In Bakhmut

Hugh Barnes watches a funeral on TV

It was a Monday in September and all eyes were glued to a televised funeral. But the ceremony was taking place a thousand miles away from Westminster Abbey, at the National Opera House in Kyiv, mourning the loss of a 47-year-old Ukrainian ballet dancer. Oleksandr Shapoval, its principal soloist, and an Honoured Artist of Ukraine, had been killed by mortar shelling near Mayorsk in the Donbas after joining the army to defend his country against the Russian invasion.

About 15 miles north of Mayorsk, sitting on a sandbag next to a blown-out window, Volodya watched the grief-stricken faces on the TV. Did he even know that another funeral was taking place in London the same day? None of the Ukrainian news programmes I’d seen had made any mention of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps there are just too many deaths to report on the home front.

‘Damn this war, damn the Russians,’ Volodya said, taking a slug of vodka. ‘They’re supposed to love ballet but now they’re killing dancers!’

And it isn’t only dancers. Earlier this month, Russian soldiers burst into the home of Yuri Kerpatenko a principal conductor of n Regional Philharmonic orchestra, and shot him dead at point blank range. Kerpatenko was executed because he declined to participate in a concert in occupied Kherson intended to demonstrate the ‘improvement of peaceful life’ after annexation by Russia. The Gileya Chamber Orchestra, led by Kerpatenko, was billed to feature in the concert on 1 October, but the 46-year-old conductor had refused to co-operate with the oerganisers and had been posting defiant messages on his Facebook page.

Like many people I’d met in the illegally annexed regions of Donbas and southern Ukraine, where Russia has directed its fire since April after abandoning a disastrous bid to capture Kyiv, Volodya felt that Vladimir Putin had backed himself into a corner – which means his next move could be even more dangerous and unpredictable.

Before the war, Volodya had worked at a metallurgical plant in Yeniakevo, a part of the Donetsk separatist ‘republic’ since 2014. A pall of industrial pollution hangs over the town, typifying the dark side of post-Soviet life: poverty, addiction, violence, crime and corruption. As soon as Putin launched his invasion, Volodya somehow escaped to the other side of the internal border and now he supported the Ukrainian army and volunteers against the separatists. He was squatting in an abandoned flat in the former Don Cossack settlement of Bakhmut, earning a pittance from hawking cucumbers and tomatoes off a cart.

Since the beginning of October, Bakhmut in Donetsk region has become almost the only focus of Russian offensive operations following the spectacular counterattack last month that saw Ukrainian forces liberate whole swathes of territory in the east and south of the country.

Yet Volodya and his neighbours hardly pay any attention to the shells whistling overhead or their deafening explosions. ‘Life is better here [than in occupied Donetsk],’ he told me. ‘We may all die but at least we’re free.’

Since February, as many as three million people, mostly women and children, have been displaced from the Donbas. But another three million have stayed behind, in ruined towns and villages where day-to-day life is punctuated by bursting shells.

‘This is my home,’ Nadiya, a hospital cleaner in Bakhmut, told me. Why would I want to leave? This is my land, not Putin’s – it’s where I belong.’

In any case, she said, she couldn’t desert her elderly mother and father who were too frail and mentally infirm to make the journey abroad or even to the west of Ukraine. If Putin’s plan is to brutalise the Donbas population psychologically as well as physically, it isn’t really working. ‘We are frightened and hungry but we are not demoralised,’ Nadiya said.

In Kramatorsk, however, the interim capital of Ukrainian-held Donetsk, I met a couple of soldiers just back from the front line. They were clearly jubilant about the spectacular turnaround on the battlefield. Eight months after Putin embarked on what he imagined would be a short victorious war – or, at most, a ‘special military operation’ – Russian troops have been driven back in the Luhansk, Donets and Kharkiv regions, and Ukrainian forces are also squeezing their supply lines in Kherson in the south. Yet Bohdan, one of the soldiers, quoted a famous line from Balagur’s almanack: ‘As the old Cossack said, if Ukrainians are ever ordered to fight the Russians, we should stand on the border, shoulder to shoulder, and shoot at the people giving the orders.’

The dividing line is whether a person values the existence of a political entity called Ukraine or attaches more importance to Russianness, as some do in the Donbas but their numbers are dwindling as a result of Putin’s war crimes.

In Izium, where the communal graves of civilians murdered by occupying Russian forces are still being excavated a month after they were discovered in a pine forest, a volunteer showed me the churchyard of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, which had been mined by Putin’s troops. ‘He pretends to be a devout Orthodox Christian,’ said Andrey, ‘but no wonder some people think he’s the Antichrist!’

A few days after Sharapanov’s funeral, Putin went on TV to announce a ‘partial mobilisation’, seemingly ready to escalate the conflict, perhaps up to the brink of nuclear war, rather than to admit defeat.

‘I am not bluffing,’ he told the cameras, with a poker face.

Volodya was outside the sandbagged TV room, having a smoke but still listening to the broadcast. ‘Look at Putin,’ he smirked. ‘He’s driven himself mad trying to believe what he says.’ Then he threw his cigarette to the ground and extinguished it with one foot, doing a little pirouette worthy of Oleksandr Shapanov.