Bad Days In Bakhmut

Reporting from the frontline of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine

Photos by Chris Occichone

Slagheaps and winding gear clunk against the horizon as we barrel east, towards Donetsk, the windows down, American Pie pumping out on Chris Occichone’s car stereo, Vlad Demchenko riding shotgun, me in the back, the three of us belting out "This'll be the day that I die" which is kind of funny ha-ha because we’re not going to the levee in a Chevy but Bakhmut, a ghost city smack bang on the frontline. The land here rises and falls like the Atlantic on a calm day and we stop on a down-wave and see the city about two miles off and listen.

Occichone is a New Yorker, officially cynical, mock crass.

Chris Occichone

He pretends he hates humanity. A photographer who came for a month in 2014 to report on the war, he has stayed ever since. Vlad arrested me on Day Two of the war on suspicion of me being a Russian spy. I was wearing my lucky orange beanie and a camel-coloured duffle coat and could not have looked more English if I tried. I yelled at him: “Do I look like a Russian spy?” Never argue with a man with a loaded machine-gun. I was arrested and then Vlad, his commander and the deputy commander drove me to the SBU HQ to get checked out. Of the four of us in the car that day, only Vlad and I are alive. Since the spy mix-up, Vlad and I have become friends. During COVID, he hitch-hiked from Ukraine to Namibia. I suggested he join Twitter and asked my followers to follow him. He now has 60,000 followers. He consumes books, dreams of travelling again and directing films, has the willpower, the sense of the absurd, an eye for a shot and enough charisma to make it to Hollywood.

Vlad “Vova” Demchenko

For now, he kills Russian soldiers.

Crump. Crump. Crump. Outgoing, I ask Vlad? “Incoming.” He explains that outgoing artillery is a simple coherent sound, a plop, but incoming is longer, stretched out, like a fart. There’s ten farts for every plop. Given Russia’s massive heft in heavy metal, Bakhmut is not a healthy place to be. We drive on as dusk falls, the electricity dead, the darkness of a city of once 100,000 people all the more intense because of the occasional very loud bang, echoing and re-echoing in the concrete canyons of what was, once, a prosperous Soviet mining city atop coal and gypsum fields. Here and there are a few ironic points of light, signalling the stay-behinds. Bakhmut is creepy with a capital C. I look around for someone from BBC management but it must have been their day off.

            The city most likely gets its name from a corruption of Mahmut, suggesting that it was founded by the Tartars long ago. In the eighteenth century it was a Cossack fort, fought over and lost, time and again. First salt was mined, with Bakhmut supplying a tenth of all the salt for Tsarist Russia. In 1860 a rich coal seam was discovered in the Donbas and the Tsar’s men asked a Welsh engineer, John Hughes, to dig deep mines and create an iron smelter. Gypsum was mined too for plaster and Bakhmut prospered. The revolution saw tides of blood come and go, then Hughesova – modern day Donetsk – became Stalino and the whole region, all of Ukraine, suffered from the horrors of Stalin’s famine when maybe seven million people died in 1933. A decade on the Nazis took Bakhmut and drove 3,000 Jews to a mine shaft which they bricked up, suffocating them all. In 2014 Vladimir Putin’s army invaded the Donetsk oblast or county and Bakhmut became a hub for the Ukrainian army. Since the full-scale invasion in February this year the Russian meat-grinder has gobbled up swathes of the oblast and is now the enemy is at the gates. The western end of Patrice Lumumba Street is held by the Ukrainians; the eastern end by the Russian Army.

            We call it a night and drive back the 20 kliks to Kostyantynivka through a few checkpoints where Vlad, now a lieutenant in the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, reads out the passwords from his cellphone. Our quarters are a gloomy ground-floor flat. There’s electricity but no water. Two Ukrainian army soldiers are already there, Valentin and Vasyl. They both look like extras from a Viking movie. They have an interesting job, putting up CCTV cameras to spy on Russian movements and shelling and whatnot. The cameras are powered by big solar panels the size of a hopscotch game, making them a sitting duck for Russian heavy metal. The cameras give a 24/7 view of the frontline but putting them in place – on the top of high-rise buildings or natural features that command a view– is hairy and one of Vlad’s jobs is to cover them while they fiddle with the bits and bolts. Valentin – before the war he was a liberal politician - and I play chess. He beats me and as I turn over my king I say: “fuck you!” We play two more: “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Bloody liberals.

            There’s a ban on alcohol at the front. On brand, I’ve brought a bottle of Italian red and a half-bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey but I don’t open my stash. There’s some weed but, as usual, I end up coughing pathetically. Bed is a couch in the room where two computer monitors are set up to look at the CCTV cameras. Every time a Russian shell lands the monitors flash brilliant white so it’s like fall asleep under strobing disco lights, with the distant heavy bass of shells landing in Bakhmut. In the small hours of the night, two massive bangs, outgoing. No-one stirs.

            In the morning Vlad boils some eggs and hands me one. I stare at it, not knowing, without eggcup and spoon, what to do. He cracks his egg on a plate and de-shells it. I am dumbfounded. Occichone texts his girlfriend to say that I was now with them and she replied that I was brilliant and he says, “yeah, but he doesn’t know how to deal with a boiled egg.” The New Yorkers and the Ukrainians laugh at me. I tell them I haven’t come all this way to be insulted.  

The water’s still off so I go for a swim in a lake on the other side of town. Breast-stroke to the sound of heavy artillery is quite the thing. After a lot of faffing around we head to Bakhmut again. War degrades everything – humanity, civilisation, personal hygiene - but especially the surfaces of roads. Since the first Russian invasion, the one in 2014, no-one worth their asphalt has been down here, so Occichone sashays to the other side of the road to skirt deep potholes that could swallow a small hippo, the experience all the more scary because he is driving a British Mitsubishi with the wheel on the wrong side. But Occichone’s music choices are good. Making a contract with certain death is eased by singing along to Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone.

In daylight I can see the damage better, blocks of flats and schools and techs smashed up, mortar splashes on the road, some homes burnt black. The wind lifts grit in small dust storms. The city is not quite empty. The rich and the middle class have fled leaving the poor and the old and the disabled.

Occichone hates people. Or so he says. But he is friends with Olena. She is proof of the aristocracy of the human soul. She’s been disabled for a very long time and is wheelchair-bound but feisty and funny.  The Russian shells pile in, never too close, never far away. The electricity is off so she cannot use her computer to talk to the outside world.

Why do you stay? “I think the Ukrainian Army will stay strong. Also I cannot leave because too many people need me.”

How old are you? “In France, they say that is never a question you ask.”

I apologise, some shells crump, Vlad thinks that he may have a solution to her electricity problem. We know someone with a few solar panels going spare…

Occichone takes her picture as I stand with a light trained on her face. My arm gets stiff and Vlad takes over. A while back I was all for giving money to Ukrainian charities but not for weapons. I have changed my mind. Vlad is going to raise some money for Olena and her friends but now I have seen the front-line close-up I know that the best thing to do is to buy the Ukrainians tanks and big guns so they can chase the Russian killing machine out of artillery range and save far more lives that way.

We say our goodbyes and take a turn through the city. At a junction, three dogs are entertaining each other in an embarrassing way and I snap it and tweet: “Threesome, Bakhmut”. In war, you laugh at the silliest things because laughter is some kind of antidote to the fucking madness going on all around you. In the dead centre of town, a Russian rocket crashed into the central market area creating a crater you could lose a London double decker bus in. Artillery is a game of Cartesian geometry. They knew exactly what they are doing and where they were putting their rocket. You want to empty a city of 100,000 people, you smash its heart. Still, there’s a kebab shop and a kiosk selling coke. The kebab guy, Roma, looks like John Belushi in Animal House with less front teeth and is ten sheets to the wind but he knocks out the best, tastiest kebab I have ever had, ever. He was in a band and wants to play electric guitar on the roof of a high-rise and starts to laugh his head off.

We scoot around town and stop outside a technical school which has been smashed to pieces. For my video diaries on Twitter, I bring Vlad in and explain that he and I have a continuing argument. I believe there is another Russia, one without Putin, and that this is Putin’s war. Wearing his Ukrainian army floppy hat and sunnies, looking for all the world like a 21st century version of a hobbit – “all we want to do is drink beer and go dancing” – Vlad replies: “Vladimir Putin came and pushed the button and…” he points to the great gaping hole in the tech college. Vlad continues that Russian opinion polls give Putin a 80% approval rating. Yeah but, I reply, I don’t trust Russian opinion polls. You say what you think in Russia, you may die. I have met people who have opposed Vladimir Putin like Anna Politovskaya, Natasha Estemirova, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny. In order: poisoned, then shot; shot; shot; poisoned, now in jail. That makes me argue that another Russia is possible. But Vlad has lost twenty of his friends. The shelling seems to ease off during the day. It’s never wholly quiet but its intensity has dropped. I beat Vasyl at chess but yet again I am crushed by Valentin. I ask him what he thinks about the idea of another Russia. “I hate them,” he replied.

The next morning we hear the news that Alexander Dugin’s daughter, Darya, has been blown up by a car bomb in Moscow. Dugin is a fascist who called for Ukrainians to be killed. He is known as “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin” because the master of the Kremlin has adopted his far-right ethno-nationalism as his own. I have met him twice, the last time in December 2016.  My interview with him in Moscow did not end well.

First, he dismissed the chances that the Russians hacked American democracy as "strictly zero".

Sweeney: “People ask questions about Vladimir Putin's commitment to democracy?”

Dugin: “Please be careful. You could not teach us democracy because you try to impose to every people, every state, every society, their Western, American or so-called American system of values without asking…and it is absolutely racist; you are racist."

Sweeney: “What happens is if you critical of Vladimir Putin you may end up dead.”

Dugin: "If you are engaged in Wikileaks, you can be murdered?”

Sweeney: “Julian Assange is dead, is he?”

Dugin: “No.”

Sweeney: “So hold on a second, please, tell me about Boris Nemtsov. He was murdered one hundred yards from the Kremlin.”

Dugin: “By Putin? You think he was murdered by Putin?” 

Sweeney: “He was critical of Putin. Can you list the number of American journalists who had died under Barack Obama. You can’t, can you?”

Dugin: "It is a completely stupid kind of conversation. Very nice to meet you but I don’t like to continue."

Then Dugin ripped off his sound-mike and walked out of the interview. Later, he posted a blog to his 20,000 followers, illustrated with my photograph and accusing me of manufacturing "fake news: I’ve kicked a BBC correspondent out. A notorious bastard! An utter cretin… John Sweeney was in charge. His name tells it all: he’s a ‘globalist swine’.  They are making a fake news documentary on how Russians helped Trump become President. Their only evidence that Putin had worked in the KGB. Complete imbeciles. Zero journalistic skills! Nazi-style propagandist. Stay away from them!"

From then on, everywhere I went in Russia I was followed.

But as a human being I felt sorry for the loss of his daughter. Like her father, Darya was a fascist. She had visited Mariupol and rejoiced at the killing of Ukrainians. Vlad’s reaction to the news was harder. He was delighted in the killing and believed that the Ukrainians were responsible.

“Naughty,” I replied. As the story developed, the car bombing became more murky. It’s entirely possible that the killers were some faction in the Russian secret state. At the funeral Dugin behaved in a very strange way, showing no grief for his daughter. The casket lay open and her face seemed to be untouched by the car bomb. But that doesn’t make sense because when a bomb goes off, it ignites the oxygen all around. In the small space inside a car, you would expect someone’s face to be burnt. As all the truth-tellers in Russia have either been poisoned, shot, fled the country or are in jail, it’s hard to know what happened. But it felt odd, heading off to the frontline again, that we were all still alive and kicking and Dugin’s daughter had been blown up.

We head for Patrice Lumbumba Street and take selfies of the three of us with a winery in the backyard, partly burnt out, partly intact. Up the hill, at the eastern end of the street, one of Vlad’s fellow soldiers, Bingo, had taken part in a firefight with the Russians a few days before. In a gloomy shop on the corner Marina, middle-aged, sweet-faced, laments her losses. She had built up her fortunes from nothing, selling wine from the place next door to Moscow in the old days, making so much money that she had two shops and two homes in the city. Our conversation is punctuated by crumps of artillery, pounding home her misfortune. Sure, she hasn’t lost family or her sight or a leg or an arm, but the sense of a good life of hard work smashed to pieces by an evil about which she can do nothing to stop is clear and saddening. I tell her that I am some kind of professor of smashed up places, and that my advice is she should get out. She listens, nods, and, as far as I know, has stayed put.

In the afternoon, Vlad suggests we visit a trench. He says to get to it there’s a 700-metre walk across open ground that can get shelled by the Russians. I take a deep breath and say yes. We drive south of Bakhmut, along empty potholed roads, crumps landing here and there and hit the crest of a hill where we hide the car under a knot of trees and find a trench system. From there, “Lego”, a big man in beard, Ukrainian Army camouflage and a skull patch just below his blood group leads the way downhill. For this gig, Occichone, Vlad and I are all wearing our helmets and body armour. To make the point that I am a reporter, not a fighter, I have blue flowers patched on to my flak jacket. It’s hot and the walk down the hill is horribly exposed with little or no cover. Occichone tells me to hang back so we are all roughly ten metres apart, lest a shell comes in and the survivors can help the wounded. My mouth dries up.

As we near the trench system, “Lego” points out two shallow craters, about ten feet wide, caused by a tank shell firing at them yesterday. There is also a rocket with tailfin intact, embedded into the scenery, yet another piece of Russian kit that is dud and didn’t go off.

Lego

It's like being in a time machine, dialled to 1917. The trench system is about half way up the hill, overlooking a lake, woods, a railway line. The formal Russian frontline is about five miles away but one of the soldiers, “Nightingale”, tells me from his lookout position that the Russians have been mucking about in the woods just on the other side of the railway line. That’s a thousand yards away, less. I make some films for my Twitter followers, someone hands me a cup of tea and Occichone takes my photograph. Vlad tells me that my cup says in Ukrainian “Best Grandma” and Occichone says I could be a grandma if I wanted to. It’s what the Ukrainians are fighting for. I tell him to fuck off.

John Sweeney

A lovely old soldier, Botsman, has not so many teeth but his English is really good opens a British-funded ration pack decorated with a Union Jack with his knife. Don’t mess with Botzman. In the pack are coffee, premium hot dogs, chocolate, drink, cake, nuts and bacon, something to purify the water and a fork. God Save The Queen, I say and Botsman replies: “God Shave The Queen.”

Botsman

A beautiful chocolate cocker spaniel, surely abandoned by its owners in their rush to flee the fighting, found the lads in the trenches a few days ago. Botsman says that her name is Zhanna, adding “very nice doggie”. As we talk a helicopter flies very low over our trench. Russian or Ukrainian? “Ukrainian,” says Botsman. It’s on a mission to hit Russian artillery on the back of the next ridge along but they miss and come zooming back. The Russian choppers don’t bother them. In Kostyantynivka, I see four Ukrainian jets and Vlad explains that the Russian fighters always stay their side of the line, firing at Ukrainian positions from relative safety. All I can say is the five aircraft I saw at the front with my own eyes were Ukrainian and that does not bode well for the master of the Kremlin.

The morale of Lego, Botsman, Nightingale, Vlad, Valentin and Vasyl is extraordinary. They face artillery that fires at them ten times for every shell their side fires back but their spirit is great, full of humanity and humour. When I read people like former British general Sir Richard Dannatt and the Mail On Sunday quizling Peter Hitchens call on the Ukrainians to pack it in, I scratch my head. At the frontline, the Ukrainian Army has the best morale I have ever seen in an army, far surpassing, say, the British Army in Bosnia or the Americans in Iraq. I hereby invite Dannatt and Hitchens to come with me to Bakhmut and see for themselves.

I leave the boys in the trenches lifted by the experience but saddened, too, that something both my grandfathers, Herbert Sweeney and Stephen Owen, thought would never happen again – trench warfare in Europe – is killing people in the twenty-first century. A line from Wilfred Owen comes into my mind: “I, too, saw God through mud — The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.”

August 24th is Ukrainian Independence Day but it is also Vlad’s birthday and the make him a kind of cake by ramming a candle in a Toblerone packet. Valentin and Vasyl come into the room we’re sharing – I’m on the bed, Vlad on the floor – and sing Happy Birthday and then some Ukrainian shanty. Vlad is 34 and he has been fighting the Russians for the last eight years. His film about the battle for Donetsk airport was going to have its premiere in late February but then the Russians attacked Kyiv. But he blows out the candle of his cake with all the bashful fun of a seven-year-old boy.

Occichone and I head off to Bakhmut for one last time, while Vlad stays at the base doing stuff. The Russian Army is celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day in its own way, by smashing the city. We see smoke and come to a stop by a wooden cottage on fire after a Russian shell had smashed in the tin roof. Thankfully, the cottage is empty. The Bakhmut fire brigade are hard at work putting it out but, on the other side of the road, there is a small knot of people watching them. A middle-aged man arrives on a bike and joins them. His mother owns the cottage. The people are cold to the firemen, to the Ukrainian soldier with us, to Occichone and I. The soldier is wearing a camouflage jacket with a Union Jack flash on it and they accuse him of buying a British passport. He’s very happy with his Ukrainian passport but explains that the

people have been brainwashed by Russian propaganda, that they think the Ukrainians may have blown up the home.

Polls show that 97% of people are happy that Ukraine got its independence from the Soviet Union. We have just met some of the 3%. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth but perhaps it was just ash from the Russian fire. Vlad puts it like this: “Some locals, mostly people over 45, have no reference points in life, except for the myths and legends of the USSR. They live in a past that never existed in reality. But they were young then and life was beautiful. Russia promises to resurrect their childhood together with the corpse of the USSR.”

On his birthday Vlad posts a story on Twitter about Olena asking his followers for money to support her and her wheelchair posse. So far, he’s raised $3,000. The difference between the Ukrainian Army and the Russian Army is that between good and evil.

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