
I have just returned from living on a military base for a few days on Ukraine’s front line in the war with Russia. I’m not going to tell you which military base; they are all in anonymous buildings commandeered for the purpose. I’m not even going to tell you which part of the front line I was on, at least not yet; that might be hinted at in a future article. Anyway by all accounts life in these military bases is pretty much the same up and down the front line so it doesn’t really matter. What I want to do is to describe to you the daily routine in these extraordinary places, so that you might have an insight into how this war is being run. A number of articles will emerge from these experiences, and this is only the first.
We arrived at this base at about 10pm one evening, after a 12-hour drive, the last four of which were along the most extraordinarily bumpy roads. We turned off all our telephones and the like for the last few kilometres of the drive, so that Russians signals interception might not identify a moving vehicle. (However I personally very much doubt that Russian signals capacity along the 1,000 kilometre Ukrainian front line is up to tracing individual mobile phone numbers, or even clusters of them, save in very specific circumstances; most Russian reconnaissance is done by drones with cameras on them along this massive front line. Nevertheless we were cautious. The anonymous building which did not even have a lock on it was alive and kicking, in a way, even as we arrived at 10pm. It’s a 24-hour establishment and of course the curfew doesn’t apply along the real front line; there are people coming and going all night.
Don’t ask how I obtained permission to live in this base. I can’t possibly tell you and even if I did you wouldn’t believe it. It’s very chaotic on the front line and you just have to get used to all the disorganisation.
The converted building was basic but functional. It had a couple of simple bathroom facilities, but mostly the furniture had been removed from the various rooms and it was just a collection of mattresses (not particularly clean ones) with sheets for occupants to lie on. The mattresses are all tightly squeezed adjacently to one another. This was a facility mostly for officers and there was a table with some food on it that the officers had kindly purchased themselves for us, the late arrivals. There was also some alcohol although to be fair our hosts are Ukrainian officers mostly didn’t drink it and certainly didn’t get drunk. I asked them why not and they explained that they need to set an example to the regular troops; and also because that’s the sort of thing the Russians do and they don’t want to fall to the base standards of the Russians. I found this quite commendable. There was a man with a shisha pipe so we entertained ourselves like that and crumpled into bed after our arduous journey.
The place was awash with flies, mosquitoes and other insects and in each room hung a series of fly coils covered in dead insects. It got cold at night and I had been assigned a mattress in a small room adjacent to a colleague who had the luxury of a 1960’s (latest) springy bed that was too short. He wanted to leave the window open all night which had the twin disadvantages not just of it being very cold in there but also I would be awoken by the very loud air raid sirens in the vicinity which would typically go off every half an hour. The danger in the region is FPV drones, now notorious as the tool of terror along the front line. Russian FPV (first person view) drones with anti-personnel or anti-vehicular ordnance have I was told a range of around 55 kilometres and therefore presumably so do the Ukrainian ones. Hence the entire front line is a minimum of 55 kilometres wide; you are constantly living in the shadow of death and the only real way of maintaining minimal safety is to stay indoors. Drone pilots find it difficult to fly in windows and their ordnance may not be powerful enough to cause structural damage to a building. Nevertheless people come and go all night amidst the air raid sirens, the drone danger and the general sense of activity.
With not so much sleep, I was gently kicked awake by my colleague at about 6am amidst great bustle as a number of the local elderly ladies had started work preparing the cooking for the day. There is a large kitchen where they produce huge volumes of food, both to feed the people living in the military base (it is sort of a 24-hour canteen for anyone passing by) and to prepare food for those in the trenches or the woods just down the road. This massive exercise in cooking involves simple staples: broth, soups, lard slices, potato, bread, chicken and the like. This is piled up in large quantities everywhere in the early morning and the time to eat your meal of the day is breakfast. The ladies who cook have all departed by about 11am and the food remains piled up in the central eating area. If you are staying here you will be having the same thing for lunch and the same thing for dinner, and it will be getting progressively colder and less sumptuous. It may be little surprise to discover that I went down with a mild bout of food poisoning while staying there, no doubt through insufficiently heating through the food in the sole microwave one evening. Anyway I recovered and I remain extremely grateful for the hospitality I received.
There were a few unusual incidents. One evening a solider who was traumatised and possibly intoxicated entered the premises (which are essentially unguarded; anyone can walk in, 24 hours a day, if they know where they are - indeed there is nothing to indicate that these are military premises at all) with a handgun that he proceeded to discharge into the floor. I decided that this was a good moment to go to bed and lay back while the Ukrainians sorted out the commotion; but this is not just an idle mention of a problem that was potentially serious at the time but with retrospect might be seen as rather humorous. The problems of trauma and stress disorder arising amongst troops on the front line is serious, and I saw it in a number of the soldiers, officers and otherwise, that I observed. There is nothing in the way of psychiatric services or medication available at the front line; absolutely nothing. Moreover there remains in Ukraine a stigma against psychiatry, possibly a throwback to the Soviet era, and the signs of psychiatric distress that I observed are not being noted by qualified medical personnel and acted upon. If a soldier is discharging his firearm in a military base then he needs a break from front line service and a consultation with a psychiatrist to relieve his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder; and this is not happening.
Once the ladies of food have finished their labours, they depart but one thing I noticed is that nobody is really managing the facility in the sense that there is no roster of who is staying, who is coming in and out, what the purpose of their visit is, and the like. I was not the only civilian staying in the base; there were others, with mixed purposes, and a number of different officers and regular soldiers were staying there for various reasons each evening. It was clear that some were afflicted with complete exhaustion, just lying down on these mattresses for a period and trying to recover from their physical labour. The facility had hot water and there were a few local shops nearby. It is amazing what sort of ordinary civilian activity continues near the front line; where there are soldiers, there is a market of people to sell things to and the local people replace their prior activities with sales to soldiers.
Things come and go all day and all night in this base, including food, other sorts of donations, exhausted troops and those seeking treatment, and local civilian volunteers looking to do their bit to help the Ukrainian Armed Forces. However lots of things are not done. The toilets are not cleaned, the buildings are dusty, and the environment is consequently unhealthy because there is insufficient central organisation to maintain proper management and administration of these types of commandeered military base. When you imagine what the front line in the war in Ukraine involves, at least on the Ukrainian side, yes there are trenches and minefields and tank traps but also there is a loose affiliation of buildings from which military activities are conducted. The Russians know this, and therefore they terrorise all the towns and villages along the front line. Amazingly, a lot of civilians just continue their regular lives along the front line as though there is no war on. We were told of farmers still ploughing the land amidst the so-called “zero line” (an imaginary and really non-existent line supposedly dividing the two sides but that is really just drawn by marking the various battles between each side and their outcome). It cannot be emphasised too much that one wrong turn on these potholed, war-bitten roads will take you to the Russians. There is no neat, easy front line. This is a complicated and confusing war where straight lines often cannot be drawn.
During the day, various phone calls are made. Food is prepared by eager volunteers to feed the troops. Referrals are made to a military field hospital around the corner, again an anonymous facility in a commandeered civilian building. There is nothing to distinguish it as a so-called “stabilisation point” (the place where wounded soldiers on the front are first taken to eave their lives before being transported onward to one of the military hospitals in a major city) although I did receive a sort-of tour albeit it was brief because the commanding officer was extremely nervous. What I saw made me think of western European hospitals in the 1950’s.
The vast majority of officers are driving civilian cars, either their own or donated, and for this reason every vehicle, civilian or otherwise, is potentially a target. The Russians are not using artillery in such areas; these are reserved for identified military positions but this is really a war of drones. Russians spot activity and chase cars down the road with kamikaze drones, determined to make a hit and hopefully to strike out someone who has something to do with the military or is assisting them in some way. In these circumstances the distinction between civilians and military becomes worthless, at least to the Russians: you are a target as soon as you step out of the base and drive anywhere along the rough, bumpy roads that characterise the front line. You spend your life constantly scouring the horizon for drones. There are various anti-drone units or “jammers” but by all accounts they can be identified as well as they are large and they have their own electromagnetic signature. So it’s not clear whether they are a blessing or a curse. The other tactic tried is to place fishing nets over the windows of buildings so that drones cannot fly in through open windows. The safest place to be against drones is inside a building.
We were taken on tours of front line towns and villages that had been comprehensively destroyed by Russian missiles and drones early in the war. It is not clear what the purpose of doing this was; perhaps it was to eviscerate civilian morale but such attempts rarely succeed. Shops that had been destroyed had been rebuilt with wooden roofs and tarpaulins and they were doing a seemingly roaring trade with all the soldiers about. At the same time local civic buildings lay in ruins and the drive from each village to the next was always spiced with danger from drones. These are not the Shaheed longer-range drones supplied to Russia by Iran (although they are a danger; the air raid sirens, I was told, mostly reflect a risk of Shaheed drones) but simpler, cheaper devices designed to strike at anything and anyone.
Each evening in my base seemed to end up with a lot of food and some merriment, as people each evening tried to make the best of a distinctly difficult and unpleasant situation. I had the advantage of being able to leave after a few days; still each day I was able to take a warm shower and eat well if simply and heartily, and to share a few cheers each evening at the end of inevitably gruelling days. It struck me that the soldiers who effectively call this base home must be completely exhausted, both under constant stress from the danger of attack and missing friends and loved ones, hours from the nearest city down shocking roads unlit at night and full of trucks supplying the front. After a few months living like this, they must dream of returning to a semblance of a normal life.
I learned a number of lessons. Food is available on the front line. There is no doubt about that. Villages and towns right in the vicinity of the front line have supermarkets, post offices, and shops selling basic clothes. There are also pharmacies although their quality is variable. Medical facilities are extremely limited and I heard a recurrent complaint that aid supplied from NGO’s or elsewhere in the West simply isn’t getting through to front line locations because it is being misprocured within the military bureaucracy or within the NGO networks themselves elsewhere in Ukraine. This raises a huge question as to the effectiveness of much NGO work in the country if its products are just being diffused into Ukraine’s corruption problems. By all accounts a pair of socks purchased by volunteers or donated is fetching as much as 500 Hryvnias (US$12) on the front line whereas the intention was that they were donated for free. I will write more about that subject later; but for now I want to highlight a problem that has been conveniently ignored or overlooked by many of those who wish Ukraine well: their efforts are not achieving what they want because they do not understand the networks and the informal operations into which they are contributing.
This is a vast subject: understanding the militia nature of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the informal fashion in which they work, and thereby appreciating the limitations of aid and assistance and better directing our efforts so that they may be more effective. However before I do that I want to say some words about the area of the front line where I was sent, and I have promised a short break before I write about that. So for now these are my general observations about living on the front line, from the short period I experienced it, so that you the reader can get an impression of the omnipresence of horror, danger, informal facilities and so that you may begin to obtain an insight into the way the Ukrainian Armed Forces really work and the ways in which this extraordinary ground war is actually being fought.