The soldiers take shelter from the cold inside the bujanka. The quintessential Soviet van has a heating system that turns its interior into an almost tropical paradise. Outside, on the Bakhmut front in eastern Ukraine, it is raining and the temperature does not rise above eight degrees. Men from the Grad Rocket Company of the Ukrainian 17th Armored Brigade wait for hours for orders from the battalion commander to go into action. His best friend is his mobile phone and the Internet connection that arrives via satellite, through an antenna from the Starlink company.
“Most of the time in war is about waiting,” says the company commander, Lieutenant Volodimir. At the beginning of May, EL PAÍS accompanied two of its three Grad rocket units in a camouflaged position on the second line of the front, 12 kilometers from Bajmut. The fiercest battle of the war is fought in multiple layers, from the trenches or from the rear of both armies. The Grads of the Benjamin Company -the code name of their commander- will be ready in 50 minutes to position themselves within kilometers of the indicated objective. They will be in the attack position for no more than four minutes: they will shoot and leave with shotguns to avoid being identified by the Russian artillery.
Volodimir (right), commander of a grad missile launch company, prepares something to eat while waiting for the order to fire on the Chasiv Yar front, near Bajmut.LUIS DE VEGA
Until then, the six men manning the two rocket launcher trucks have to make do with what’s at hand. On a table that they have set up with boxes of explosives they play cards or dominoes; the bujanka driver uses his knife to shape a piece of wood into a spoon; Yevgen, 24, was a bartender in kyiv and lists the cocktails he makes best; Inside the van, 22-year-old Danil is playing World of Tanks, one of the most popular war videogames, on his phone. His favorite tank in the game is the Kranvagn, an armored prototype from the 1950s that Sweden designed to stop a possible Soviet invasion of Scandinavia.
The commander drinks one tea after another while waiting to receive orders. In telephone groups with other brigade officers they share possible coordinates of the enemy and satellite images. One of the groups bears the name NATO. The orders are detailed in a digital program that updates to the minute, and with high precision, the location of the enemy, identifying different levels of certainty of the military assets that can be found there. Volodimir does not part with the digital tablet on which he has all the confidential information from the front, separated by colors: blue, the Ukrainian units; red, the Russians.
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The duty rotations are three days, three days that the soldiers will sleep next to the Grad, in holes dug in the ground, between the trees, because at night is when the Russian artillery and aviation go hunting for their positions . On the Liman front, 50 kilometers to the northeast, the rotations of the men of the 63rd Brigade are only one day because the enemy is right in front of them.
Mortars, shells and helicopter missiles are constantly falling into their trenches, says Walter, the code name of the captain of the company stationed on a lake. On the other shore is the gray zone, some five kilometers in length that neither side controls.
On the left, Captain Walter, 59, commander of the 1st Company of the 63rd Infantry Brigade in the vicinity of the Liman front. LUIS DE VEGA
The MT-LB awaits the EL PAÍS team five kilometers from the front. The base is located in a village between Liman and Svatove, between the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. From there, this Soviet Armored Infantry Carrier will cross abandoned farm fields to the second line of trenches. The first is located 500 meters ahead.
The helmet, always unbuttoned
The first instruction that soldiers communicate to journalists is that the helmet must be worn unbuttoned: if a bullet hits it and it is fastened, the projectile will pierce it. On the other hand, if it is not tied, the bullet will be projected next to the helmet. One of the soldiers, meanwhile, recalls his experience in Bakhmut, one of the most brutal fronts in this war: “Sometimes 20 shells hit us a minute. It was difficult but we endured. We didn’t go back a meter.”
Around the trenches, pods of Soviet mobile howitzers pion, a projectile of 203 mm caliber, one of the most powerful in the world, accumulate. The mission there is to contain an attempted Russian advance. The front has not moved in this position since last September, when the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive liberated the Kharkov province and set foot in the Luhansk province.
Sitting at the table where his men eat, Walter, a veteran of the 2014 Donbas war and the Battle of Bakhmut, considers it a near-suicidal mission to try to cross the front at the lake, but adds that the Russians continue to use sending waves as a tactic. of men to die to advance a few meters. “The Russians have not learned in this war,” Walter says. An officer of the 63rd Brigade illustrates it with the fingers of one hand. The tactic is the same, and the enemy always repeats the same mistake: in a line of defensive positions, the middle finger retreats and the Russian units go straight in and take it, while the ring and index fingers encircle them.
Video: CARLOS MARTINEZ
VIDEO | A member of the 1st Company of the 63rd Infantry Brigade shows a shelter.
This enveloping tactic is precisely what General Oleksandr Sirski, commander of the Ukrainian Land Army, is attempting in the Battle of Bakhmut: withdrawing from the center to isolate the Russians inside the city.
Ukrainian sentinels wait on the lake to set a trap for the enemy, or control the arrival of the air threat. Like every day. “They are all the same here,” says a soldier. “There are no Mondays, no Tuesdays, no Sundays, no holidays.” They see missiles pass daily towards Kramatorsk, the city that serves as the capital of the Donetsk region in the hands of Ukraine, also drone bombs that try to annul with units armed with Stinger, the American surface-to-air missiles that became famous in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the mujahideen used them against the helicopters of the Red Army.
Roman leads a team of two soldiers equipped with a Stinger. Crouching in the bushes, he and his partner are readying their weapons when they hear the drone of a drone engine. The entire position goes on alert trying to identify the source of the sound and Walter forces the press team to be evacuated with the MT-LB.
Post-traumatic stress, an invisible enemy
Back in the village converted into a temporary base, the invisible enemy of the soldiers appears: post-traumatic stress. A soldier breaks down in tears and is comforted by two comrades. Vitali is the officer who serves as the therapist in the battalion. He confirms that the soldier has had a nervous breakdown resulting from a concussion caused by an explosion that has left him with mental scars.
Vitali is an engineer by profession and in February he was mobilized. He took a course to learn the Army protocols for “psychological and moral support.” His task is to detect which soldiers need psychological assistance, including being removed from the front.
Illustrates the methods learned to care for a soldier in a dazed state. He asks one of the journalists to sit in the chair at his desk, surrounded by bunk beds, sleeping bags and mats: “The first thing to do is get closer, take the weapons from him, pass them on to someone else, hide them. Ask him, softly: ‘Are you listening to me, how do you feel?’ Then you hold him like this, with your fingers you begin to massage him here… Then his hands. You massage for a couple of minutes, then you take his hands like this, with your fists, you just sit in front of him, hold his hands, and talk to him non-stop, very softly. This is done so that the person in a stupor begins to listen to you. To activate the reflexes. Then you have to say unpleasant things to the ear ”.
The first thing to do is approach him, take away his weapons (…) Ask him, softly: ‘Are you listening to me, how do you feel?’
Vitali, responsible for the psychological assistance of soldiers
Video: CARLOS MARTINEZ
VIDEO | Vitali serves as a therapist in the battalion.
What unpleasant things are said to a soldier knocked out by an explosion? Vitali gives some examples: “That his wife cheats on him, that his brother has died. She will bring the man out of a stupor, he will begin to react to the environment. Then, when he comes to, you have to explain that it was necessary, so that he doesn’t get angry. And he thanks you.”
The mental health of the Ukrainian military is, according to experts and the military, a major problem that the country will have to face, a problem for which it will need abundant resources that will be difficult to obtain. Nearly half a million men and women have already gone through combat experiences, according to figures provided to EL PAÍS by high ranks of the Army, and Ukraine does not have enough therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists prepared to care for those who need it.
Yuliia Sobolta, a therapist from the DoLadu organization, which has specialized since 2017 in psychological assistance to soldiers suffering from disorders, admitted that only now are military establishments, by nature conservative in an already conservative society, beginning to accept that the infantry on the front perform meditative exercises to stabilize your state of mind.
One of the soldiers of the 63rd Infantry Brigade in the surroundings of the Liman front (Donetsk region). LUIS DE VEGA
“When you are fighting, you don’t have much time to think about what is happening,” reflects another soldier, Roman, 52, 23 of whom have lived in the Madrid municipality of Alcalá de Henares. “You can say that you get used to war over time. For me it is not the same when I started, in March 2022, as it is now. But when you think about it, it’s hard. It is very difficult for comrades to die.” He lost one with whom he had been at the front from the beginning and he died very young, only 28 years old.
There is still a long way to go, as evidenced by the laughter that caused the relaxation exercises that Vitali carried out with the journalist. Despite the skepticism of some, his experience at the front has convinced him that where he can be most useful is fighting in the war that is waged in the head of each soldier. For this reason, Vitali says, he will put aside his career as an engineer to study psychology.
Credits
Coordination and format: Guiomar del Ser and Brenda Valverde
Art direction and design: Fernando Hernández
Layout and programming: Alejandro Gallardo
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