Nightmare Siege

"As a result of the blockade and ceaseless rocket attacks, the city is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe. Citizens are dying on the streets, in their courtyard and in their homes. Every new day brings only death and destruction."
Luhansk Mayor Sergei Kravchenko

"Doctors can do nothing but cry. Every day, wounded people come in and we can't help them. We lack even basic medicines."
"This is a nightmare situation. It's not just medicine we don't have. We don't even have food and water."
Dr. Fyodor Solyanik, Luhansk regional hospital

A woman cooks over a campfire as a result of gas cuts in her building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Popasna, within the Luhansk region.    Photograph by: Anatolii Stepanov, Getty Images, The Associated Press

 

Over 2100 kilometres of the Russian-Ukrainian border is in rebel hands, while the Ukrainian military is tightening their ring around Luhansk and Donetsk, the two major cities of eastern Ukraine in the Donetsk region with populations of 500,000 and 1-million respectively. Government shelling is claimed to have hit apartment buildings and people have died, even while the government in Lyov insists its military does not shell its cities.

Travel in or out of the cities has become difficult-to-impossible. Supermarket shelves have been emptied. Because the power grid was down on Monday in Luhansk, untreated water is what residents who still remain in the city are now drinking. Patients in hospitals are being sent home since doctors have few drugs left to help in their treatment. Those that could, fled the violence and deprivation.

Located an hour's drive from the Russian border, the loss of Luhansk by the rebels is regarded as a major setback, with Donetsk soon to follow. A school, a supermarket and several apartment blocks were hit by rockets on the weekend. And when a shell hit a critical electrical transformer, there was an immediate 80 percent drop in power.

While the ethnic Russians accuse the Ukrainian army of a vicious bombing campaign against the civilian population, the Ukrainian military is doing what it must, to reclaim Ukrainian territory from secessionists eager to transfer the geography to Russian possession. There is a certain familiarity with the pro-Russia secessionists ensconcing themselves and their arms within the civilian population, inviting return fire from the country's military, with that of the actions of Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.

Gas reserves are close to exhaustion. The heavy weaponry that Russia continues to smuggle across the border to aid the rebellion maintains the separatists' high hopes of turning the tide. They have not yet surrendered the hope that Moscow plans to order the assembled battalions and their military equipment to cross the border to join with the rebel army and finally conclude the standoff between Russia and Ukraine.

A Russian border security official claimed that over 400 Ukrainian soldiers had crossed into Russia, defecting from the Ukrainian military, flooding to the safe corridor that Russia had opened. A Ukrainian military spokesman refuted this version, stating the troops had been forced into Russian territory by rebel fire, when they had themselves run out of ammunition.