At a crossroads on the dusty edge of Debaltseve, a pair of elderly ladies waited with a pile of bulging bags for a lift out of town.
For company they had each other, the charred wreckage of two Ukrainian armoured vehicles and, on the other side of a mortar-pitted and shrapnel-strewn main road, a group of militants who moved with the supercilious ease of victory.
“Son, do you have a cigarette? Or even two?” asked one of the ladies.
On another corner of the crossroads was a building shattered by missile fire, and a billboard proclaiming “Ukraine above all!” – the traditional patriotic slogan spelled out in the nation’s blue and yellow colours.
But Ukraine is bloodied and reeling from a year of deadly revolution, the loss of Crimea to Russia, and a Moscow-backed insurgency that has claimed 6,000 lives and has just taken another deadly turn.
The latest wound has been inflicted here, at this major road and rail junction that fell into the hands of Russian-backed separatists last week, after weeks of fighting that killed, according to officials, 179 Ukrainian soldiers.
Kiev says another 81 people are missing and 110 were captured, but many Ukrainians say the figures understate losses suffered by state forces in their latest bitter defeat to a better organised and better equipped enemy.
Russian president Vladimir Putin mockingly commiserated with Ukraine last week, saying it must be tough to lose to a rag-tag militia of "miners and tractor-drivers".
The West says Ukraine’s forces – comprising an army ravaged by 25 years of neglect and battalions who are eager but inexperienced – are often battling Russian soldiers and insurgents trained by Moscow’s security services.
Resigned
Russian newspaper
Kommersant
reported how men fighting for the rebels admitted to being Russian soldiers who, with encouragement and instruction from their officers, resigned from the army to come to Ukraine.
With modern weapons that flow freely from Russia, they allegedly do the toughest fighting and then withdraw, leaving local rebels to man checkpoints; if they are killed, Moscow can plausibly deny responsibility for these expert “volunteers”.
The havoc they can wreak lines the road to Debaltseve.
Ukrainian tanks and armoured personnel carriers are strewn around the landscape, on tarmac cracked and studded from rocket strikes, on tracks leading towards the elusive shelter of woodland, and in frosty fields heaped with what appear to be huge molehills, where missiles have landed in an earth-churning hail.
Echoing accounts from government soldiers who escaped Debaltseve, a staggering amount of ammunition appears to have been used here, with roadside trees severed and scarred for kilometres by the fire that rained down on Ukrainian positions.
Two dead soldiers lay at one checkpoint, boots gone – apparently stolen – their beige socks sinking into the mud. The checkpoint has been reduced to mounds of splintered wood and murderous twists of metal, shrapnel from missiles that scored direct hits on the turrets of tanks and peeled open their armour like cheap cans.
Cossacks wearing black fur hats with scarlet crowns scavenged in the wreckage, salvaging what they could fight with or perhaps sell for scrap; one stood inside the engine bay of a blasted armoured car, picking fastidiously through its oily entrails.
Fearsome
Past the crossroads where the two ladies stood, a fearsome bite has been taken out of a bridge leading into town, and what remains is barely wide enough for one car to pass.
Ten metres below run the railway lines that give Debaltseve junction strategic importance and which, along with the local coalmine, was a vital source of work for the town’s preconflict population of about 25,000 people.
The tracks are quiet now, littered with rocket and mortar casings and roamed by ravenous dogs whose nerves are shot from months of shelling.
The people aren’t faring much better.
In weak but welcome winter sunshine yesterday, hundreds of residents queued up on the main square for food aid from the Red Cross, and at a soup kitchen and a generator where they could charge their phones.
“There’s been no light, heat or water for weeks,” said Nadezhda Sidorenko (75). “It was hell, my dear comrades, hell.
“I’ve got health problems from head to toe, so I didn’t go into the basement like everyone else. I saw all the shooting, the missiles, the tanks. All my doors and windows are smashed, but my son and I are alive.”
Katya Bikhtiryova (19), who studies biology in the nearby city of Luhansk, said she had rejected calls to evacuate Debaltseve. “Every street is damaged, but why should we leave our own homes?” she said.
As rebel gunmen sauntered through Debaltseve, its residents blamed Kiev for the destruction.
“Joining Russia would be best, but independence would be fine,” said Tatyana Kurlova (57). “Look around – how could we live in Ukraine again after this?”
