4/30/2023 0 Comments Battle group avalon“It became really frightening when Ukrainian soldiers took up positions within the factory grounds and the fight came very close to us,” he said.īut incoming shells and gunfire were not the only deadly threats facing some 800 plant workers and their families hunkered underground beneath the factory stacks as Russian forces besieged Severodonetsk, a strategic prize in the offensive to seize the entire region of Donbas.Ībove them, vats of toxic chemicals used to produce nitrogen fertilisers, were now at the centre of one of the bloodiest flashpoints of the four-month war, exposing them to the risk of explosions and leakage.Īs a member of an emergency response team, Vladimir, 54, recalls rushing to help repair a tank full of dangerous ammonia gas – which can cause blindness, breathing difficulties and death – after it had been damaged by fighting.Īs Russian forces closed in on surrounding villages in the advance to capture the vast industrial regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, workers evacuated their children and elderly relatives from increasingly vulnerable homes to the relative safety of the factory’s sturdy Cold War-era bomb shelters. ![]() Inside the Donbas chemical plant where hundreds of families shelter in toxic surroundingsīunkering below the Azot factory means incoming Russian shells and gunfire are not the only deadly threats facing families as troops advanceįor close to two months, Vladimir sheltered with his elderly mother and mother-in-law in the darkness of a spartan bunker under the sprawling Azot chemical plant, as fighting raged around them in the embattled eastern city of Severodonetsk.
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