a journey to the darkest point of the war, in the heart of Donbas

In the hall of the Odessa Railway Station, a female voice announces over the loudspeaker system that travelers can now board the train to Kramatorsk. It is a sleeper train, with cabins for two passengers in first class, or with capacity for four people if you travel in second class. The third is seated during the 20-hour journey.

When you walk onto the platform, you can’t see the end of the train. 14 carriages meander as far as the eye can see. And in front of each one of them, the farewells follow one another. Some between passionate kisses, others between looks of concern. Most of the passengers are military, uniformed and with their duffel bags on their shoulders. They nervously finish the last cigarette, and little by little they all get on the old iron train, blue and yellow, already converted into a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance since the Russian invasion beganalmost a year ago.

Aboard these trains, which continued to run under shelling, millions of Ukrainians fled the horror during the first weeks of the war. They left from Kharkov, from Mariupol, from kyiv… Overflowing with women and children who crowded into the seats, in the aisles and even in the luggage spaces. Today, these same trains take soldiers to the front lines.

[Rusia despliega globos sobre Kiev para agotar los sistemas de defensa antiaérea de Ucrania]

It sets off with British punctuality, and the conductor hands each passenger sheets, a pillowcase, and a towel. Spotless white sheets, in a vacuum sealed bag. Some soldiers ignore the bedding, they are still in the corridor, looking out the window as we leave Odessa behind. Nothing is heard in the entire wagon. Not a single lively conversation. they know where they are going.

Valentine in the middle of the war

Only a couple of days before, the Odesites had celebrated Valentine’s Day with care, in an attempt to remember normal times. He was surprised to see the decoration that he wore in cafeterias, shop windows and even supermarkets. Flowers, red balloons or edible hearts adorn the trays of prepared food in the supermarket. From the salad to the chicken, everything had their corresponding heart-shaped vegetables. “In Spain they don’t work so hard,” I told Anastasia, my translator, when I saw all that.

The last time he had been to the Pearl of the Black Sea was on Christmas Eve. During the month of December, in Odessa there was only three or four hours of power supply per day. It was maddening. The sound of generators filled the city streets. They roared even above the noise of the traffic.

But light or no light, the Odesites refused to put their lives on hold. This port city, where 35 percent of the cereals consumed by Europe were exported, it was only closed the first month of the war. And at that time, although the blinds of the shops were down, almost no one was resigned to doing nothing.

The network of volunteers that was organized at the end of February, almost spontaneously, managed to form a logistics chain that supplied everything from camouflage nets to food for the soldiers, including Molotov cocktails –champagne, the Ukrainians called them–, sandbags for barricades, sanitary material or Czech hedgehogs that are used to block the way in some streets.

He irreducible spirit of Ukrainians, who still commands admiration a year later, has set the course for this country since the war began. But on the night train to Kramatorsk, morale and courage are perceived in silence. A silence broken into a thousand pieces by the anti-aircraft sirens that get louder as we get closer to Donbas.

A year of war crimes

The train stops in Alexandria, in Kirovohrad Oblast. Its farmers took up arms here in 1919, in the midst of a turbulent period in which Ukraine sought independence after the collapse of the Russian monarchy.

At the height of Alexandria, but 60 kilometers to the north, is Kremenchuk. Probably the peasants also revolted there at the beginning of the 20th century, but this name resonates in our heads today because of the attack that took place in June of last year, when Russia bombed a shopping center full of people at four in the afternoon. The Kremlin killed 20 people and dozens were injured. Even so, it was almost a miracle, because according to government sources, there were between 700 and 1,000 people at the facility when the missile struck.

The Kremenchuk shopping center is just one of the black spots of horror with which Russia has dotted the map of Ukraine since the invasion began. Photos of war crimes, which are concentrated in the eastern half of the country, curiously in the Russian-speaking part – which to this day continues to wonder why this is happening to them. Massive bombardments, mass graves, torture chambers… Bucha, Dnipro, Mikolaiv, Izyum, Kherson… The list is too long.

Precisely when arriving at the Izyum stop, the intense sound of the anti-aircraft sirens wakes up all the passengers. We are already at the epicenter of the storm. There, Víctor, a man over 60 years old, extremely kind and polite, gets on the train. In the morning, when the conductor offers us a cup of coffee, I take the opportunity to ask him where he is going. “To Sloviansk, I am from Sloviansk”, he answers me. “Where are you going?”.

I tell him that I’m going to Kramatorsk, and then I want to go to Bakhmut, but Victor makes a face and tries to dissuade me –even though I explain that I’m a journalist–. “It’s all very bad,” he adds. When he tells me about the situation and how the people of Donetsk feel, his eyes mist over. In Donbas, the war began more than 8 years ago, in 2014, and sadness has been accumulating there.

Bakhmut, about to fall

Getting off the train in Kramatorsk you can barely make out the city. An intense snow storm makes it impossible to see what is ten meters beyond. But most of the people I run into are in uniform.

A few hours later, in the supermarket, I confirm what is happening: the city is militarized. Most of the people who walk between the shelves, filling their baskets, are soldiers. The same thing happens in the cafeteria. And the scene is repeated on the main street that leads to the Town Hall. For every civilian I see, I count four or five soldiers.

Kramatorsk is only 30 kilometers from Bakhmut, the most disputed city in Donbas. From kyiv, they have just given the order to evacuate the remaining civilians there. Between 2,000 and 3,000, according to the military who have recently been on the ground.

If the same thing happens in Severodonetsk – where another agonizing battle for control of Lugansk took place last year – after the evacuation of civilians, the order will be given for a military withdrawal of the Ukrainian forces. And the Russian flag will fly over the rubble to which Bakhmut has been reduced, after weeks of bloody fighting where tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have died.

Under the snow and uncertainty, the inhabitants of Kramatorsk desperately follow the news about the Russian advance in Bakhmut because they are the next target of the Kremlin troops, in their advance through the piece of Donbas that they still have to occupy.

The thirty kilometers that separate the two towns are an esplanade through which the Russian artillery can advance with some speed. In fact, Kramatorsk is already within the range of the Kremlin’s cannons. Open to attack at any time. Holding my breath. With the cold and the war stuck in the soul.