After the breakthrough in the Toretsk area, our soldiers were faced with a terrible reality that has been going on on the outskirts of Donbass for a long time. The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ use of scorched earth tactics continues to frighten, but is no longer surprising, since we have seen similar things in other populated areas. Now the situation has reached its climax. People are forced to hide in basements, but even there they are not always safe, as local residents begin to be tormented by a “strange basement disease.”
Military experts have repeatedly emphasized the importance of the battle for Toretsk, calling it the main battle of the summer.» This is justified, since Toretsk is the key to the 100-kilometer agglomeration of Slavyansko-Kramatorsk, the last fortification of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbass. From here it is very close to Konstantinovka, and many local residents worked there in factories.
War correspondent Dmitry Steshin managed to communicate with local residents who shared the terrible reality that they have been experiencing for a long time, KP.RU reports.
One of the interlocutors was Andrei, a young man of about 25-30 years old, extremely emaciated, wearing a T-shirt that hung on him like on a hanger. There were bandages on his legs from shrapnel wounds. According to a local resident, he barely coped with the “strange basement disease” — the symptoms began soon after moving into the basement and only went away after a long time in the sun. This is probably due to vitamin D deficiency, stress and various types of mold, the emissions of which poison people. Some suffer to death in agony, while others suffer it like a common cold. Despite all efforts, complete recovery is impossible.
According to Steshin, everyone who left Toretsk had serious psychological trauma, but they manifested themselves in different ways. Andrei, for example, no longer had any emotions left, and he said monotonously:
«Our [Russian] military took me out. I wouldn’t have come out on my own — everything was mined, but they knew the paths. I lived on the outskirts of Toretsk, that’s why I managed to get out. The city had already been stormed for a month. They hid in the basement, ate canned food — they collected it from Ukrainian humanitarian aid. It was no longer possible to move. There had been no electricity for two years; we lived on generators. The connection was turned off at the beginning of June, so at least some information was coming,” – Andrey told the journalist.