Life on the Ukrainian border: ‘Trenches. The cold. That’s our reality’

War grinds slowly on the eastern front. Between a whitened ground of frozen steel and skies of looming lead, death may come by a sniper’s bullet or booby-trapped drone.

Yet cold and boredom are more familiar entities to the soldiers huddled in bunkers beneath hundreds of miles of trenches, where sentries stare out across the winter snows on no man’s land in temperatures of minus 13C at night.

Well-versed with a sense of endless conflict, few Ukrainian soldiers here have the inclination to predict the course of their coming destiny. “It is senseless to even talk about what may or may not come; whether Russia will or won’t attack us; who will be our allies; whether we will have to fight alone or not at all,” says a lanky warrant officer in his fifties, nom de guerre “Grey”.

Seated in the bowels of a bunker outside the shell-torn Donbas village of Pisky, 10km northwest of Donetsk, he adds: “It is a waste of energy. We are here. The war goes on. Trenches. The cold. That’s our reality.”

It is a common sentiment. Far from the frozen trenches and occasional shooting, Russian diplomacy jousts hard amid reports of cyberattack and missile movement, but on the front those with most to lose only laugh when asked to predict the outcome of diplomatic thrust and parry that may decide their fate.

 “We have shelter, we have food, we have weapons: the rest will be revealed in time,” Grey adds.

Fixed in place ever since the Minsk II Protocol of February 2015, more than 500km of trench lines separate Ukraine troops from Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east. Though a low intensity conflict has continued ever since, the stagnation of the front has allowed some aspects of trench life to assume the trappings of domesticity.

Above ground, life is a bleak concourse of frozen duckboards, sandbags and riveted fortification. “Beware! Sniper!” signs abound, and no soldier is stupid enough to stick their head over the parapet to stare at the snowy wastes of no man’s land, preferring to use trench periscopes instead.

In the depths of the bunkers, however, the regular troops on their nine-month rotations have eked a home of sorts. Chains of Christmas lights are woven through underground racks of bunk beds — the Orthodox festival is still just close enough to justify celebrating; wood stoves keep the cold at bay; cooks chop vegetables and stir stew beside racks of AK-47s and RPGs, and no position seemed complete without a rat-killing cat to keep the vermin count down.

In this glowing subterranean fug of sleeping troops, hushed laughter and the sound of a stirring spoon, the war might seem far away were it not for the jangling of a field telephone connecting the world above.

“It is quiet until suddenly a sniper takes one of us,” says “Zemljak”, 35, a lieutenant who like many soldiers prefers to be known by his war alias due to family members living in areas controlled by separatists.

He lost one of his soldiers three weeks ago, shot in the head on a silent morning as he moved too slowly along a shallow stretch of trench line. “Another was wounded a few days later,” Zemljak adds. “A sniper’s bullet hit him in the shoulder and spun under his flak jacket nicking his spine and lung. He may remain an invalid. Our counter-sniper teams killed two of theirs afterwards. And so it goes.”

Sixty-six Ukrainian soldiers were killed last year: part of an overall figure of 13,000 deaths, including civilians and separatist fighters, since the start of the war eight years ago. The veteran soldiers describe a series of specific stages in the war.

In 2014, after the loss of Crimea, the war entered what they call a “mobile stage” of infantry fighting in which the Ukrainian forces began rolling back separatists in the east.

Russian units intervened, and the Ukrainian troops describe what happened next as “the artillery phase” in which they suffered heavy casualties until the Minsk II agreement of 2015, a complex protocol involving a ceasefire and the removal of heavy weaponry, which was supposed to be the bedrock of an eventual solution.

However, aside from lowering the war’s intensity and fixing the lines in place, the solution never came. Though shelling sometimes still occurs, snipers have predominated the conflict ever since.

“I lost one of my soldiers on New Year’s Day,” explains an airborne company sergeant major, Yozhak, when I visited his section of the front in the frozen steppes outside Novhorodske, where a slicing wind skidded over the ice to hurt the eyes. “Shot through the head at dusk. As airborne soldiers, though we aren’t afraid to die, we aren’t here to die — we are here to kill our enemy. That’s a spiritual stance that goes back to our Cossack forefathers. My men understand it.”

He adds: “But these days it’s not just snipers that can kill but drones too”.

He produces a cylindrical mine, slightly bigger than a can of Coke, which his men had found and disarmed after it was dropped by a separatist drone on his unit’s positions. On impact with the ground, the mine self-righted on a mini-tripod and sprung a tendrils of trip wires from its cap.

“It is like some sort of spider mine,” the sergeant says with a shrug. “It seems our latest phase of war is getting increasingly technical.”

Yet if the drones added an impersonal edge to the conflict, the soldiers express loathing for their separatist enemies across no man’s land, branding them as “trolls”, “goblins” and “zombies”, claiming they despise them more than the Russians.

 “Betrayal from our own people is worse than our dislike of the Russian invader,” Zemljak continues, perched on a wooden stool beside a field telephone. He describes how one day the body of a Ukrainian marine, a friend with whom he had shared a barracks dormitory for three years until the start of the war, had been found among the corpses of a separatist patrol Zemljak’s unit had ambushed. “I couldn’t believe it. A man whom I had known so well, for so long, but who then betrayed his country.”

Zemljak’s voice suddenly drops as he recalled the moment and, as the wind howled outside, a mood of pathos stole into the shadows of bunker. “Each one of us has lost something in these eight years of fighting,” he adds quietly, as around him listening soldiers nod, silent. “Six years ago my wife left me as she said she couldn’t wait any longer for me to come back from the war,” he says.

“She took my daughter with her. I’ve never seen her again. This goes on forever. A home, a friend, land, family: we’ve each lost something. We fight for freedom and are proud to do so, but we live in the frozen earth, with personal loss and [an] unknown future.”