Shovel in hand and helmet on their head, Ukrainian soldiers disembark from a truck and prepare to dig a trench near Bakhmout, in eastern Ukraine.
The team leader gives his instructions to the thirty or so diggers: "You have to dig from there to there", he says, pointing with his hand to a section a few tens of meters long of green grass and wet from the rain. of the night.
The place is between a small road and a wood, about six kilometers from the first Russian positions.
The chef continues: "Half hollow, the other half can smoke, and you change. You dig until 2:30 p.m. and then we get out of here," he said mid-morning Sunday.
"There is Bakhmout, there is the front," he ends, pointing in both directions with his hand.
The soldiers who are going to dig put their guns in the grass, and shovels in hand line up along the portion. The others fall back slightly.
They don't have time to start when the shrill sound of a rocket rips through the air before swooping down and exploding less than 50 yards away.
Some soldiers dive to the ground, others run to lie down at the edge of the adjoining wood.
There follow about twenty explosions in a row, in deafening noises near or farther away.
The detonations click and follow one another for about twenty seconds. Then the silence returns. A few soldiers then get up, but they quickly dive back down when again two explosions ring out.
When calm returned, the team leader ordered the soldiers to run towards the truck parked about fifty meters away, under cover under the trees. "Come on, come on!" he cried, relieved that there were no injuries.
Everyone runs towards the vehicle, some shovels in hand, everyone gets on board and the troop leaves the area.
"They were cluster munitions," Ruslan, a team sergeant, told AFP a few minutes later in a sheltered place.
The Russians "may have seen our group. The projectiles fell right where a lot of people had gathered", he explains, judging it very likely that the diggers were spotted by a drone. sighting, despite low, gray skies on Sunday.
"We are not digging in a dangerous place. Some days we dug almost to ground zero (of the line of contact between the belligerents), but there were no such attacks," he adds. -he.
"With our numbers, we can make a trench in two days. We have to get the job done quickly," he said.
AFP journalists saw soldiers digging numerous trenches in the Bakhmout region, the town where particularly deadly fighting has been raging since last summer.
In recent weeks, the Russians of the paramilitary group Wagner and special forces of the Moscow army have advanced in the center of the locality.
The Ukrainians now only hold a small western part of the city, the Russian authorities claiming to control around 90% of the city, now almost reduced to ruins and which had 70,000 inhabitants before the conflict.
30/04/2023 16:53:20 - Près de Bakhmout (Ukraine) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
