raise his daughters", says Katja tearfully.

"The hardest was when he came home for a week. Our youngest daughter didn't recognise him. She's so young and doesn't really understand she has a father who's missing. He was already training by the time she turned one."

Looking at a photo of her husband on the front, Katja can also barely recognise him. Well-fed and clean-cut before the war, he is now gaunt and sports a lumberjack's beard.

"He's started to smoke too", Katja says dryly.

800 kilometres away, Maxim sits in his underground bunker, dug into the earth and reinforced with wood planks.

For three months Maxim and his unit have called dirt trenches home, and will do so for months to come. Here as winter sets in, they warm themselves with hand-chopped wood and eat homemade jams and pig lard as rations. It's here they listen anxiously to continuing fire.

Maxim explains that he didn't object to his mobilisation, telling Katja at the time, "It's easier for us if I go, and I can help our people."

But while escaping injury so far, the deployment has come at a high cost.

It meant not only leaving his family, but also sacrificing his three clothing stores, that have since closed without his management

'Does the West remember?'

The consensus on the front is that the Minsk II peace accord fails to offer a real political and military end to war.

Artillery fire is the exclamation mark to this failure.

Now Ukraine's state of pseudo-war leaves the nation of 45 million in economic and political paralysis.

With 8,000 dead, 1.5 million internally displaced and Ukrainian men continually drafted to the front, citizens carry the burden of living with wartime conditions without tangible progress to justify the sacrifices.

As the worth of lauded European values and leadership is increasingly shown wanting, Ukraine risks abandoning its European path, stuck between the EU and Russia as a failed state.

And if the West does not engage to nurture Ukraine's sovereign future, it risks the fallout of an unresolved 21st Century war in Europe.

All this comes to mind when Ukrainian marines ask, amid the thud of shelling, "does the West remember our problems?"

Credits

Reporting - Christopher Bobyn

Christopher Bobyn Photography - Christopher Bobyn

Christopher Bobyn Producer - Tim Leslie

Tim Leslie Commissioning Editor - John Bruce

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics

First posted