Traitor Spy Helping Putin Crush His People

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SOLEDAR, UKRAINE—An explosion covered the sky above the apartment building we were standing in. They were thermite cluster bombs launched by multiple Russian long-range rocket systems, spreading a glowing flame on their targets. That day, their target was us.

A thick mass of flames, hot enough to melt steel and concrete, slowly rained down on civilian apartments in the town of Soledar, one of the key battlefields in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region. Vladimir Putin’s army has been fighting for over six months to capture this territory.

The city was a hellscape of destroyed buildings, blaring with incessant artillery fire. Ukrainian troops were desperately searching for cover from underground to underground, and quadcopters her drones were buzzing above us scouting enemy positions. If I was still in that block, I might have been incinerated.

A destroyed house in Soledar.

Tom Match

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About 15 minutes before the bombing, Darren Roberts, a British military veteran and volunteer aid worker, provides medical attention to Alexander, a 24-year-old Ukrainian civilian who was wounded in the shoulder and arm by Russian artillery fire. rice field. We found him topless, in homemade bandages, lounging on a bench in the courtyard, talking to his mother.

During the five hours we were in town, perhaps ten civilians sat outside watching the destruction. Some hadn’t seen sunlight in months.

Despite the carnage, hundreds of civilians in Soledar, originally a small city of over 10,000 inhabitants, are reluctant to leave. Many people prefer to stay at home because they don’t want to be intimidated by Russians. Older people and people with disabilities have no choice. A loosely organized group of volunteers that The Daily Beast agreed to follow helped evacuate disabled people who were trying to leave on their own.

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Two evacuees rest in a church in Kramatorsk after being evacuated from Soledar.

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Russian war chiefs dispute over credit for reportedly taking town

British aid workers Andrew Bagshaw, 48, and Christopher Parry, 28, disappeared from the very town last week in a similar evacuation. The Russian militia Wagner, which is leading the latest attacks in Donbass, posted photos of passports and claimed to have found the body of one of them on Wednesday.

Others seem to have had more nefarious motives for staying. As the volunteers desperately tried to convince Alexander and his mother to move out, three men drove up to the courtyard on mopeds and began taking pictures of our group with their cell phones.Immediately, Darren turned to us and looked really scared for the first time.

Volunteers at Bryce, Craig, Darren, and Soledar

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Investigating the aftermath of artillery fire with Soledar.

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“We need to get out of here now,” Darren said to the group, pushing us all into the car. “They are likely Russian witnesses,” said 31-year-old Australian video journalist-turned-volunteer Bryce Wilson, who was organizing the evacuation operation. We high-tailed to a meeting point called “Oasis,” named after a small corner shop in

Not long after we arrived, Russian artillery started raining where we had just left.

I don’t know if they were aware that our group was made up of journalists and volunteers. The journalists were clearly wearing press vests, but the volunteers were all elderly military men in bulletproof vests. was. Russian authorities frequently claim that groups of “foreign mercenaries” are fighting on the Ukrainian side, and they may have thought we were one. They probably didn’t care either way.

“I have spoken to the Ukrainian military about this, and they have specifically told me that there is a problem with the mopeds that they will take pictures of and send to the pro-Russian military,” Wilson later explained.

Bryce Wilson

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Russia’s claim that the people of Donbass are being “liberated” by aggression after being “genocided” by Ukrainian nationalists is baseless propaganda. But that doesn’t mean that the easternmost regions of Ukraine aren’t fooled by the Russian narrative. And during that time they worked little by little to help the invaders.

The Ukrainian government has been trying to crack down on such “traitors” since the early days of the war, and the anti-cooperation bill was signed into law by President Volodymyr Zelensky soon after the invasion began on February 24. . According to the Associated Press, the law involving 400 people in the Kharkiv region alone. Ukrainian authorities have even arrested his SBU officials for treason and are reportedly planning to create an official “collaborator registry” in the country.

Authorities in the Donetsk region often stop cars near the front lines to check the phones of residents to make sure they are not communicating with the other side. The Russians are said to offer large cash rewards for details of Ukrainian military positions and troop movements.

According to Wilson, Ukrainian military sources described a case in which an adolescent boy traveled through the area, hitchhiking rides to various areas, and claimed himself to be lost. When he was later taken into custody, authorities allegedly found evidence that he had scouted military positions and sent them to the Russians.

Many of those who cooperated with the Russians in previously occupied territories like Kherson and eastern Kharkiv likely did so under duress, while others clearly had a guilty conscience about betraying their country. not

When I visited the Luhansk region in May, locals warned journalists about pro-Russian saboteurs, who slashed the tires of Ukrainian military vehicles and sent troops and supplies to and from the region. Claimed to have seen it blocked. A pro-Russian civilian from Lyschensk told the France24 crew: “We want to meet the Russians again. They are our friends, not the Germans of Europe!”

When Ukrainian troops withdrew from their last stronghold in Luhansk, the city of Lysychansk, they enacted a four-day curfew to make it clear to the approaching Russians that the remaining civilians were withdrawing. made it impossible to

This week, Russia’s Wagner group announced the complete capture of Soledar, encircling and destroying the Ukrainian garrison. In the past six months, Russia has achieved only success on a major battlefield. Meanwhile, Ukraine has won major victories at Kharkov and Kherson, and Ukrainian authorities have increased their artillery support and improved tanks. We are doubling the demand.

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