I went to Ukraine again, only this time I was on the Ukrainian army side because I’d become a wanted man for the Donetsk rebels, who didn’t take kindly to my photos of their funeral. In any case, I felt it was important for an observer to see both sides of the equation, something that is not always easy to do for a war reporter. I’d managed to do it during my several trips to Nepal in 2005, first moving with the Maoist rebels, and subsequently with the Gurkhas in the regular army. Covering both sides helps to confirm the fact that soldiers are very similar all over the world, acting mainly as vehicles for less visible powers and principalities.
I traveled to cities like Kramatorsk, which had been shelled by rebels with powerful Grad rockets from nearly twenty miles away.
Then I did a piece together with Ukrainian journalist Elena Savchuk about female fighters in the Aidar Battalion, based near Luhansk. The photos caught a lot of flak when they appeared in the Guardian because one of the vans in the background had some neo-Nazi markings stenciled on it. Obviously the fair-skinned female volunteers in the Aidar Battalion had some white supremacist comrades-in-arms.
The presence of far-right neo-Nazis on both sides of the cease-fire line is well documented. Ukraine’s other source of twentieth-century horror came from the Stalinist legacy. Although the ultranationalists were still a minority in Ukrainian society, and the Nazi collaborators tended to be concentrated in western Ukraine, which had only been absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1939, no one in contemporary Ukraine above a certain age could escape having to deal with the communist regime in one form or another. Almost everyone worked the system as best they could; only a tiny minority were dissidents, and they tended to pay a steep price for their dissent. When the Soviet Union disintegrated and the full extent of Stalinist malfeasance became common knowledge, Ukrainian society underwent a radical examination of conscience. In a sense, the only people who were clean of conceptual complicity in the crimes that took place in these bloodlands were the utterly indifferent, the lobotomized proles. Then, in the post-Soviet era, these indifferent innocents were the first to fall prey to aspiring oligarchs whose overriding concern was to make money.
So when the neo-Nazi junta in Kyiv bombed the neo-Stalinist Muscovite terrorists—or when the bloodthirsty dictator Assad bombed the radical jihadist terrorists, for that matter—it was not unlike a desperate cancer patient letting loose on a tumor with radiation or chemotherapy. By killing cells that have run amok they hope to preserve the rest of the body.
* * *
CANCER IS AN APT METAPHOR for the wars I’ve witnessed in my little bracket of time alive. When I was cuffed to the bed in Syria, chipping paint off the wall and imagining maps of conquest, I was just eking out my own survival, trying to stay afloat through the process of metastasis. I felt like a healthy cell observing all the other cells around me becoming irreparably damaged. And I knew the longer I was there, the harder it would be for me to avoid getting altered within or engulfed entirely.
Nations at war and rebels fighting oppression tend to imagine their adversaries as tumors to be kept at bay, controlled, eliminated. In Syria I got caught in the rip current of a Sunni-Shia struggle that had ramified beyond any easy distinctions and was now braiding into the broader Muslim-Christian struggles ebbing and flowing through a history of caliphates, crusades and colonialism. I was watching the process play out at the microscopic level, but at the time I was too preoccupied with survival, too scared to see it in perspective.
Whether it’s dictatorship versus democracy, communism versus capitalism, Christianity versus Islam, or any confrontation among the countless subsets of nested identities, civilizations have a way of keeping healthy by recognizing the “other” as a potential menace. All those who would dismiss the idea of “clash of civilizations” seem to be denying the obvious. For my own part, I needed to accommodate my behavior to the “others” who had taken me hostage. But I never denied that they were a threat to my life. Had I done so and dismissed the clash aspect of civilization, I may have wound up with an AK-47 in my hands fighting alongside my captors. Paradoxically, my dismissal of the clash in order to embrace the other could have ultimately turned me into a jihadi, out to destroy the very stuff I was made of.
For anyone who wants peace in the world, preventing cells from running amok would seem to be the solution (at least in this admittedly reductive metaphor), just as prevention may be the best way to stave off cancer. Unfortunately, anyone with a cursory understanding of history cannot but be aware of the fact that we are still at a point in human evolution in which the most effective means of dealing with these perceived tumors are violent: neutralization and excision.
It’s hard to imagine an alternative healing solution for the world’s ills that doesn’t smack of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Prevention is an ideal to shoot for. Alas, human civilization has millennia of momentum behind it in which mutual antagonisms have informed our cultures and consciousness, and the damage cannot be undone by simply wishing it away. We’re living in an age of metastasis, an age in which miracles are hard to imagine.
ENTER THE KESSEL
THE CEASE-FIRE LINE after the first Minsk agreement was an unruly series of twists and turns that formed natural salients. A common military tactic is to close in on the base of a salient from two flanks, creating what’s known as a pincer movement. Once the pincer is closed and the troops within the salient are surrounded, it’s known as a pocket. In Russian, these pockets are called kotyol, from the German kessel, which means cauldron. The metaphor is apt because the troops inside are still numerous enough to be boiling with activity and capable of engaging in heated battle, at least in the beginning. After the pincer closes and the troops become surrounded, either they surrender, they break out, or the contents boil to death—civilians as well as soldiers.
This part of Ukraine saw one of the most successful kessels in history. In September 1941, during the First Battle of Kiev, the Germans surrounded nearly the entire Southwest Front of the Red Army, encircling 450,000 Soviet soldiers. Casualties—killed, missing and wounded—ran up to 700,000 during the monthlong battle. And that was only on the Soviet side.
Such numbers are unimaginable today. Five years of the current Syrian War hasn’t produced as many casualties as just that single battle. In my lifetime, only the various Congo Wars, where I actually got my first experience in combat photography, approach those numbers: estimates range from two to five million excess deaths due to a decade of sporadic fighting. But in that largely ignored war it was a question of militias destroying remote jungle villages and civilian casualties. You didn’t have mechanized forces and millions of infantrymen arrayed against each other.
To the east of the Donbas, in Stalingrad, the most significant kessel of World War II took place, which proved to be the turning point in Europe. In September 1942 the German army cornered the Soviets in the city named after Stalin himself, against the banks of the Volga River. The battle degenerated into house-to-house warfare. Both sides poured in reinforcements. Then, in November 1942, the Soviets launched Operation Uranus and encircled the entire German Sixth Army. The cauldron boiled for months. By February 1943 General Friedrich Paulus of the Sixth Army had surrendered. All told, the five-month battle saw nearly two million casualties.
No matter how I tried, I simply couldn’t imagine such numbers. Already what I’d seen in my career was horrific enough. And when I looked at all the young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers at the checkpoints or riding armored personnel carriers and tanks, I couldn’t help thinking that their grandparents had lived through those million-casualty battles.
The most prominent salient on the front line established by the Minsk Accords was in Debaltseve, a city with a strategic rail hub about halfway between Donetsk and Luhansk. The Ukrainian army controlled it and the rebels needed it so they could transport goods and arms more easily from Russia. Without Debaltseve, large rail shipments going from Russia to Donetsk had to pass through Rostov-on-Don, to the sou
theast.
* * *
THE BATTLE FOR DEBALTSEVE started in earnest around January 16, 2015, when heavy shelling on the part of rebels, flush with matériel brought in from Russia via “humanitarian convoys,” started pounding the Ukrainians’ flanks along the road from Debaltseve to Artemivsk, about twenty miles to the northwest.
I based myself in Artemivsk, which was controlled by the Ukrainian army, at the home of an evangelical Christian family (a rarity in this overwhelmingly Orthodox part of Ukraine). The road between Artemivsk and Debaltseve was still open and being used by the Ukrainians to bring in reinforcements and ammunition, and bring out the wounded. I found a driver who would take me into Debaltseve to photograph the remaining civilians.
On my first day there, I met Yevgeny, a short man in his thirties who worked for the Red Cross. Like the family that put me up, he was also an evangelical Christian. He drove a Red Cross SUV and handed out plastic bags full of food and supplies to a long line of people, mostly elderly, who were very disciplined as they waited for the humanitarian aid. There was constant shelling all around. He smiled at me as he paused to take a deep drag from his cigarette, so I walked up to him. He spoke some English and I asked him what he was doing.
“Every day I come here to distribute aid packages. I drive on that road, an hour and a half. Very dangerous. The Ukrainian army is being compressed on all sides.”
A few of the locals realized I was a foreigner and they had Yevgeny translate. “Tell him Poroshenko is a bastard,” they said. Most of the remaining inhabitants, Yevgeny told me, were just waiting for the Russians to come. But the Red Cross driver struck me as someone mainly concerned with helping his people. He considered anyone from the outside with weapons—whether Ukrainians from the west or Russians from the east—as undesirable elements in his native Donbas.
On the whole, I saw very few Ukrainian soldiers in the middle of Debaltseve. They were mostly concentrated on the outskirts, trying to put up a defense and keep the pincer from closing. I knew there had been heavy fighting in the nearby towns of Yenakiyeve and Vuhlehirsk, and that the rebels were gaining ground with the help of the Russian regular army, almost closing the road several times. There had been reports of troops with very Asiatic features, no doubt from Siberia.
I asked Yevgeny if I could come with him the following day and he agreed.
* * *
IN THE MORNING I had my driver drop me off in the center of Artemivsk. Yevgeny was already there. I was nervous. It was gray, with low cloud cover; the temperature was unseasonably warm—which for Ukraine in February meant right around the freezing point. Very grim, but perfect light for taking photos outdoors.
I rode shotgun in Yevgeny’s SUV. The back was crammed with about a hundred plastic bags full of pasta and other nonperishable food. We drove down the only highway, through checkpoint after checkpoint. The Ukrainian army knew Yevgeny well, so they let him pass with a nod or a wave. A couple of times he stopped and exchanged a few words with soldiers who were obviously friends. Most of the soldiers looked at him like he was crazy, but they respected and admired him because he was selfless when it came to helping people.
About fifteen klicks from Debaltseve we got to the last Ukrainian checkpoint. The soldiers told us, “We can’t do anything for you beyond this point.” But they waved us on anyway.
As we were driving down the road we heard continual whistling right over us. One shell landed a mile away, the next five hundred yards away, then a few only a couple of hundred yards off the road. Yevgeny kept barreling straight ahead. Not far from the last checkpoint we went over a mangled bridge. From there the road went downhill and passed between two small lakes. To the right was Svitlodarsk, a town with a huge power station that was constantly getting shelled, seemingly from every direction.
After the lakes we passed through an almost abandoned checkpoint. All you could see were the antitank guns right out in the open, manned and ready for a major assault. The road beyond was littered with destroyed vehicles still smoking, ammo dumps, trucks whizzing by back and forth with bullet and shrapnel scars—and mud everywhere. Some of the trucks had flak jackets hanging off the doors for protection in case someone tried to gun them down from the side of the road.
A couple of klicks before we hit Debaltseve, on our left, I could see a tank hidden behind a small house. It looked like a DPR tank, waiting for an ambush. Yevgeny saw the tank, too, and eyed it carefully as he continued down the road.
The deeper we drove into this apocalyptic scene, the more nervous I became. The shelling was much more intense than the day before. We got to the northern edge of Debaltseve and it was completely destroyed, rubble everywhere. Yevgeny knew exactly where people were hiding in their cellars. He parked beside a series of long Soviet-type buildings and honked his horn a few times. When I stepped out of the car it was dead silent except for incoming or outgoing shells. Then all of a sudden people started popping out of doorways and climbing out of holes in the ground. Within a few minutes there were about two or three hundred people emerging from every nook and cranny of that shattered neighborhood. They were mostly elderly, shrouded in layer upon layer of clothes to fend off the damp cold at night. The gas and electricity had been out for days. They all waited in line with remarkable patience. Yevgeny opened the hatchback of his vehicle so he could distribute the food. He took the names of the people one by one so he could know who was there and keep people from trying to get double rations. Even though the locals were well disciplined, a few of them started shoving each other at one point. Then the shelling picked up. A mortar landed on the next block over, but everyone just shrugged it off.
We’d been exposed for an hour and a half and I was already eager to get out of Dodge. Yevgeny saw it in my expression and told me we weren’t finished yet. He distributed more packages, took more names, had a few brief conversations, then finally said we could go. But first we had to go to the center of town, to the city hall, which had been converted into a refugee center.
He parked in front of a typical Soviet government building: both grandiose and functional, always looking old and decrepit before its time. People were pressing around him desperately. I had a bad feeling, like a shell was going to land on us any second, like we’d pushed our luck too far. All I wanted to do was leave immediately. Yevgeny packed about a dozen desperate elderly people into the back of the SUV so tight that they were practically standing. Finally he hopped into the driver’s seat and gunned the throttle, and we were bouncing through the shredded streets out of town.
The shelling on the road was much heavier. That bad feeling was amplified with every explosion. We were no more than a couple of miles north of the town when Yevgeny got a phone call. We needed to go back. Now I was sure we were going to get hit. The laws of probability were simply against us. He made a U-turn and said, “We have to pick someone up, or try to.”
Fortunately where we needed to go was on the outskirts of the town. Yevgeny parked the car right on the side of the road, which was getting shelled regularly. He told everybody to just stay inside and not move, as if they could possibly move in the back. I went with him and ran across the road to a row of houses; most of them were destroyed. We slipped through a shattered wall that partitioned the backyards of two typical Ukrainian houses with their corrugated metal roofs. One of the houses must have taken a direct hit a few hours ago, right in front. It was freezing and there was a dusting of snow on the ground. I was walking behind Yevgeny and he pointed downward, as if telling me to watch out. There, at my feet, was a dead body, a man. Out of instinct I took a picture of him. He looked stiff already. Yevgeny said he was the grandfather who owned the house. The direct hit had killed him. I stepped over the body but there was debris everywhere and I was trying not to fall on it. Toward the main entrance I saw an old lady sitting motionless next to three plastic bags full of her belongings, everything covered in debris. She was staring at her husband lying there stiff in the snow. Staring at him for hours no doubt. Th
ey’d been trying to leave. Two younger men, who were now talking to Yevgeny, had called him on the phone and asked him to please pick her up. But she wouldn’t move. She refused to go anywhere without her husband. Yevgeny tried to convince her but she was practically catatonic. He shrugged his shoulders and looked back at the crowd of people crammed into his car. There was probably no room anyway. So we just left her and let her keep watching her husband. Maybe she saw something happening to his soul that we couldn’t.
In any case, we went back to the car, where everybody was in a panic, and we started driving.
Not more than a few miles out of town, right where we’d spotted the DPR tank on the way in, we came to an overturned truck on the side of the road and another one trying to stop. Dead bodies were strewn all around. Yevgeny pulled over and a few DPR soldiers came out with their weapons trained on us. They’d just cut off the road with an ambush. The kessel was officially closed and we were caught inside. They’d just killed about a half a dozen Ukrainian soldiers who were now lying in the middle of the road, so there was blood everywhere, ammunition everywhere, and on the side of the road four or five prisoners were crouched down and looking up at us.
Three DPR soldiers came toward our car. From the glow in their eyes and their numb, slack-jawed expressions you could tell that they had just killed. I hid all my cameras as soon as I saw them coming. One soldier grabbed me and pulled me out of the car with Yevgeny. I looked around; there were about ten of them. They must have been waiting with the tank to ambush reinforcements going into the town. Up till that point the Ukrainians had managed to keep the road open.
There was an officer with them, and I was fairly certain he was Russian. A very handsome man, with blue eyes and a short beard, he had a professional bearing that all the other soldiers naturally deferred to. I pulled out my French passport. He took it and said, “Oh, Frantsuz.” He looked at me, opened the passport, and compared faces. One of his soldiers came up to us holding a helmet filled with all sorts of ammunition. They were scavenging everything they could get their hands on. With Yevgeny translating, the officer said, “So, do you have a problem with the DPR?” “No,” I said, “do you have a problem with the French?” He started laughing. I pulled out my cigarettes and offered him and the others a smoke. They all came around to get my cigarettes and we started smoking to cut the tension. The officer had a good smile and he asked me, “Why are you here?” I told him I was helping Yevgeny. He looked into the back of the car, which the other soldiers had already checked out, and saw the poor old people. For them it was their people, too. So they just let us go and started fighting again.
The Shattered Lens Page 23