Inside Donetsk, while residents run away from attacks on the Ukrainian region Putin wants to control

The Donetsk region in Eastern Ukraine has long been in the sights of Moscow. Vladimir Putin is reported to want to freeze the war in return Complete control over himS

Russia already controls 70% of Donetsk and almost all the neighboring Luhanski and makes slow but steady progress.

I head to the front city of Donetsk the town of Dobropilia with two humanitarian volunteers, just 8 km (five miles) from Russia’s position. They are on a mission to bring patients, adults and children to a more fucked place.

At first it goes like a clock. We accelerate in the city in an armored car equipped with roof drones, hitting 130 km/h (80MP). The road is covered with a high green mesh that darkens the visibility from above – protecting it from Russian drones.

This is their second trip in the morning, and the streets are mostly empty. Several remaining residents leave their homes only for quick supply collection. Russian attacks come daily.

The city already looks abandoned and has been free of water for a week. Every building we pass is damaged, with some reduced to ruins.

In the previous five days, Laartz, a 31-year-old German, and Varia, a 19-year-old Ukrainian who worked for charity universal assistance in Ukraine, made dozens of trips to evacuate people.

A week earlier, small groups of Russian troops violated the defense around the city, igniting fears that the front line of the so -called “fortress belt” of Ukraine -some of the most protected parts of the Ukrainian Front can collapse.

Additional troops were harvested in the area and the Ukrainian authorities claim that the situation was stabilized. But most Dobropillia residents think it’s time to leave.

While the evacuation team arrives, on the 56 -year -old Vitaly Kalininko waits on the threshold of his apartment block, with a plastic bag full of things in his hand.

“All the windows were broken, look, they all flew to the second floor. I’m the only one left,” he says.

He wears a gray T -shirt and black shorts, and his right leg is bandaged. Calininko points to a crater beyond some pink shrubs, where Shahed’s drone crashes a few nights earlier, breaking his windows and cutting his legs. The engine from another drone is located in the adjacent garden.

While we are about to leave, Laarz marks a drone on top and re -hiding under trees. His handmade drone detector shows many Russian drones in the area.

An older woman in a summer dress and a straw hat walks with a shopping cart. He warns her of the drone and she speeds up her pace. The explosion hits nearby, his sound echoes from nearby apartment blocks.

But before we can try to leave, there is still another family that needs to be saved, just around the corner.

Laarz walks on foot to find them, excluding idle drone equipment to save the battery power. “If you hear a drone, these are the two switches in the middle console, turn it on,” he says as he disappears around the corner. Jamer is effective only against some Russian drones.

A series of explosions hit the neighborhood. A woman to bring water with her dog runs for cover.

Laarz returns with more evacuated and drones, which are still in the air above, traveling from the city even faster than he arrived.

Inside the evacuation convoy I sit next to Anton, 31. His mother stayed in the back. She shouted as he left and he hoped he would leave too early.

The front lines are displaced, cities are lost and winning and losing again, but with the advancement of Russia and the fate of the region, which is negotiated, this may be the last time Anton and the other evacuated see their homes.

Anton says he has never left the city before. Above the roar of the engine, I ask him if Ukraine should give up Donbass – a resource -rich region made up of Donetsk and Luhansk.

“We have to sit at the negotiating table and, after all, resolve this conflict in a peaceful way. Without blood, no casualties,” he says.

But Varia, 19, feels different. “We can never trust Putin or Russia, whatever they say, and we have experience.

The situation in Donbass is increasingly dangerous to Ukraine, as Russia is slowly but constantly progressing. President Volodimir Zelenski is laughing at suggestions that it can be lost by the end of this year, predicting it will take four more years to allow Russia to fully occupy what remains.

But it is unlikely that Ukraine will restore considerable territory here without a new weapon or additional support from the West.

This part of Donetsk is crucial to the protective part of Ukraine. If they are lost or given to Russia, the neighboring regions of Kharkov and the attachment – and then – would be at a greater risk.

The cost of retention is measured in the life and parts of the body of Ukrainian soldiers.

Later, I drive to the nearby field hospital under the guise of darkness. The drone’s activity never stops and the war wounded and the dead can only be obtained safely at night.

The Russian victims are far higher, maybe three times more or more, but there is a greater capacity to absorb losses from Ukraine.

The wounded start to arrive, the cases grow more seriously as the night extends to the morning. The victims are battles in Pokrovsk, a city that Russia has been trying to seize for one year and is now partially surrounded. This is a key city in Donetsk’s defense and the fighting was brutal.

The first man arrives conscious, a bullet wound to the chest from a shootout. The following is another man of his forties covered with shrapnel wounds. It took two days and three attempts to save it and the intensity of the fighting. Then a person whose right leg is almost swollen entirely by the punch of drones on the way from Pokrovsk to Mirrihrad.

The surgeon and SNR LT Dima, 42, pass from patient to patient. This is a medical stabilization compartment, so its job is to strengthen the victims as quickly as possible and send them to the main hospital for more current treatment. “It’s hard because I know I can do more, but I don’t have time,” he tells me.

After all this slaughter, I also ask him if Donbass must be betrayed to bring peace.

“We have to stop (the war), but we don’t want to stop it like that,” he says. “We want back our territory, our people and we must punish Russia for what they have done.”

He is exhausted, the victims were more severe, dozens a day, as the invasion of Russia and the injuries are the younger that the doctors have seen since the beginning of the war, most of all because of drones.

“We just want to go home to live in peace without this nightmare, this blood, this death,” he says.

On the driving outside this afternoon, between the fields of corn and sunflowers, miles of a newly discovered prickly wire gloss of sunlight. They run along with raised shores of red ground, deep trenches and tidy lines of concrete pyramids on the teeth of a dragon. All designed to slow down any sudden Russian progress.

Russia is believed to have over 100,000 troops who are waiting to operate another possibility as the worse offenses around Dobropilia.

These new fortifications, carved in Ukrainian dirt graphics, a worse situation here in Donetsk. What remains from the region can still be transmitted by diplomacy, but until then Ukraine, bloody and exhausted, it remains an intention to fight for every inch of it.