The Kramatorsk Diaries part 35

Boiling Frogs

By Paul Conroy — Kramatorsk

A frigid wind scours the Ukrainian steppes, dragging with it the first bitching bite of winter — that cruel, invisible enemy that freezes hands to weapons and boots to feet. In the trenches, breath crystallises before it leaves the mouth. The world narrows to the scrape of metal, the rattle of a dying generator, and the endless white silence between shellbursts.

If that were all, the men might endure it — hunkered deep in their subterranean prisons, trading cigarettes for warmth and jokes for courage. They’d bite the bullet, grit their teeth, and wait out the season. But there’s more to it than that.

If nature is cruel, man wins hands down — a pure beast, eager to outdo the frozen fury of the Siberian winds rolling down from the north. The drones bring their own weather now: a storm of shrieking FPVs, glide bombs, and ballistic missiles. Death doesn’t creep here; it screams. It comes fast — not the slow, numbing fade of frostbite, but a brutal, deafening full stop. No time for reflection. No time for fear. Just light, fury, then nothing.

Move back from the frontlines — once a tangible edge, now a vague concept dissolved by technology. The old comfort of geography has gone. The advances in drones have killed even that reassuring myth: I’m not on the front, therefore I’m safe. Forget it. You need to be twenty-five kilometres away before you can even pretend that line still exists.

The war has metastasised into a sprawling grey zone — a place where the map lies and the sky decides. A farmer’s field, a petrol station, a quiet intersection: all are fair game, all within reach of the unseen hand. Step inside, and the war will find you, unseen and indifferent, before you can say let’s turn around.

And that’s not the half of it. The good old days — when soldiers stalked, tracked, and hunted other soldiers before finishing them in a blood-and-mud frenzy — are long gone, buried with the corpses rotting out in the dead zone.

Now the crosshairs have drifted. Pensioners, mothers, infants — the pale, hollow-eyed ghosts haunting the housing blocks of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk — make just as good prey. These are the last two towns in Donetsk still breathing, though only just. The rest are mausoleums, their stairwells echoing with wind and memory.

Out here, the line between soldier and civilian has been erased by circuitry and cold logic. The drones don’t discriminate. They don’t even hate. They simply find.

At Kramatorsk railway station — the scene of a blood-splattered massacre of fleeing civilians in the early days of the war — word spread fast: the last train out had gone. The service was suspended indefinitely, another artery cut, another tenuous lifeline severed. For years, it had carried soldiers, mothers, and children between danger and the fragile illusion of safety. Now it was over.

Taxi drivers smoked in their cabs, staring at the replacement bus with a kind of hollow resignation. “That’s it,” one told me, voice low and heavy with realisation. “Now there is only one way out. One road left.” He paused, eyes fixed on the empty tracks. “Do you understand? One road.” He stressed the word one like a man trying to absorb the full weight of what he’d just said — as if repeating it might make it less true.

At a small wooden kiosk, a middle-aged woman with bleach-blonde hair and tired, resigned eyes weighed out sugar into plastic bags. Her nylon-quilted jacket was zipped to the chin, puffed out like armour against the cold. Spread before her on a patchwork of trestle tables lay a surreal bounty — shocking-pink sweets, stale biscuits, dried fish, odds and ends of a life still pretending to be normal.

But there wasn’t a customer in sight.

“There are no trains and no people,” she said with a shrug, measuring another half-kilo of sugar. “What difference does it really make where you are homeless?” Her voice was flat — too far gone for unnecessary emotion, worn smooth by years of surviving the impossible.

Death comes in many guises here in Donbas. One that the Russians have recognised — and mastered with methodical precision — is death by infrastructure.

The electricity in my apartment no longer flows; it trickles. It limps out of the socket like a shipwrecked man crawling up a stony beach, gasping for breath. I want to help it along, to steady its hand, to coax it toward the kettle. But it claws and twists its way up the wire, faltering, wheezing, and — just, only just — manages to bring the water to a boil.

Six weeks ago, Russia blitzed the Kramatorsk power station beyond repair. Now the only thing standing between the city and a cold, stony void is a creaking Soviet-era plant in nearby Slovyansk. Kill that, and they kill the last flicker of life in free Donetsk.

Last week, they came close — a strike that plunged both cities into absolute darkness. The effect was devastating. Total darkness is a luxury elsewhere, something people chase for peace or novelty. Here, it’s a hunt. With infrared eyes in the sky, drones roam freely, unblinded by human weakness. Down below, people stumble through the black — hunted, freezing, and unsure of every step.

That kind of darkness isn’t the absence of light. It’s fear made visible.

There’s a small community of journalists still clinging to Kramatorsk. We don’t talk about it much, but we all know why we’re here. This is the last redoubt — Fortress Donbas — the final patch of free soil before the tide rolls in.

For nearly four years, the Russian war machine has been grinding its way toward this place — slow, brutal, relentless — and we’ve stayed to witness it, to document what may be the closing chapter. But tension runs through everything now. You can feel it in the air, in the glances, in the silence before curfew. Their grip tightens by the day, and we can sense the city being slowly swallowed.

We were sitting in a half-lit restaurant just off the square, one of the few still serving hot food when the power stayed up long enough. The air smelled of burnt gas and reheated borsch.

“Do you know the story of the frog in the pot?” asked Boldizár, my Hungarian journalist mate. “The one that’s slowly boiled as the temperature rises?”

“I do,” I said.

He stared at his coffee for a moment, then turned back to me.

“Do you think we’re the frogs?”