In late August, Russian-backed rebel forces launched a devastating counter-offensive against Ukrainian troops. They drove them out of border areas of both the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine, retook areas south of Donetsk and advanced to within a few miles of the port of Mariupol. A ceasefire came into effect on September 5. It is holding in most areas, but not everywhere. Few have confidence that the fighting is really over and that both the Ukrainians on one side and the rebels and their backers from Russia on the other have not simply called half-time. I took the following photos while reporting for The New York Review over the past few weeks.
Tim Judah
August 30: Three Ukrainian prisoners captured on August 27 when the rebels also captured the Novoazovsk border crossing to Russia. They were from the border guard service and being held in a storage room at the frontier. They seemed in good shape and said they were being treated well, but the rebels were present when were we talked to them.
Tim Judah
September 3: Just outside the village of Novokaterinivka, twenty-eight miles southeast of the rebel-held city of Donetsk: on the right is a destroyed APC. There are the remains of two Ukrainian dead in the wreckage and one hanging off the cables. For the Ukrainian side, the retreat from Ilovaysk and the destruction of the convoys in flight from there and elsewhere at the end of August will long be remembered as a catastrophic defeat and humiliation.
Tim Judah
September 6: One of the rebel soldiers guarding the stump of the once great Savur-Mogila monument that commemorated the Soviet capture of this strategic hill in 1943. Journalists are told not to take pictures that show the faces of rebel fighters. They drove the Ukrainians out of here on August 26.
Tim Judah
September 10: A rebel checkpoint on the road between Donetsk and Zugres. The flag on the left is the so-called “war flag” of Novorossiya, the territory the rebels want to carve out of south and east Ukraine. They have another state flag that is an adaptation of an old Russian imperial flag.
Tim Judah’s article on the catastrophic Ukrainian defeat at Ilovaysk, and the rout of its retreating soldiers on the road to Novokaterinivka, appears on the NYRblog.
