SIEVIERODONETSK, Ukraine – A woman got out of the ambulance, crying, her hands covered in blood. Police in riot gear stormed a rally on Friday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck.
“Please, God, let him live,” said the woman, Olha. “You can’t imagine what a person he is. He’s a golden person.”
But the stretchers were already standing. Olha’s husband, Serhii, was killed at noon on Tuesday, another victim of the relentless artillery and gunfire that Russian forces have rained on this front-line city for three months.
Sievierodonetsk, a mining and industrial city, is located in the heart of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which puts it directly in Moscow’s sights. Rejected in the capital, Kyiv, Russian forces have directed all their forces to the east, with the aim of seizing much of the territory along the Russian border, although it has cost them.
Sievierodonetsk is also strategically critical of the Ukrainians, and they have spent weeks fiercely defending it. Earlier this month, Russian forces suffered heavy losses as they tried to cross the nearby Seversky Donets River and consolidate their position.
In Sievierodonetsk, this has meant months of trauma as Moscow tries to encircle the city and besiege it. Russian forces are now in place on three sides.
Olha, whose husband, Serhii, had just died in a Russian rocket attack on her apartment building.
Traveling to Sievierodonetsk is dangerous. To get here on Tuesday, a team of reporters from The New York Times drove a police escort through small towns and fields to avoid shelling from Russian positions, and then crossed a single bridge. lane which is the only route left to the city.
The remnants of the Russian bombing were on almost every street.
The fins of the rockets came out of the craters of the asphalt. A broken electrical tower and wires were covered in the street. And the burned cars, shredded by shrapnel and sometimes overturned, were abandoned where they had been blown up. A truck was hanging precariously by a bridge.
For Sievierodonetsk police officers, it was only one more day.
Officers have maintained a police presence in the city as well as in the neighboring town of Lysychansk, making provisions for the remaining population, picking up the dead and wounded and evacuating people from the front line.
“Many of them were nobody, but when the war started they became heroes,” Lugansk region police chief Oleh Hryhorov said of his agents. “A lot of them have stayed because they really understand that this is their duty.”
The ruins are visible on almost every street in Sievierodonetsk.
Although much of the region for which Chief Hryhorov is responsible has been occupied by Russian forces, he has managed to maintain a headquarters in Sievierodonetsk and commands a force composed mainly of natives from the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that Russia states as his. own. Many of them lost their homes eight years ago in the war in eastern Ukraine, and now they have lost everything a second time, he said.
As the Ukrainian army struggles to defend the city, fighting artillery and tanks to defend Russian advances, the police force has tried to meet the needs of the civilian population. Inside a warehouse, workers made lists of those in need of help and those requesting evacuation. A row of blankets on wooden pallets served as first aid. In the yard, people were filling buckets with a water tanker truck.
Meanwhile, the Russians have increased their bombing in recent days and a new assault seems imminent, the police chief said.
Now, even civilians who had chosen to stay at home, rejecting previous evacuation offers, are asking for help to get out, Chief Hryhorov said. The police take out 30 or 40 people a day.
The danger also increases for its agents, who are more than 100 in both settlements. On Tuesday, he held a meeting with his staff to draw up a strategy on what to do in the event of a siege by the Russians.
For now, they will stay, he said, as there is no one else to attend to people.
Ukrainian forces have been concentrated in the area.
Of a pre-war population of 100,000, thousands still live, many living in communal basements and air raid shelters, others staying at home in apartments or small wooden houses amidst gardens and tree-lined streets. Some are pensioners. Some do not have the means – or inclination – to escape. Still others sympathize with the Russian government.
Many seemed simply overwhelmed by the events.
While a team of officers was unloading food supplies for families in apartment blocks in the old town, two women approached the police commander. They wanted to be evacuated, but they took care of their mothers, both of whom were hit by a stroke.
“I’m out of money, out of pennies,” Viktoriya, 49, said as she began to cry. “I have no relatives or where to go.”
Viktoriya had been in contact with an American aid group that had offered to help when the city still had telephone and Internet connections, but she said they never came. Her mother, Valentina, is 87 and can’t walk, she said.
As he spoke, the sniper’s fire whistled nearby. The police commander crouched down and turned to look for the impact. But the two women seemed oblivious to the shot, as well as the explosions that sounded nearby.
Residents at the entrance of their shelter in the basement.
The second woman, Lyudmila, 52, said she lived in a fourth-floor apartment and did not dare go down to the basement when there was a bombing because she could not bear to leave her mother alone upstairs.
“I have to feed it with my hand,” he said. “We sit down and feel scared and don’t know what to do.”
The apartment block had once been hit by a shell and an apartment was partially burned.
“We will not promise, but we will try,” the police chief said in response to the woman’s evacuation request.
Police teams have been gathering those who want to leave in small groups and have taken them to a meeting point, where they are then taken out in an armored bus.
The operation is full of errors and uncertainties, including the emergence of new bombings, which slow down any movement. But as teams gathered at police headquarters in Lysychansk to plan the next evacuation, they said the latest delay was caused by a group of evacuees demanding additional guarantees.
Other officers attended to those for whom aid was too late.
Three policemen, fighting the shell fire, marched to collect and bury the dead in Lysychansk. They drove a white van to a house where a 65-year-old woman, whom neighbors called Grandma Masha, was lying in the backyard with her arms outstretched under a blanket. Her dog growled and barked from her kennel while officers placed her in a corpse bag and carried her to a stretcher.
Residents of an apartment building preparing lunch on Tuesday, despite the Russian bombing nearby.
Grandma Masha was diabetic and the war made it difficult for her to get her medicines, said her neighbor, Lena, 39. Her son had left with her family and was unable to return when she fell ill, Lena said. Like most of the people interviewed for this article, he preferred to give only his name, for security reasons.
“I didn’t want that to happen at all,” he stated. “It’s a completely stupid war, but no one asked me for my opinion.”
Police picked up another body, from a 60-year-old man named Sasha who had lived in a small wooden house with a garden covered with vegetation near a military base.
“There was a shell fire and then he died,” said his neighbor and friend Mikhail, 51, exasperated. “He said he was sick, but where should we take him in case of an emergency?”
Sievierodonetsk has a hospital. But the only doctor there treats 30 patients, has been heavily bombed and is virtually inaccessible, city officials said.
Police officers drove to the cemetery on the outskirts of the city and drove back in their van to a line of narrow trenches dug by a backhoe. They took the bags out of the van and carried them unceremoniously to the trench where there were already a dozen bags for corpses.
They have buried 150 civilians in three months, said the official in charge, who only gave his first name, Daniel, 26 years old. There were only a few relatives to arrange the proper burials, and the rest went to the communal graves.
“It’s very frightening to get used to it,” Chief Hryhorov said.
His way of dealing with war is to focus on one task at a time, he said.
“And tomorrow will be another day and there will be some new tasks,” he said. “Probably each of us should do the right thing, and the result will be a common victory.”
Damaged vehicles land where the explosions send them.