SIVERSK DISTRICT, Ukraine – Oleksandr Chaplik, one of the few civilians still driving on a road to the front, skidded to a stop and leaned out the car window to exchange information with a villager.
He returned supplies to his village, one of the few remaining in Ukrainian hands and in the way of the Russian advance.
“We are surrounded on all sides,” said Mr Chaplik, 55, a dairy and livestock farmer. “It is the second month without light, without water, without gas, without communication, without internet, without news. In short, horror.”
“But people have to eat,” he said. “I’m a businessman. So I do my job.”
Mr Chaplik owns about 75 hectares of land near the town of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian and Ukrainian forces have fought fierce street battles for control in recent days. The countryside around his farm is almost constantly bombarded by Russian troops who try to encircle the easternmost Ukrainian forces and besiege Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.
The roar of multiple rocket launcher systems fired south of the farmhouse rattled the windows and doors of his house. “Don’t worry, they’re Ukrainian,” he said as he toured his farm. “Here, thank goodness, the boys are holding out.”
But the war has come dangerously close. Craters from bombs and artillery shells scar his fields. Leaning against the wall of one of his barns were the shells of a dozen rockets that Mr. Chaplik had collected from around the farm. The rockets delivered cluster bombs, he said, that still littered his hayfields.
“They want to eat grass,” he said as he walked through the stables of his 35 dairy cows. “But because of these bombs, I can’t let the cows run loose on this grass and I’m afraid they will fall into the bomb craters.”
Mr. Chaplik is a fragile connection to the world for his increasingly isolated village, which he asked not to be named so that it would not face retaliation from Russian troops. At considerable risk to itself, it provides vital supplies and information, and continues to produce food as best it can.
Many other farmers have left the area, but he said he couldn’t. “I can’t let the people down,” he said. “If I leave, I won’t be able to return to the village, I won’t be able to look people in the eye.”
But as the war drew closer, he had to downsize his business while trying to keep the farm producing and feeding and paying the workers. With utilities shut down, he runs the milking machines on generators, but can only run his refrigerators for 12 hours a day.
“We used to make almost 100 different dairy products,” he says. “I have a two-year-old Parmesan cheese. I made unique products that no one else made, sour cream, cream, mozzarella, burrata.”
But without electricity, he has had to reduce production. There was a shortage of containers, he added. He took two cheeses with moldy rinds out of a refrigerator. “They’re not good,” he said.
He has moved his food production activities to different parts of the country, relocated some of his dairy production to the nearby market town of Bakhmut, where he already owns an organic meat and dairy store, and relocated his meat production plants to the relatively safe cities of Dnipro and Lviv.
His family has also moved. His wife is a teacher and two of his children are in college, so they had to go somewhere with the internet to keep working, he said. They called him daily and begged him to join them, but he said he still had work to do.
Its workforce has been cut as many villagers have moved with their families to safer parts of the country. “I have fields and machines and diesel, but I don’t have the workers,” he said. But he gathered the 10 workers that remained, so that they now live and eat together.
Two teenage girls were mucking out the cowsheds. “They are the daughters of my workers. They are children, but I have no workers,” he said.
A retiree, Lyudmila, 68, has stepped in to run his shop in the village.
“Did you get cucumbers?” she cried, as Mr. Chaplik pulled bottles of water and fresh vegetables from his van.
“We would be lost without him,” she said. Villagers couldn’t travel to the market and prices were much higher there anyway, she said.
But the tension can be seen on Mr Chaplik’s face. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. He complained of a toothache and a cramp around his eye. One of the hardest things, he said, was dealing with the panicked phone calls from relatives trying to reach the villagers left behind. The cell phone service in the village has been shut down, but they know that Mr. Chaplik drives into town every day to the market, where cell phone service continues, and they bombard him with phone calls.
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“My nerves are cracking,” he said, declining another phone call. “I work 14 to 15 hours a day. I am physically tired.”
So now he arranges for his son to bring a mobile antenna so the villagers can get in touch with their relatives.
He sees more trouble on the horizon. The war has disrupted agriculture and food production to the point that people in eastern Ukraine could go hungry for months to come, he warned.
The potatoes have already been planted, which will feed the villagers, he said, but meat and milk will become scarce.
“If I don’t make feed for my cows, they will die this winter,” he said. “I can’t cut the hay because of the cluster bombs in the fields and I need 12,000 bales of hay and I don’t have the workers.”
And as he follows the progress of the war and the steady advance of Russian troops, he said it was likely they would seize control of the village and he would lose the farm he had built over 20 years.
Russian-backed separatist forces took over the area in 2014, but were pushed back after a few months. But this time, he said he didn’t expect President Vladimir V. Putin to quit. The Russian leader wants to conquer part of the country, from the city of Kharkov in the northeast to Odessa in the southwest, he said.
“He won’t calm down,” he said. “He will fight for a year, two, three until he reaches his goal.”
Mr Chaplik has slaughtered his pigs, so only one remains, slumbering in his pen. The newborn calves will also need to be slaughtered, he said. “It is a pity.”
If the Russians came, he added, he would have to leave his watchdogs, six German Shepherds. “I couldn’t bear to put them down,” he said. “I’m letting them go.”
If the shells got too close, he would take his workers and leave, he said. “I’ll start over,” he said. “Give me a little piece of land, in Ukraine, in the United States, anywhere. I can build a great company again.”