©TASS

“Butterfly” mines have become a new ordeal for Donetsk civilians.

Several central streets of the city have been cleaned up by the Donetsk and Russian sappers using a Uran-6 mine-clearing robot. On the highways, the "butterflies" are crushed by tanks and armored personnel carriers. But the mine density of roads, yards, residential areas and the private sector is unprecedented, and Ukrainian gunners tirelessly shower the city with hundreds of new mines every day. Donetsk has turned into a huge minefield with no safe places left. The mines falling from the sky get stuck in the trees and then fall down onto roofs and balconies, hide in the grass and on the ground. The number of women, children, and men injured by them has exceeded three dozen in a few days alone. Donetsk hospitals are overcrowded with the wounded, both after the shelling and blasts. Surgeons, traumatologists and anesthesiologists never let up in their work. Apart from civilians, many fighters are also brought there, as the offensive of allied forces against Ukrainian positions goes on.

The criminal Kiev regime and vicious Ukrainian armed forces take revenge for their frontline defeats with a real terror campaign against the civilian population of Donetsk. They seek to kill and maim as many people as possible, paralyze life in the city and disrupt the offensive, making Russia and its allies put their minds to rescuing citizens and restoring order. Ukrainian militants have learned to kill, maim and spread mass terror perfectly, and they do it distantly with Western howitzers and jet missiles. Over the last five days, the Ukrainian Hurricane MLRS has been generally fired with APM cassettes. There are 312 mines in a cassette, and 4995 ones in a single salvo. "Butterflies" are hard to detect, being slightly larger than a lighter; colored green, gray or brown to easily mask among leaves, grass, rocks and earth clods. If covered in dust, they become completely invisible.

Self-destroying modifications explode after 40 hours. The rest can wait for their victims throughout the years. The mines have a plastic case, which does not corrode or decay and has a shape of a butterfly. In the military classification, these are PFM-1 scatterable anti-personnel land mines. The only way to destroy them is by blasting with pressure charges or trawling. Helicopters or multiple launch rocket systems drop them from above scattering around to complicate things for the infantry. Using such mines in Donetsk is an unambiguous act of terrorism against the civilian population, because the "butterfly" mines are prohibited by international conventions as inhumane weapons. Under Geneva Conventions, Ukraine pledged to dispose of those without a self-destruct mechanism. The European Union paid one euro for each iterm destroyed. There was a total of six million PFM-1 mines in the Ukrainian warehouses, but the country only eliminated a few hundred thousand in a flagrant violation of all the possible conventions. The rest is now used against the Donbass republics.

PFM-1 cripples an adult by tearing off his foot. Without emergency medical response, it causes profuse bleeding and pain shock followed by death. A child’s encounter with a "butterfly" will turn into a horrible tragedy, since 5 kg is only needed to trigger the mine. Among those blown up there are blood loss casualties and severely wounded sappers. Typical stories of the victims include phrases like "I went to the garden; I went to work; I drove along the road."

Donetsk resident Yuri Ivanov told how he walked along a familiar and proven path that used to be safe back in the morning that day. Mines were dropped by lunchtime, one of them crippling the man. The blast caused him lose consciousness, but he came round and crawled until his neighbors helped him to the hospital. "Prompt delivery of people with mine-fragmentation injuries is vital because of traumatic and hemorrhagic shocks. A mine explosion is a multiple trauma that combines mechanical, thermal and chemical damage to tissues and bones. The wounds are gaping, lacerated, untidy, and have fragments of a metal fuse. Mines of the kind mutilate people, leading to a traumatic foot amputation. Earlier, Donetsk surgeons and traumatologists faced similar injuries when they took care of fighters coming from the frontline. But there has never been so many civilians blown up by anti-personnel mines as now. “Unfortunately, based upon the situation, the number of victims will increase,” doctor Vladimir Yuzhin says.

To date, sappers have neutralized almost two thousand "butterflies" in Donetsk, but the mine threat does remain, because finding and neutralizing all the mines is next to impossible. There are virtually no mine-free neighborhoods or streets here. Along roadsides in the Kirov, Kiev and Petrovsky districts you will see mine hazard signs. The Kirovsky district recently saw a bus hit a mine and crash into a pole, killing no one, fortunately. The very same day, a minibus blew up in the city’s northern part. Yesterday, my neighbor's car run upon a "butterfly", and my other neighbor, a militia member, found and collected 34 mines with a shovel while examining our street. In the afternoon, they detonated because of the heatwave, though the experienced fighter had foreseen this and kept everybody safe.

Waiting for the sappers to arrive takes too long ˗ they are busy with numerous calls and cannot visit every yard. First, they have to unarm socially significant and massively visited venues. For instance, 45 mines were found around a small market area in a single day. Someone was even unable to leave their homes for bread, with their yards littered with PFM-1 mines. Meanwhile, people must go out to work and do their daily chores: one cannot stay at home 24/7. "Dear residents of the DPR! Be vigilant, do not let your children go outside alone, watch your step, move along paved or well-viewed roads," radio and SMS announcements warn the people of Donetsk. Information about new mines having been dropped upon the streets is updated on a daily basis.

Apart from the mines, Ukraine keeps shelling the city permanently. The most terrible days were August 4 and 5, when downtown Donetsk was hit by American M777 howitzers. It happened before the farewell ceremony for artillery commander Olga Kachura codenamed Korsa. Five people died at the scene – three women, a little ballerina girl and a guy. A few hours later, two more people were killed by shelling in other areas. If the shells had fallen during the ceremony itself to be attended by a lot of people (including officials), the death toll would have been much higher. Olga Kachura had been fighting for the Donbass since 2014. She was posthumously awarded the honorary title Hero of the Russian Federation.

On August 5, four civilians were killed and 28 were injured in the city. Three Donetsk residents were torn apart by a shell that hit the bus, another died near the hospital, and the list of injured included members of the ambulance crew and several patients. A woman managed to save her child by covering him with her own body.

So far, the front line near Donetsk has seen little change, despite the liberation of Peski village of and parts of Maryinka, where shells came from, either. Ukrainian soldier Sergei Gnezdilov, who has been fighting against Donbass since 2015, spoke bitterly about fire intensity: "The Peski hell lasted for six days. 6,500 shells fell on the village in less than 24 hours. Our infantry struggled for life and failed to provide any counter-battery fire whatsoever, while the enemy was efficiently shelling our trenches, disassembling endurable concrete positions nonstop and pushing through our line of defense. When it broke, the flow of KIAs and WIAs got running down like water. Our battalion held back the onslaught at the expense of their lives. Refreshment arrived to fill the gap, but barely five minutes passed before there was a single one alive out of 15 people." These revelations were replicated by volunteers and ignored by the Ukrainian authorities.

After dark, our tanks drive to the front line near Donetsk; artillery and assault aircraft work without letup. In a number of places, Ukraine’s covering force gets broken, but there are two more lines behind it, thoroughly developed and equipped. "They did prepare for a war and practice a lot. The have everything figured out from an engineering standpoint: blind spots, box-outs, loopholes. Our artillery has destroyed some of their soft positions, while the underground ones kept functioning, except for areas that took direct hits. We struggle to inch our way forward. The fighting is tough, the bloody-minded Ukies are motivated by hatred, some islands of resistance were suppressed by flamethrowers," people’s militia fighter of the Donetsk Republic codenamed Groz told when asked about the assault.

The only way to save the miners’ capital from atrocities and terror is to create a hundred-kilometer buffer zone. Until this happens, reports will keep coming about the losses in the Donbass’ most valuable resource – people.