The Battle of Ilovaisk of August 2014 is the most tragic and yet one of the least well-understood episodes in Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine.
Ilovaisk, Donetsk Oblast city of some 16,000 people, was supposed to be where Ukraine’s army would break Russia’s proxy forces. But it turned into a bloody slaughter that ended the Ukrainian army’s advances, and left hundreds dead.
It was also the first time Russia openly sent thousands of its regular army soldiers into Donbas to fight Ukrainian troops. The Kremlin denies doing so but an overwhelming amount of evidence proves its denials to be false.
The Battle of Ilovaisk changed the course of the war, forcing Ukraine’s authorities into a humiliating peace deal in Minsk.
By taking control of Ilovaisk, a strategic railway junction in 620 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces would have cut the supply lines to Russian-led forces in Donetsk – it would then only have been a matter of time before they, and other Russian proxy forces in Luhansk, would have had to surrender.
But since Ukraine’s regular army troops were already too exhausted to fight, Ukrainian commanders decided to use the little-trained volunteer battalions as their main combat assault force to take Ilovaisk.
After several failed attempts, the volunteers managed to enter the city, but they became bogged down in fighting with Russian-led forces along the railway line, which bisects the town from north to south.
Meanwhile, thousands of Russian troops were secretly flooding into Ukraine, and starting to encircle the Ukrainian forces in Ilovaisk. Reinforcements failed to arrive, and by the time the Ukrainians realized the seriousness of their plight it was already too late.
Negotiations began with the Russians on safe passage for the Ukrainian soldiers out of encirclement. But then came treachery and ambush – the two Ukrainian military columns that were taking the Ukrainian troops out of the city were shelled by the Russians, with hundreds being killed, wounded or taken captive.
The official number of those killed in Ilovaisk, according to an investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office, is 366. Many of those who survived and historians who have themselves researched the events of late August 2014 in the Donbas believe the numbers may be much higher.
In the more than three years since the Battle of Ilovasik, Ukraine’s General Staff has yet to clarify much of what happened during the fighting, and the families of the soldiers killed have been left in the dark about how Ukraine’s worst defeat of the war came about, and who was to blame.
The Kyiv Post has tried to reconstruct some of the tragic events in and around Ilovaisk in late August 2014, by telling the stories of those who was there in a multimedia project called “Surviving Ilovaisk.”
There are stories of confusion among military leaders, and chaos on the ground when soldiers came up against not lightly armed Russian proxy forces, but the full might of the well-trained and equipped Russian regular army.
But there are also stories of the heroism of those who fought on, even when the situation seemed hopeless, those who clung on to their own lives, and saved the lives of their comrades in the most dire circumstances.
