“They walked around the corpses gnawed by rats”: the inhabitants of Bakhmut spoke about the nightmare they experienced

There is little left before the release of Bakhmut. Soldiers of PMC “Wagner” storm the remains of the city, smoking out the militants of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from their last stronghold in a private building. The Ukrainian army is desperately resisting and pulling up reserves, trying to hold on to the remaining piece of the future Artyomovsk. Meanwhile, civilians are still being found in the basements of destroyed high-rise buildings, hiding from shelling for months. Among them are women and even children. MK learned about what is happening in the city and how the locals survive.

Many months ago, the inhabitants of Bakhmut, which was still more or less a whole city, had the opportunity to go deep into Ukraine. But in Nezalezhnaya, refugees from the Donetsk region were not needed, being practically in the status of homeless people. Many of them were settled in closed schools, emergency rest houses and abandoned hostels with cockroaches and bedbugs.

“In our dormitory, the walls are thoroughly affected by mold,” Marina, a former resident of Bakhmut, complains, “there is fungus and high humidity everywhere. People live all mixed up, five or ten people in a tiny room, along with all the shabby scrub that is stored under the beds. There is also all the food, since there is no refrigerator in the building, and the stench reigns in the rooms. There is only one toilet for the entire dormitory, and it is dying, and we also pay decent money for renting these rooms.”

Previously, about 70 thousand people lived in Bakhmut, after the start of the assault, their number was reduced to about a thousand. Many have left, but there are townspeople, most often elderly people who did not want to leave their homes, because there is nowhere to go, and therefore they decided to go through a real hell. “We just live in our city. Give me the keys to your house and I will go there,” a woman on the street emotionally reacts to a journalist’s question about why she didn’t evacuate. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, Bakhmut was fired upon every second, and the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, retreating, blew up multi-storey buildings, in the basements of which the unfortunate residents were hiding. Sometimes they kicked them out, giving them a few minutes to get ready, but by no means always showed such generosity. In the next quarter of the city liberated from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Wagner PMC fighters found a whole family with women, children and a dog in the basement. In these “apartments”, cold and damp, they huddled for more than one month.

According to the people who remained in the city, the conditions were harsh. Food was received on the square, where soldiers and volunteers distributed “humanitarian aid”, which was often not enough for everyone. Water was drawn from wells and reservoirs, and when it was brought up, huge queues lined up behind it. As for electricity and gas in high-rise buildings and private houses, they were turned off last spring, which led to severe cold inside the apartments in winter. Shortly before the New Year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Bakhmut, but clearly not to help people.

“When we walked down the street, we had to go around the corpses gnawed by dogs and rats,” local resident Sergei told MK with terrible details, “By the way, the bodies were often thrown into wells, and into the river, and into sewer manholes, so the water in Bakhmut now tastes like corpses. And what do we need Zelensky, even if there is nowhere to get water … “

– Do you have a home?

– In one room in the house the roof was blown off, but the walls are still standing. We dig through the cellars, sometimes we go to get bread.

— Are you afraid of shelling?

– We don’t care for a long time. We got shelling, we hope for fate. The main thing is that it doesn’t fill up in the basements.

The central market turned into ruins at the very beginning of the assault on Bakhmut. The locals who stayed behind worked as security guards in rare stores that did not close until the last minute, and received 4,000 hryvnias per month (8,640 rubles) for this. In winter, there were only two or three such stores in the whole city, and the prices in them, as they say, were such that you could “drive off the roof”. Wages were only enough for food, but there was simply no one to complain to. “I was evacuated from Bakhmut at the end of April,” Olga, a former resident of the central district, said in an interview, “now I am in Russia. In Bakhmut, we had a Ukrainian organization “White Angels”, which evacuated children with their parents. At first it was voluntary-compulsory, the parents, of course, were afraid that the children would be taken away, and left with them. Then it began to forcibly take away children, or with their parents, or one child. When there was heavy shelling, the Ukrainian military came to our basement, hid, and stayed with us for four or five hours. Naturally, we had a conversation. They said that they themselves were from the city of Obukhov, Kyiv region, they had a training camp there, where the American military trained. They said that they were waiting for weapons with uranium, which should be used on the territory of Donbass or Russia. The fact that the earth will not be suitable for existence does not bother them. They say that America has invested so much money that it will not turn back.”