The Kramatorsk Diaries part 12

Heroic

You know that feeling when you meet someone after many years and think, "My god, you've aged." Well, Zarina and I had a similar experience when, after five weeks, our Ukrainian cleaner arrived. I looked at the apartment and realised that under our less-than-watchful eye, it too had aged - badly.

This didn't go unnoticed by our eagle-eyed cleaner despite my panicked round of pre-cleaner cleaning the previous night. She possessed that uncanny power, usually the domain of French waiters, of making you feel small and, in our case, dirty.

I don't know how it got so bad. Zarina eats only weird eggplant stuff from a plastic tub, and I live exclusively on pasta and pesto, so the kitchen is used sparingly. Zarina only discovered we had kitchen lighting five weeks into our stay, purely by chance, I must add.

I can't be sure if the cleaner used the word squat, but if my body language gauge is accurate, it was undoubtedly hovering on the tip of her tongue.

We left the cleaner to her miserable task and went to meet one of the most remarkable young men I've ever met.

Dyma's Tale;

On 26 February 2022, Russian forces began their assault on the city of Kherson in Southern Ukraine.

Dyma, a fresh-faced engineering student, and two close friends went to the Antonivs'kyy Bridge spanning the Dnipro River to assist in the battle against the Russian invaders. Despite ferocious fighting and with no military experience, they helped evacuate injured Territorial Defence soldiers and ferried munitions to the front lines.

The Ukrainians, outnumbered and outgunned, lost the battle, and the Russian tanks rolled into town. Still, on that bloody day in February, the seeds of resistance were sown.

In the weeks following the occupation, Dyma and his friends devoted themselves to humanitarian work, delivering food parcels to civilians trapped by the fighting and caring for the older residents. As time passed, though, Dyma's groups decided they could do more. Much more.

Huddled in the basement of a Soviet-era housing block, they formed one of Kherson's first partisan groups. In need of weapons, they approached the city and military authorities with a request but were promptly told to "Fuck off" as they were too young. Undaunted, they collected arms wherever they could find them, "We were worried that the old guys with the guns wouldn't use them," said Dyma with a wry smile.

They monitored Russian troop movements in the region, passed all the information gathered directly to the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence), and were soon integrated into a growing intelligence-gathering network receiving direct requests and orders from Kyiv.

As the Russian grip on the city tightened, Dyma's unit acquired the keys to apartments vacated by residents who had fled and, at night, installed covert cameras to monitor the Russians who broke in and used them as lodgings.

"We watched them at night, on the streets, everywhere they went," said Dyma, laughing at the memory.

From the offset, Ukrainians collaborating with the Russians were a high priority on the partisan's target list. "We had to do something. They were a serious problem and needed stopping," said Dyma, "so we acquired explosives and eliminated them. It took time and was dangerous work, but we captured and killed many."

Infrastructure, particularly the rail network, was another critical objective. The Russians relied on it to transport munitions to the front, so, using explosives, they sabotaged the Russian war machine's vital rail tracks and ammunition depots.

Life under occupation was a deadly game of cat and mouse. The FSB, Russia's intelligence service, were hot on the partisans' trail, and, despite all of their security measures, the FSB finally infiltrated an agent into Dyma's group.

In September 2022, an early morning knock on the HQ door saw an armed response squad burst into the apartment. Initially, the FSB tortured him in situ; they wanted all his contacts in the group, but when he didn't break, they moved him to a notorious underground torture chamber.

"They beat me daily and used electric shocks generated by field telephones. At night, I could hear the screams of the other prisoners. It was psychological and physical torture, and it went on for five months."

The only exit from the cycle of torture and beatings was to work for the Russians as an informant. "Eventually, I agreed, but I had no intention of doing it. I was already planning my escape," said Dyma.

"At first, to check if they could trust me, they made me clean the torture cells and do other shitty jobs. I did it, but at the same time, I was sabotaging their equipment, breaking the wires on the electrocution telephones, anything to disrupt their activities."

By November, the Ukrainian army had routed the Russians in Kherson and Dyma was released onto the occupied left bank to start his new career as an FSB informant. Except he didn't. Instead, he and his friends disappeared and went on the run.

They hid in basements and scavenged food and water, evading the Russians at every turn. Desperate to return across the river and the safety of the Ukrainian right bank, they had to devise an alternative plan; the retreating Russians had blown all the bridges. Their way home was gone.

Eventually, they gained access to a computer. Friends on the right bank sent them ID documents, which they altered and replaced the pictures to make new papers that would, hopefully, pass Russian scrutiny.

The next phase of the escape was the most audacious. Unable to cross the Dnipro River, Dyma and his cell had only one option: to travel into temporarily occupied Crimea. This was a high-risk strategy; they had yet to test their forged documents, and Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, was a fortress.

Improbably, they passed through the Russian checkpoints into occupied Crimea. Their forged papers had worked, but the most daunting hurdle had yet to be crossed: to get back to Ukraine, they had to travel through Russia proper.

Using their altered IDs, they slipped out of Crimea and into Russia on a night bus and began the terrifying, painfully slow journey across Russia. The consequences for escaped Ukrainian partisans captured inside Russia on false papers would bring almost certain death or a lifetime in prison; the stakes could not have been higher.

They passed undetected through Moscow before a final, nerve-wracking bus journey took them to the border with the Baltic states.

Their run of luck held out, and in the spring of 2023, after travelling 1500 miles through enemy territory, they crossed safely into Latvia and then made it to Poland, where Dyma was reunited with his family.

"I could have stayed in Poland," said Dyma as we chatted in the former partisan HQ and scene of his initial torture, "but I figured I still had work to do, so I returned to Ukraine and enlisted in the army."

The former engineering student smiled, shook hands and said, "I have to go. I'm back on duty this evening."

We left Dyma and were both in a mild state of shock after hearing his story. We arrived home, and the apartment was immaculate, injecting a splash of shame into the emotional mix.

"We must do better," I said solemnly, stirring a pan of pasta.

"Mmm mmm," Zarina replied through a mouthful of eggplant stuff.