SIVERSK DISTRICT, Ukraine – Oleksandr Chaplik, one of the few civilians still driving on a road leading to the battlefield, stopped and leaned out of the car window to exchange information with a villager.
He brought supplies to his people, one of the few still in Ukrainian hands on the path of Russian advance.
“We’re surrounded on all sides,” Mr. Chaplik, 55, rancher and rancher. “It is the second month without electricity, without water, without gas, without communication, without internet, without news. Basically, horror. “
“But people need food,” he said. “I am a businessman. So I’m doing my job. “
Chaplik owns about 75 hectares of land near the city of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian and Ukrainian troops have been fighting to control intense street fighting in recent days. The field around his farm is under almost constant bombardment by Russian forces trying to encircle the easternmost Ukrainian forces and besiege Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.
The roar of various rocket launchers fired south of the farm shook the windows and doors of his house. “Don’t worry, they’re Ukrainians,” he said as he toured his farm. “Here, thank God, the boys stand firm.”
But the war has come dangerously close. Bomb craters and artillery shells scar their fields. Leaning against the wall of one of his barns stood the carcasses of a dozen rockets that Mr. Chaplik had picked up around the farm. The rockets dropped cluster bombs, he said, still polluting their barn fields.
Some of the Russian cluster munitions that Mr. Chaplik has been found on his farm, in an area surrounded on three sides by Russian forces and where fierce battles are taking place. “We’re surrounded on all sides,” Mr. Chaplik.
“They want to eat grass,” he said as he walked through the stalls of his 35 dairy cows. “But I can’t let the cows loose on this grass because of these bombs, and I’m afraid they’ll fall into the craters of the bombs.”
Mr. Chaplik is a broken connection to the world for his increasingly isolated people, who demanded that he not be told why he would not suffer the retribution of Russian troops. At considerable risk to himself, he provides vital supplies and information and continues to produce food as best he can.
Many other farmers have left the area but said they could not. “I can’t let people down,” he said. “If I leave, I won’t be able to go back to the village, I won’t be able to look people in the eye.”
But as the war approached, he had to reduce his business as he tried to keep the farm producing and the workers fed and paid. With utilities cut off, it runs milk machines with generators, but it can only run its refrigerators for 12 hours a day.
“I used to make almost 100 different dairy products,” he said. “I have a two-year-old Parmesan cheese. I made unique products that no one else made, sour cream, cream, mozzarella, burrata ”.
But without electricity it has had to reduce production. There was a shortage of containers, he added. He took two cheeses with flowery skin out of the fridge. “They’re not good,” he said.
A shell crater near a Ukrainian armored column in a line of trees near the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, where fierce battles are currently raging in the Donetsk region east of Ukraine, this week. Fields burn after being hit by defensive flares fired by Russian planes. Friday in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine.
It has relocated its food production operations to various parts of the country, placing part of its dairy production in the nearby market town of Bakhmut, where it already has an organic meat and dairy store, and relocating its meat production plants in a relatively safe place. cities of Dnipro and Lviv.
His family has also moved. His wife is a teacher and two of his children are college students, so they had to go somewhere with internet to continue working, he said. They called him daily, begging him to join them, but he said he still had work to do.
Their workforce has shrunk as many villagers marched with their families to safer areas of the country. “I have fields and machines and diesel but I don’t have the workers,” he said. But he gathered the remaining 10 workers, so now they live and eat together.
Two teenagers were sweeping the cow stops. “They are the daughters of my workers. They are children, but I have no workers, “he said.
A pensioner, Lyudmila, 68, has intervened to run her shop in the village.
“Did you catch cucumbers?” he shouted, as Mr. Chaplik unloaded bottled water and fresh vegetables from his van.
“Without him we would be lost,” he said. The villagers could not travel to the market and the prices were much higher anyway, he said.
Mr. Chaplik runs the risk of driving to a nearby town to keep his village shop stocked. Without electricity for refrigeration, some of its best cheeses and other products have been spoiled.
But the tension is on Mr. Chaplik’s face. Looks like he hasn’t slept in days. He complained of toothache and a contraction around his eye. One of the most difficult things, he said, was answering panicked phone calls from relatives trying to reach the villagers who had been left behind. The mobile phone service in the village has been deactivated, but they know that Mr. Chaplik drives into the city every day to the market, where the mobile service continues, and they bombard him with calls.
“I’m getting nervous,” he said, rejecting another phone call. “I’m working 14 to 15 hours a day. I’m physically tired.”
So he is now arranging for his son to carry a mobile antenna so that the villagers can keep in touch with their relatives.
You see more problems on the horizon. The war has disrupted agriculture and food production to such an extent that people in eastern Ukraine could go hungry in the coming months, he warned.
Potatoes are already planted, which will feed the villagers, he said, but meat and milk will be in short supply.
“If I don’t prepare feed for my cows, they will die this winter,” he said. “I can’t cut the hay because of the field bombs and I need 12,000 bales of hay and I don’t have the workers.”
And as he continued the progress of the war and the steady advance of Russian troops, he said he was likely to take control of the village and lose the farm he had been building for more than 20 years.
Neighbors of Mr. Chaplik in his garden. A farmer grazes cattle near Mr.’s farm. Chaplik.
Russia-backed separatist forces seized the area in 2014, but were repulsed a few months later. But this time he said he did not expect President Vladimir V. Putin to stop. The Russian leader wants to seize a strip of land from the city of Kharkiv in the northeast to Odessa in the southwest, he said.
“It won’t calm down,” he said. “He will fight for a year, two, three, until he achieves his goal.”
Mr. Chaplik has been killing his pigs, so there is only one left, asleep in his corral. Newborn calves will also have to be slaughtered, he said. “It’s a shame.”
If the Russians came, he added, he would have to leave his guard dogs, six German shepherds. “I couldn’t stand dropping them,” he said. “I’ll let them go.”
If the shells got too close, he would grab his workers and leave, he said. “I’ll start again,” he said. “Give me a piece of land, in Ukraine, in the United States, wherever it is. I can rebuild a big business.”
As it becomes more difficult to feed his animals, Mr. Chaplik has been sacrificing them.