Already the third alert in two hours. A sibling and automated voice resonates in the corridors and offices with obstructed windows. “Kab alert”, confirms a firefighter. KABs, these guided planing bombs launched from Russian planes full of hundreds of kilos of explosives, can destroy an entire building. Their threat is taken seriously by the men of the barracks, who grumble and turn off their cigarettes, before going down to the basement. Some are already sleeping. Others discuss, seated or leaning on the bunk beds. This Saturday, June 14, is an ordinary day of work for the Kostiantynivka firefighters, the city of the Donbass on which the Russians have been intensifying their assaults for a few weeks, in order to form a pliers by the North, the East and the South. The front is only about ten kilometers away.
Difficult, for these firefighters, to say precisely when the situation has worsened. Before being based there, a large part of them worked in cities now occupied by the Russian Federation, like Bakhmout, about twenty kilometers as the crow flies, fallen after a long and bloody battle, in the spring of 2023.
The dirty and dirty hair dog which intersects between the legs of each other is also part of the evacuated of the Bakhmout barracks, laughs Roman Gontcha, the fifties, solid fellow with sad eyes. He himself worked until then in another city in Donbass. He does not specify the name, is content to slide that there “Flobits another flag today”.
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Source: Lemonde