Inside Donetsk, when residents flee the attacks on the Ukrainian region Putin, wants to control

The region of Donetsk eastern Ukraine has long been in the sights of Moscow. Vladimir Putin is reported to freeze the war in return Full control over it.

Russia already controls 70% of the memories and almost all neighboring Lugansk and makes slow but persistent success.

I head to the front town of Donetsk Dobropilia with two humanitarian volunteers, just 8 km (five miles) from Russia’s positions. They are on the mission to bring sick, the elderly and children to safer earth.

At first it goes like a clock. We will accelerate into the city in an armored car equipped with a roofing equipment that gets in 130 km/h (80 km/h). The road is covered with a high green mesh that obscures the visibility from above – protecting it from Russian drones.

This is the second trip in the morning and the streets are mostly empty. Few other residents leave their homes only to collect deliveries quickly. Russian attacks come daily.

The city already looks abandoned and was without water for a week. Each building we were passing was damaged, with some reduced to the ruins.

In the previous five days, Laartz, a 31-year-old German, and a 19-year-old Ukrainian, who works in a charity universal assistance of Ukraine, made dozens of trips for evacuation.

During the week, small groups of Russian troops violated defense in the city, causing fear that the front line of the so -called “fortress” of Ukraine – some of the most protected parts of the Ukrainian Front – can collapse.

Additional troops were sent to the area, and the Ukrainian authorities say the situation was stabilized. But most residents feel that it’s time to go.

As the evacuation group arrives, 56 -year -old Vitali Kalinichenko is waiting for his apartment unit, with a plastic bag full in his hands.

“All my windows were broken, look, they all flew on the second floor. I am the only one who remained,” he says.

He is dressed in a gray T -shirt and black shorts, and the right leg is tied. Mr. Kalinichenko indicates a crater, except for some roses, where the drone gusts crashed a couple of evenings earlier, breaking the windows and cutting leg. The engine from another drone lies in the neighbor’s garden.

When we are going to leave, the laarch will notice the drone, and we cover again under the trees. His pocket drone detector shows several Russian drones in the area.

An eldest woman in a summer dress and a straw hat goes by with the buyer. He warns her about the drone, and she accelerates her pace. The explosion gets nearby, its sound is repeated in the nearby apartments.

But before we can try to leave, there is another family to save, near.

Laarz goes on foot to find them, excluding the equipment for the passage car for drones to save battery power. “If you hear the drone, these are two switches on the medium console, turn it on,” he says, disappearing around the corner. Jamer is only effective against some Russian drones.

A series of explosions hit the neighborhood. A woman, to get water with her dog, runs to cover.

Laarchs returns with greater evacuation, and with drones in the air, left the city even faster than he arrived.

Inside the escort, I sit next to Anton, 31 years old. His mother remained behind. she shouted, leaving, and he hoped she would go too fast.

In the war, switching the advanced lines, the cities are lost and won and lost again, but when Russia is moving and the fate of the region hanging in the negotiations, this may be the last time Anton and other evacuated seeing their homes.

Anton says he had never left the city before. I ask him if Ukraine should abandon the Donbass – a rich resource of a larger region consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk.

“We need to sit at the negotiating table and eventually resolve this conflict quietly. Without blood, without casualties,” he says.

But the 19 -year -old variation feels in a different way. “We can never trust Putin and Russia, whatever they say, and we have experience. If we give them the Donbass, it will not stop anything, but it will give Russia more opportunities for another attack,” she tells me.

The situation in the Donbass is becoming more dangerous for Ukraine, as Russia is slowly but steadily moving. President Floodimir Zelensky mocked the opinion that it could be lost by the end of this year, predicting that Russia would take another four years to completely do what Russia remained.

But Ukraine will be unlikely to take place a significant territory without new weapons and additional support from the West.

This part of Donetsk is crucial for the defense of Ukraine. If it was lost or given to Russia, the neighboring regions of Kharkiv and the Capery – and beyond – would be more risk.

The cost of detention is estimated in the life and parts of the body of Ukrainian soldiers.

Later, I go to a nearby field hospital under the cover of darkness. The activity of drones never stop, and the war has suffered, and the dead can be safely obtained at night.

Russian losses are much higher, perhaps three times more and more, but it has a greater ability to absorb losses than Ukraine.

The wounded begins to arrive, the cases are steadily becoming more serious when the night is stretched in the morning. Victims are a struggle in Pokrovsk, a city that Russia is trying to capture throughout the year and is now partly surrounded. It is a key city in defense of Donetsk, and the fighting was tough.

The first man comes to the consciously, a bullet wound to the chest from the shootout. Next, another man will come in the forties, covered with shards. Two days and three attempts to save it, such was the intensity of the fighting. Next, the person whose right foot was almost completely undermined by an unmanned blow on the way from Pokrovsk to peace.

Surgeon and Snr Lt Dima, 42, move from the patient to the patient. This is a medical stabilization department, so its task is to pay the injury as soon as possible and send them to the main hospital for further treatment. “It’s hard because I know I can do more, but I don’t have time,” he tells me.

After all this massacre, I also ask him whether to add Donbass to bring peace.

“We must stop (war), but we don’t want to stop it,” he says. “We want to return our territory, our people, and we must punish Russia for what they have done.”

He was exhausted, the victims were heavier, dozens a day, because the invasion of Russia, and the injuries – the worst, which the doctors saw ever since the war began, mostly from the drones.

“We just want to go home to live in a world without this nightmare, this blood, this death,” he says.

On the passage that day, between corn and sunflowers, a mile of a recently cleared barbed wire in the sunlight. They run next to the raised shores of the red land, deep trenches and neat lines of concrete pyramids anti -tank dragons. Everyone is designed to slow down any sudden Russian promotion.

It is believed that there are more than 100,000 troops in Russia, waiting to take advantage of another opportunity as previous violations around the benefits.

These new fortifications, cut in the Ukrainian dirty graphics, worsening the situation here in Donetsk. What is left of the region can still be transferred to diplomacy, but so far, Ukraine, bloody and exhausted, remains intended to fight every centimeter.