The Kramatorsk Diaries part 36

Spinning plates...

Paul Conroy in Kramatorsk

For a heartbeat, every gadget in the room conspired to deliver one final, sickening click — a tiny mechanical death rattle — before everything collapsed into inky, absolute darkness. A lone LED on the monitor held its ground, brave and pathetic in equal measure, before surrendering to the inevitable. That’s the law here: one goes, they all go. Power doesn’t die politely; it’s sudden, unforgiving, final.

Across the city, a hundred men — all of them called Dima, because every bloke over forty in this country is called Dima — crushed their cigarettes, sighed, and trudged outside to do the honours. Within minutes, Kramatorsk throbbed, vibrating to the roar of generators coughing out their life-giving volts and their filthy, choking fumes. The whole city powered by diesel, despair, and a legion of exhausted Dimás.

I stayed put for a moment, letting my eyes adjust and giving myself time to crawl out of the stagnant pit of misery I’d slid into at the prospect of yet another blackout. It wasn’t some grand emotional reckoning — just the weary realisation that, for the second time this week, life had reverted to a cruise-ship plate-spinning act, only with batteries and chargers instead of plates and sticks, and none of the forced cheer.

No one knows how long a blackout will last, and “always-on” lighting is the exclusive domain of generator people — the diesel aristocracy. I’m not one of them. I’m a sworn man of the battery, which means moving through the apartment with a torch clenched between my teeth, groping for a switch so the room is bathed in LED light with all the warmth and charm of an autopsy room.

And for any of you deviants who think this sounds remotely enjoyable — some quaint little adventure where you unplug, curl up with a book, and “rediscover life without technology” — cut it out. There’s no heating here, and the temperature is dropping like a stone. This isn’t cosy minimalism. It’s indoor camping.

Cell towers run on standby batteries too, and the longer the blackout drags on, the flatter they get. A few hours in, your phone is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. Which means any planned work — trips to military positions, interviews, anything requiring actual coordination — evaporates as fast as the volts in a Kramatorsk cable. Then you end up writing pieces like this.

You’d think the blackout’s blindness would be punishment enough, but there’s also the joy of generator deafness. In a place where death drops out of the sky on a regular basis, hearing drones as they creep in from Russian positions 20km away is fairly important. Light up a few thousand generators, and suddenly the city hums just loud enough to smother that sound. The first hint you get of a nearby strike is when the building shudders and the windows rattle like cheap teeth.

Twenty hours in, I roll up to the local coffee shop. They’ve got a generator roaring out back and a Starlink dish coughing WiFi into the void. Everyone else in town has had the same idea, so the place is packed — off-duty soldiers, volunteers, civilians, journalists — all jammed together in this tiny oasis of power and signal.

It’s a relief to see life concentrated in one spot again. It’s also terrifying.
The last time I saw a place with this exact buzz was the Ria pizza restaurant a few years back — same chatter, same glow, same sense of stolen normality. The Russians hit it with an Iskander and killed fourteen people.

I found José and Catalina hunched over their laptops, buried in a tangle of wires as they sucked the last drops of life from the café’s generators. The news isn’t good. No word on when the power will return. The plant in Slovyansk — sixteen miles away — is a Soviet antique from the 1950s, hit dozens of times and now running on habit, hope, and whatever prayers the staff have left.

There’s going to come a moment when the workers simply can’t patch it back together anymore. That moment might be now. We genuinely have no idea.

José has more bad news. At the open-air market today, an army medic bought a power bank, plugged in his phone, and it detonated. They found only his legs. The Russians had slipped someone into the city — a collaborator, or just a soldier in civilian clothes — long enough to plant the booby-trapped device in the rubbish, where it was found and sold as second-hand with tragic consequences.

Add that to the rolling blackouts, and the effect on morale is savage. The city authorities are pushing out warnings on the community Telegram channels. No one can read them, of course. The power’s out.

Forty hours into the blackout, and my power reserves are circling the drain. I come up with a solution so desperate it just about qualifies as innovation. I’ve got a big EcoFlow battery pack that spits out mains power. I strip an old car-charger cable, wrap it in electrical tape, and — with only the vaguest grasp of circuitry — create a homemade lifeline that lets me charge the EcoFlow from the car’s cigarette lighter.

Then I plug in everything I own: laptop, iPad, two iPhones, and my vape. All at once. Miraculously, it works — though it means sitting in the car for six hours with the engine running while the whole digital family slowly resurrects. At least it’s warm. I can run the heater.

Somewhere around hour four, I start seriously considering relocating to the car full-time.

Forty-nine hours later, as I’m wrapping up for another night of cold, stony darkness, the lights suddenly flicker. It scares the shit out of me — I mistake it for the flash that comes a split-second before the roar of a rocket or drone strike. Then another flicker… and the lights actually come on.

For a few glorious seconds, I’m overwhelmed. Proper emotion. Is that a tear of joy? Then reality slaps me back into motion, and I go feral. Batteries slammed into chargers, laptops, tablets, phones — anything with a port gets plugged in. For the next few hours, I’m like an ICU doctor on a double shift, checking vitals, rotating patients, monitoring every bar of charge with manic devotion.

Because one thing is guaranteed: the power is a temporary blessing. And what the Lord giveth, the Russians will inevitably take away.