“They fired from behind the backs of women and children”

“The first thing was flares. You look from the balcony and see them being shot up from that side, with no sound at first, and you know that something is going to begin now. Then you can hear mortar shells howl, but it is unclear what and where from is flying – complete disorientation. There was no place to run to because, oddly enough, there was no basement in that building. A bit of luck perhaps? I was sleepy, but when I was going to bed, I thought: do I really have to? Then I relaxed, for there are volunteers on duty and you can at least close your eyes. I woke up at 5 a.m. with an eerie feeling that something’s gone wrong. Silence. Complete silence. No small arms, no mortars.

“The worst thing in this situation is that you don’t know whether or not this will end. We arrived on Sunday, January 29, at the very beginning of the events. We thought they would shoot a little and stop, but they were not going to stop. For they begin from that side, ours can’t contain themselves and shoot in response. Passions run high, and it comes to artillery hysteria, when all the guns roar for 15-20 minutes. Then silence comes, and you think that’s the end of it, but it all begins again. One day Zhebrivskyi announced that fire exchange would be ceased at 12:00 in order to carry out evacuation. But that side went on shelling the city at 12 too, as if nothing had happened. We could clearly hear shells landing. At first, positions were hit in some way, but then we could see that they were either missing or deliberately shelling the civilian population, for when we drove through the city after the shootings, we saw some hit housing blocks that were a kilometer or so away from the military positions. In other words, they could not possibly miss if they aimed at the military. Buildings were hit on a staggered pattern. We saw a huge hole between the third and fourth floors of a five-storey building in the old uptown Avdiivka. You could easily look into the kitchen. When we came closer, we saw pink, rather than white, snow. It turned out that bricks had crumbled there.

“We stand in a small patio in the evening, smoke, and hear a loud rumble – must be the Grad rockets. We come into the house when communication has just been restored. The mother of a local boy has reached him on the phone from Donetsk and says weeping: ‘Hide, the Grads are firing from us.’ I was present at this conversation, and, in general, there were plenty of things like this there. Avdiivka is in fact a suburb of Donetsk, and people cross the line in both directions all the time. Militants fired from the city, from residential neighborhoods – they in fact stood behind the backs of women and children. It is virtually impossible to come to an agreement with them.”

Maryna Bondas, a Ukrainian now living in Germany, regularly visits the frontline zone as a volunteer (see “Maidan helped me to regain my Fatherland,” The Day, March 16, 2015). She was in Avdiivka in the days of greatest tension. Read the full text of the interview with her in one of our newspaper’s next issues.