Ukraine fighters vow to press on in four-year conflict

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian fighters in the Donbass Battalion, dug in along the front lines against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, like to add homemade silencers to their AK-47s. It allows their gunfire to go unnoticed not only by the enemy but also by those monitoring the shaky cease-fire, which avoids questions about who started the nightly gunbattles heard along the front.

The war in eastern Ukraine between the government and the separatists, now entering its fourth year, has put U.S. and Western policymakers in a bind. It’s a grinding, low-grade struggle with no end in sight, one that rarely generates headlines but presents a chronic source of division for a key ally.

There’s almost a sense Western policymakers are refusing to admit the lack of good options before them.

Kurt Volker, the new special envoy to the conflict appointed by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in July, insisted to reporters after a recent visit to Kramatorsk, an hour from the front line, “This is not a frozen conflict, this is a hot war, and it’s an immediate crisis that we all need to address as quickly as possible.”

The Trump administration wants to become more engaged in support of Kiev, he said, as do France, Germany, Britain and other Western powers. As the White House weighs a proposal to supply the Kiev government with lethal offensive weapons — a step rejected by the Obama administration — the Pentagon announced Friday that Defense Secretary James Mattis will stop in Kiev next week to reassure government leaders that the U.S. does not accept Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

But the separatists backed by Russia show no signs of giving up the struggle, and local residents talk of the hardship of living in a divided land.

Svetlana Voilova, a 53-year-old woman from Krasnagorovka whose apartment was destroyed by shelling in July, used to work in Donetsk, now the “capital” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Although the border between the government and rebel-held lands was not totally sealed off, it’s getting harder and harder to cross as the conflict drags on.

“Now there are no jobs there,” she said. “I don’t know where to move or how to make [a] life. It doesn’t make sense to go to Donetsk in the DPR.”

She added she used to take a company bus to work, but now it takes three hours passing checkpoints on both sides.

In February 2015 Ukraine signed the Minsk agreement alongside Russia, Germany and France, designed to alleviate fighting with the separatist DPR and a second separatist ministate calling itself the Lugansk People’s Republic. The Minsk accord followed almost a year of war that had begun when Kremlin-supported President Victor Yanukovych was forced from office after pro-European protests swept Kiev in early 2014.

The agreement was supposed to lead to the withdrawal of heavy weapons from more than 100 miles of frontline and create conditions for some kind of peace. That hasn’t happened.

In a week of meetings with Ukrainian officials and experts in Kiev, and with soldiers on the frontline in the east in August, it was clear the conflict is still broiling on with daily clashes and casualties. According to U.N. figures, just over 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

Ukraine calls the fighting in the east an “anti-terror operation,” and access to the frontline areas is closely monitored. This is not only because it is a war zone with mortar and sniper fire, but also because this is a Russian-speaking part of Ukraine, and some of these areas have been occupied by the separatists since 2014.

Hearts and minds

That means the battle for hearts and minds is as vital as progress on the physical battlefield, fueling a low-level informational war with the separatists who are aligned with Moscow. It is the kind of war in which Russia has long experience.

Lt. Col. Aleksander Samarsky, a deputy commander in the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian army, has served in the army for 18 years. Today he is in charge of psychological and motivational projects for the civilian population in his sector near the town of Avdiivka.

“We are creating countermeasures to Russian propaganda, and it’s important to change [civilians’] view of the Ukrainian army,” said Lt. Col. Samarsky.

In the first year of the war, the brigade had to take over basic police functions and deal with local crime because of the lack of local services. Now that the conflict has stagnated into a military stalemate, they try to help the civilian population by fixing schools damaged by shelling and showing that the army is a positive force.

“Russian propaganda says the soldiers are looters, killers and murderers,” said the officer.

Avdiivka, where Lt. Col. Samarsky’s unit is deployed, is a town on the outskirts of Donetsk that is also home to one of the largest coke factories in Europe. More than a mile of belching smokestacks stretch into the distance near the town, which has lost more than half of its prewar population of 35,000 since the fighting began. Keeping the plant functioning, despite being within artillery range, has been a challenge.

“We were able to [restore] the coke plant to full capacity as before the war and reduced the risk of fire so more people get their salaries and the economy is better,” the colonel said.

The war has required a reordering of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Several million people lived in the areas of Donetsk and Lugansk before the conflict. Some have fled to Russia or other parts of Ukraine, but millions remain. In addition, the communities on the Ukrainian government side of the line are affected as the border to cross to Donetsk or other separatist-controlled areas grows harder by the day.

This area of Ukraine used to be relatively wealthy coal country, the country’s heavy manufacturing heartland. Although much of it looks like a post-Soviet landscape, with rows of depressing Brutalist apartments, small houses with corrugated metal roofs and sunflower fields, there was investment here.

Mr. Yanukovych, the ousted president, had his political base in Donetsk, and many of the Ukraine’s wealthy oligarchs, who profited from acquiring former state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union, invested heavily here. But now the war zone cuts through the landscape.

Among the men of the Donbass Battalion, a volunteer unit that was formed in 2014 to fight the separatists, many say they are eager to retake Donetsk and the separatist areas. Some of them are from areas now controlled by the rebels, and at night they shout at their enemies across the line. According to one of the volunteers, who goes by the nickname Casper, the separatists are bolstered by “Russian volunteers — there are men there from Dagestan and elsewhere.”

Stories about mercenaries and Russian soldiers supposedly serving with the separatists are told by almost every Ukrainian fighter along the frontline. However, asked to see evidence of the “Russians” on the other side, the best Ukrainian soldiers on the front can do is to look through binoculars at enemy positions. The Ukrainians do point to the presence of Russian-made ordnance, including anti-personnel mines.

Frozen conflicts

In many ways the conflict in Ukraine has become the latest in a series of grinding post-Cold War conflicts that have broken out in states that were once within the Soviet empire. This includes Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Transnistria next to Moldova.

Communism — and dictatorial control from Moscow — helped mask nationalist enmities, but the post-Soviet period has brought them to the fore. In Ukraine this meant a growing divide between the Russian-speaking east, which historically tended to lean toward Moscow, and Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine, which looked to Europe and longed to join such institutions as the EU and NATO.

For Kiev the conflict is about getting back the separatist region and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. The war has allowed the country to make a break from Moscow after decades of uncertainty, where its politics bobbed back and forth between pro-Western and pro-Russian.

For Russia the conflict is about supporting its allies among the separatists and keeping Ukraine from falling irrevocably into the orbit of the West.

The Kremlin has shown for decades that it can do this, as in the case of Transnistria or Abkhazia. Moscow doesn’t lose anything in the Donbass, but if it abandoned the separatists, then it would lose face.

For now Russia remains committed to the Minsk agreement. In July, when a separatist leader named Alexander Zakharchenko declared a de facto “state” called Malorossiya, his comments were panned by the Kremlin.

With North Korea, the Middle East and domestic issues consuming the time of the Trump White House, there are big questions here of how much Washington can contribute to ending the stalemate, even putting aside President Trump’s complicated relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Lt. Col. Samarsky says his fighters could use more firepower to match that of the separatists, especially weapons that the U.S. could supply: drones, anti-tank weapons, Apache helicopters and high-tech combat computers.

But for now the Ukrainians in the Donbass Battalion will have to keep cleaning their rifles, affixing their silencers and preparing for another night of low-level violence.