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By David Bond,Roman Olearchyk, Ukraine in Avdiivka
Staring straight ahead, Anton Akastyolov describes what it feels like to be fighting on the frontline of Russia’s proxy war with the west. “Every day you think about death,” the 23-year-old Ukrainian private says, standing in a shattered residential block on the edge of the eastern city of Avdiivka.This is Europe’s forgotten war, a conflict that has claimed more than 10,000 lives, almost one-third of them civilians, during the past four years, making it the bloodiest in Europe since the Balkans in the 1990s and one of the longest-running in almost a century.
Western powers blame Russian president Vladimir Putin for starting the conflict by illegally annexing Crimea in 2014 — the first appropriation of European territory since the second world war — providing the catalyst for Russian-backed separatists to seize the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Lugansk.
While Mr Putin says Crimea has always been part of Russia, his actions in Ukraine are seen as part of a growing charge sheet that includes US election meddling, military intervention to back the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the nerve agent attack on a former Russian double agent in the British cathedral city of Salisbury.
“In their hope to recreate what they view is a great Russia again, they are pushing forward west into Europe,” says Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev, the commander of Ukraine’s joint forces. “Russia has no interest in bringing down the temperature, not with the western world, not with Ukraine.”
So while the war has reached stalemate, it still smoulders.
Bound by the terms of the 2015 Minsk ceasefire agreements, both sides are barred from using air strikes, tanks and heavy weaponry. This has created the conditions for an attritional land war which marks a throwback to another age, where soldiers fight in trenches with shells, grenades and sniper fire. Consequently, the death toll continues to rise. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors the conflict, in August said that a total of 30 civilians had been killed on both sides so far this year. The Ukrainian army says 80 of its soldiers have died over the same period.
There are no signs of a resolution in sight. The war was barely on the agenda at the Helsinki summit between US president Donald Trump and Mr Putin in July. And despite attempts by the US and its allies to modernise and arm Ukraine’s 200,000-strong military forces, people in Avdiivka feel abandoned by the west.
“They don’t care,” says Lyubov Kolesova, a resident whose 28-year-old son went missing in the early days of the war. “If you don’t live here, you won’t understand.”
Ukraine’s highway 20 cuts through seemingly endless fields of sunflowers, making it feel more like the south of France than Europe’s borderlands with Russia. Before the war, this road was one of the symbols of Ukrainian economic progress, built primarily for the 2012 European football championships.
Now it forms part of the front line. As the highway nears Avdiivka, about 20km from the separatist stronghold of Donetsk, it becomes too treacherous to continue. Access to the city can only be made via bumpy back roads.
Yet daytime in Avdiivka can be deceptively calm. Parents stroll the streets with young children while a group of pensioners has set up an impromptu market in the centre, selling milk and other produce.
But the war is never far away.
In the distance, occasional gunfire can be heard along with the deep boom of shelling. At the entrance to their Soviet-built flats on Semashko Street, Galya, 51, asks: “How much longer must we endure this? It’s been five years already. Will this continue another 20 years?”
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