Blood flowing from a bullet wound, the gray-haired man lies in the course of the roadblock waving weakly for help as shots ring out nearby and thick black smoke from burning tires curls into the sky.
“I’ve called an ambulance. They must come, they need to come,” a guy screams, ducking for canopy behind a concrete breezeblock.
A hundred meters (yards) away, a column of Ukrainian army armored vehicles opens fire again. The sound in their mounted machine guns and the soldiers’ automatic rifles echoes as they move in on one of the vital remaining pro-Russian rebel checkpoints just south of the rebel bastion of Slavyansk.
From nearby trees, separatist gunmen shoot back with the clack-clack-clack of sporadic automatic gunfire.
They are retreating, as they realize they’re no match for the bigger Ukrainian force.
A grey sedan car at the road sits immobile, pointing clear of the fighting. Its windows are shot out. Inside a driver writhes in pain while a person tries to wrap a tourniquet around his arm before diving to the verge as more shots are fired.
Lying sprawled at the road by the automobile is the body of a center-aged man. His back is riddled with bullet holes. His beige jacket is seeped in blood. a person tries to pull him to the side of the line.
“Come here, film this!” two women tending to the fellow shout to me and the AFPTV camerawoman with me.
Meanwhile, two armed separatists holding automatic rifles crouch behind a tree. They yell at a gaggle of civilians to get out of the world as quickly as possible.
‘Who’s shooting?’
Not very distant, at the outskirts of town of Kramatorsk — the last town to the south of Slavyansk at the road from the regional capital Donetsk — the rebels are up to speed.
A handful of masked men crouch behind a van with rifles as a small pile of tyres burn within the road.
Other militants gather Molotov cocktails by the side of the line while onlookers warily peer within the distance on the smoking checkpoint.
“What’s occurring? Who’s shooting — us or them?” asks one man hiding in a bus stop and clutching a lager. By “them” he means the warriors.
After about half an hour the sound of firing subsides. Two ambulances drive at speed through Kramatorsk with their sirens wailing.
The Ukrainian soldiers have taken control of the checkpoint.
It’s a small victory for the army at the second day of an operation against the rebels in Slavyansk.
But it’s short-lived.
Less than two hours later, the Ukrainian soldiers who had fought so hard to take the checkpoint abandon it. It’s not clear why.
Angry local residents wander round the smouldering wreckage. a number of cars nervously go through, past two empty petrol tankers the rebels were using as barriers. The ends of the tankers are shorn off, apparently by heavy weapon fire or from an explosion.
“They drove off in the course of the fields,” pensioner Fyodor Mordiltsev said.
“The authorities in Kiev don’t care about their people. They’ve sold out to the White House”.
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