KYIV – The war in Donbas escalated in recent weeks as Ukrainian forces suffered defeat at the ruined Donetsk airport. They regrouped and two weeks later thwarted Russian forces in what was described as the fiercest battle yet at the Donetsk regional railroad hub of Debaltseve on February 1 and subsequent days.
Evidence has surfaced of the Russian government’s direct role in the war’s recent escalation. Soldiers who survived the Donetsk airport attack said it was the work of professional Russian soldiers. Ukrainian fighters also described an influx of Russian military hardware and soldiers in the regional center of Donetsk.
“There’s a massive amount of forces here, and it’s all new and all from Russia,” Petro Kanonik, a Ukrainian commander in the Joint Ceasefire Coordinating Center in Donetsk, told the Ukrayinska Pravda website in an interview published on February 4.
In particular, about 90 armored fighting vehicles and 3,500 fighters were active in the battle for Debaltseve, a town of 25,000 people located 45 miles northeast of Donetsk, estimated Dmytro Tymchuk, a military expert and director of the Info Resist website (inforesist.org), on the morning of February 2.
These forces included four tactical groups supporting three artillery groups employing up to 60 units of long-barreled artillery and 32 rapid-fire rocket systems.
Debaltseve is being targeted not only because it is a key railroad station but also because it’s the easternmost city on the frontline still controlled by the Ukrainian government, experts said.
The February 1 assault ended in failure for the Russian forces, Mr. Tymchuk reported. In the process, five tanks and four armored fighting vehicles were destroyed.
“The battle for Debaltseve has been the most violent and wide in scale in the Russian-Ukrainian war. This isn’t Ilovaisk, Luhansk or the Donetsk airport. It’s the full-fledged maneuvering of military actions of contemporary, mechanized armies, and cooperation between reconnaissance, infantry, artillery, armored vehicles and radioelectronics,” Yurii Butusov, a Ukrainian war reporter on the frontlines, reported on his Facebook page on the morning of February 2
“For the first time in its history, the Ukrainian army conducted a successful defensive operation on a wide front and completely fulfilled its military objectives. An army of Russian mercenaries attempted to smash the entire Ukrainian defense in Donbas and sharply alter the course of the war. And today I can with certainty that the enemy’s attack was successfully thwarted,” he wrote.
Afterwards, Russian forces dispatched an additional 18 tanks, 23 armored fighting vehicles and 55 covered transporters between the morning of February 2 and 4, Mr. Tymchuk reported.
Despite that, Ukrainian forces retained control of Debaltseve and kept Russians forces from encircling the town, killing at least 50 in that three-day period. The Russians suffered serious losses as the wounded overwhelmed nearby hospitals.
“An absence of medicine and an acute lack of medical equipment and basic materials (syringes are being expropriated from veterinary hospitals) acute lack of medical equipment and in Snizhne, where the main portion of seriously injured fighters were delivered,” Mr. Tymchuk reported on February 3. “The morgues in Donetsk ceased to serve the civilian population because of a lack of space.”
Such success in Debaltseve followed what is widely considered a defeat at the Donetsk airport.
The Donetsk airport became a symbol of the Donbas war, often compared to Stalingrad in its critical nature, and its battles gave birth to the legend of the “cyborgs,” or Ukrainian fighters who fought so tirelessly, without rest or relief, that they were thought to be machine-like.
A large number of these cyborgs perished on January 19 when the Russian forces launched an attack, driving them from the ground floor to the second floor, then climbed onto the third floor where they “laid explosives and blew up the ceiling and the base of the second floor,” reported Sergei Loiko, a photojournalist on the frontlines for the Los Angeles Times.
Most of the 50 cyborgs – volunteer fighters for battalions – were wounded or killed, he reported, citing the firsthand account of Col. Yevgeny Moysyuk, identified as a brigade commander.
Such an operation could have been conducted only by professional Russian soldiers, he said.
“The language they spoke, the accents, the jargon, the vocabulary – all was Russian Russian, not even Ukrainian Russian,” he said, recalling their intercepted radio communications. “They were professionals, no question about it.”
While the cyborgs perished in the airport, Ukrainian soldiers were getting attacked outside.
“They drove up two tanks right in front of the terminal and shot it point-blank a few times and went away before our artillery could get them, and they would do it again and again, completely turning the terminal into a sieve,” Col. Moysyuk said. “We couldn’t get our tanks or armored vehicles there anymore because they had used the truce time to fortify all the side approaches and deploy all kinds of heavy weapons.”
In the end, all his brigade’s armored vehicles were destroyed or damaged, and 62 men were unaccounted for. At least 13 were dead, including the five in the vehicle. The rest, he said, had been taken prisoner, or worse.
Over all, 28 cyborgs are considered missing in action from the Donetsk airport battle, Vladislav Seleznev, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, reported on February 3.
To this day, the Ukrainian army has yet to remove all the corpses from the airport territory, said Mr. Kanonik, the Ukrainian member of the Coordinating Center. The terminals are destroyed and prisoners are being exchanged, he said.
The high losses at the airport battle prompted much criticism to be directed towards the leadership of Ukraine’s military.
Col. Moysyuk said the airport should have been evacuated days earlier. Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Pravyi Sektor paramilitary force, said he had earlier proposed razing the remnants of the airport’s terminals to Ukraine’s military commanders, but they disagreed.
Ukraine’s military leaders are often removed from reality and haven’t made any conclusions from the Ilovaisk tragedy of late August, said Mr. Yarosh, whose right arm was injured during the Donetsk airport battle.
“We have it easier, which is why we don’t have (official) status. The heck with them,” he told Hromadske TV from his hospital bed, referring to the volunteer battalions who don’t take orders from the military. “Before our eyes, a squadron was positioned like targets, without any logic.”
Getting wounded was a good thing because “I would have shot one of them with my own hands,” he said, referring to the army generals.
The lack of confidence in the army is widespread in Ukraine, leading to a growing problem of deserters who are avoiding the draft, with the latest, fourth round having been launched on January 20.
Yurii Lutsenko, the head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction, said on January 26 that legislation may be introduced to increase the punishment for army desertion and failing to follow orders in the battlefield.
More than 1,170 criminal cases have been opened so far against those suspected of avoiding mandatory military service, said Oleh Boiko, an official in charge of mobilization at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported on January 28 by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
Procurator General Vitalii Yarema claimed on January 16 that military prosecutors have filed charges against more than 1,000 Ukrainians for army desertion, though Mr. Boiko’s estimate was close to 200.
About 50-60 percent of those drafted in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast of western Ukraine don’t respond to their summonses, while 40 percent have fled abroad, Mr. Boiko estimated. Authorities said many Ukrainian men are reported to have settled in Polish and Romanian hotels and hostels near the Ukrainian border.
Meanwhile, the Russian Migration Service announced that Ukrainian citizens can extend their presence in the Russian Federation by 90 days in addition to the initial 90-day term as part of a deliberate policy – explicitly outlined by Russian President Vladimir Putin – to help Ukrainian men avoid the military draft.
More than 5,300 people have been killed in the Donbas war since it began in April of last year, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, reported on February 3. More than 12,200 have been injured.
“Bus stops, public transport, markets, schools, nurseries and hospitals in residential areas have become a battleground in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, which is a direct violation of international humanitarian law that regulates conducting armed conflicts,” he said in a statement.
Civilians have died in population centers controlled by both Ukrainian and Russian forces, he said.