There was a deadly turn of events at the Ukrainian army’s scandal-hit Shirokiy Lan training camp on March 13, as one soldier died and seven others suffered serious burns when a tent caught fire.
According to an official statement by the 92nd Brigade, the deadly blaze broke out when the soldiers were using a makeshift stove inside a tent at 4 a.m. The injured soldiers were hospitalized in the city of Mykolaiv, the statement says, adding that the commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces had visited the scene.
Later reports said the soldiers – all of whom were sober according to military police – had used gasoline to ignite damp firewood that had been delivered to the camp. There was an explosion and fire when the soldiers poured gasoline onto the stove, the 92nd Brigade statement said.
But this is just the latest scandal to hit Shyrokiy Lan, where soldiers earlier reported appalling living conditions in the training ground’s tent camp.
The controversy initially flared up on March 9, when Yulia Matvienko, a female sniper serving with the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, posted on her Facebook page a number of photos showing mud and puddles of melt-water swamping the camp and flooding tents. The camp is located in the Mykolaivska Oblast some 370 kilometers south of Kyiv.
“(The camp is) a hell on earth that they have failed to put in a decent condition for as long as five years of war,” Matvienko said in comments to the photos. “The separatists don’t treat their expendables the way we do.”
Matvienko’s post immediately caused a stir on Ukrainian media, with other servicemen living in the camp posting more photos showing the army camp practically drowning in mud amid the springtime snow-melt. Other photos showed soldiers trying to bale dirty water out of their tents.
“Shyrokiy Lan has been in active use for four years,” journalist Yuriy Butusov commented on his Facebook page on March 11. “It was set up on steppe land – there is no woodland near it, so makeshift constructional materials are nowhere to be found there.”
“Every winter and every spring, Ukrainian soldiers live in mud and water, because constructing a drainage system with just a spade is impossible… And when the camp sinks into the mud, there can be no battle training – people just have to survive in this swamp.”
As the row flared up, senior officers started to demand that soldiers delete all of the Facebook posts with the pictures, according to later posts by Matvienko. Moreover, the brigade’s commanding officers allegedly ordered that she be arrested and disciplined. However, the battalion’s soldiers reportedly stood up for her, preventing her from being punished.
Later on March 11, another serviceman at the camp, Serhiy Markov, claimed on his Facebook page that some other soldiers had nevertheless been punished for making complaints in public.
“Because of the photos we post, we, who are infantrymen not trained for this purpose, were assembled and marched 7-8 kilometers through a firing range, exposing all to unexploded shells,” the soldier wrote.
The day before, he said his unit had not been able to wash for a week, since there was no firewood and no showers at the camp.
In response to the public uproar, the 92nd Brigade’s top officers later on March 11 issued an official statement, claiming that Shyrokiy Lan had been inspected prior to the brigade’s deployment to the range on Feb. 19, and that everything necessary had been done to ensure there were decent living conditions for the soldiers, including the provision of proper tent heating, and bathing and catering facilities.
“However, taking into account the local climate and heavy precipitation, factors we cannot influence, … the rising level of mud and water in the tent camp cannot be dealt with very quickly,” the brigade’s deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Marchenko, said in the statement. He said the problems had been exaggerated, while no attention was paid to the improvements being made by army command at all levels.
“Yes, the conditions are truly difficult, though not critical,” the press service of the 56th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, which is also deployed at the camp, said on March 11. “This is caused by the weather, which caught us out during drills. However, the personnel has dealt with it individually by making paths of rubble and constructing showers. Each tent has decent food supplies, firewood stocks, and makeshift stoves.”
“Conversely, such conditions harden our fighters and consolidate the personnel.”
There were some signs the scandal and public uproar had provoked action from commanders on March 11, when soldiers reported that several bulldozers and trucks had been filling in the mud pools between tents with sand and rubble.
And as the terrible conditions at the Shyrokiy Lan training ground hit the headlines, questions arose over the way state funds had been spent on the camp.
As far back as a year ago, in mid-March 2017, presidential adviser Yuriy Buriukov said that up to Hr 370 million ($14.2 million) had been allocated to build 11 new barrack rooms, a canteen, a medical center and a command headquarters at the Shyrokiy Lan training camp by the end of 2017.
However, servicemen at the camp say the building work is still very far from complete.
Buriukov on his Facebook page said on March 11 that the brigade commanders and soldiers themselves were to blame for the shocking conditions at the camp. He said senior officers should have ordered soldiers to clear snow away from the tents before rising temperatures turned the area into a swamp of mud and melt water.
“Excuse me, but in the army there’s no one else to work on living conditions for personnel at the camp,” Buriukov wrote. “Those are tasks for the brigade’s combat support company and the whole personnel.”
According to Buriukov, the building work at the camp had been delayed by “a hundred objective reasons,” and the whole complex will be almost entirely completed by August 2018.
He also claimed the Shirokiy Lan scandal was being intentionally stirred up by “those fighting against us” and “their useful idiots.”
