BAKHMOUT, Ukraine (AP) — As fighting rages in eastern Ukraine, Russian strikes cut off electricity, water and fuel in entire villages, and application groups are being sent to repair transmission lines and pipes destroyed amid the bombing.
Teams arrive at one location only to be forced to retreat due to fighting, officials say. They are unlikely to reach some villages.
“It’s dangerous, because we can hear the projectiles whistling over us,” said Sergii Marokhin, a water systems engineer in the city of Bakhmut, who recently suffered an increase in shelling as Russian forces continue their offensive in the Donetsk region of Donbass. the commercial center of eastern Ukraine.
The previous day’s bombing had damaged water pipes in a nearby village and in Bakhmut itself that he and his team had repaired that morning. There was a sewer pipe to repair and it had damaged water pipes in other nearby villages.
Even on quiet days, there are still normal paintings to be done.
“People will continue to paint the war,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
In some hard-hit places, other people have been forced to rely on makeshift ovens and stoves built of bricks and stone.
“To date, part of the city is water. The other part of the city takes water from wells,” Oleksandr Marchenko, deputy head of bakhmut’s army administration, said on Wednesday. A dam to the north exploded, drying up the canal that passes in front of Bakhmut, he said.
The city has a backup water supply, but downed power lines have disrupted water pumping. Engineers hoped to repair the damage if they did.
“Unfortunately, the city is bombed every day,” Marchenko said. As if to prove his point, mortar shells whistled over his head and sent him to dive into a grassy bench to take cover.
The mortar chimney landed with a thud in the north of the city, sending puffs of black smoke.
“There is no gas, no electricity, no water!” Viktor Paramonov thundered as he and a few others on the outskirts of Bakhmut were ready to cook on a makeshift outdoor stove consisting of a wooden fireplace and a steel plate balanced on bricks. “There is nothing. “
A nearby fabric factory had been destroyed by a bombing raid a few days earlier. In mid-May, the construction next to his hit and collapsed part of it.
Further north, in Sloviansk, a generator roared in the city corridor after a power outage of high-voltage lines was shot down during fighting just to the east. The water source was also cut off.
“The repair has to move into spaces of combat operations, which is dangerous,” said Vadym Lyakh, head of the Slovyansk army administration.
The city government has water from reservoirs for Sloviansk’s citizens, which number about 30,000, up from 100,000 before the war, he said. Others used communal water pumps.
Behind a series of apartment buildings pierced by shrapnel from a rocket, citizens filled buckets and plastic bottles from an old yellow bomb in the street.
The pump requires too much force to function, an older man complained. Some women have to wait for a man to pass by and pull the lever, she said, as she assembled a small steel stove to prepare lunch outside.