Ukraine’s war continues after multiple failed ceasefire agreements. Refugees who had tried to return home are once again fleeing to safer ground, with fears that the front is moving west. The town of Debaltseve, located between Ukraine’s major industrial centres of Luhansk and Donetsk, is experiencing heavy fighting as the rebels attempt capture this strategic rail hub. The Ukrainian government troops have promised to hold the front east of the town, despite the mounting cost of that promise. Soldiers themselves are worried as they find themselves equipped with ever fewer working vehicles and less equipment. As one soldier treated for a shrapnel wound in the Artemivsk hospital told the BBC, all the equipment is old. Much of it is broken, and nobody has the supplies to fix it.
Communities around Debalt’seve have been isolated by the fighting, preventing supplies from reaching those within and preventing refugees from getting out. Many doctors have fled to safer ground, leading to a shortage of medical personnel. Local hospitals are becoming crowded, treating the increasing number of civilian casualties as more non-military areas are being targeted. It took surgeons 4 hours to remove all the shrapnel from one woman’s body; shells had hit her home while she was inside. Another, a nurse, was killed when her clinic was hit.
While most of eastern Ukraine is preoccupied with the war on their doorstep, the inmates in penal colonies, now on the land captured by the rebel independents, have been forgotten. The only supplies they receive—food or medicine—are from family members. In the previous presidency, harsh punishments for minor crimes like petty theft left prisons stuffed to, and sometimes over, capacity. The near-constant shelling around one such colony destroyed the nearby sewage treatment plant, causing half the colony to become ill from the contaminated water.
While the situation in Ukraine continues, the nearby Baltic States are becoming progressively more nervous, with Latvia and Lithuania beginning to consider re-instating the draft. The former Soviet Bloc countries have requested a full-time NATO presence in response to the Russian warships seen off their coasts and the 250+ instances of Russian military aircraft that have approached their eastern borders in the last month alone. Lithuania has already accused Russia of “chasing away” merchant vessels and interfering with the construction of power cables on the floor of the Baltic Sea.
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