Europe’s longest road, the E-40, begins its 5,000-mile journey at the port of Calais, long the gateway to the British Isles, and ends in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan.
It’s part of the E-road system, which aims to help unite Europe in trade and to aid development and ties between neighbors; until 2014, it was doing just that. Now, when you drive about 2,000 miles along the route, you come upon strange and otherworldly sights signaling your arrival at a battlefield, the key sector for Ukraine’s desperate fight to repel the Russian invader.
This summer I drove twice from the UK to the fortress belt with volunteers delivering aid to the defenders.
We entered the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone and emerged in Calais to take the E-40 across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine all the way to a crossroads at Slovyansk where the road becomes impassable as it peels off toward Russian-occupied Bakhmut.
Going right at that crossroads leads 13 miles to Kramatorsk, and then it’s 22 miles further to Kostyantynivka, another battlefield frustrating Putin’s plans.
There, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been clashing in close-quarters combat, often fighting for every floor of blasted high-rise residential blocks.
Most of the 100 miles of the E-40 from just south of Kharkiv to Kostyantynivka is covered by netting, which can trap small suicide drones with payloads that can destroy a tank.
But they cannot protect against Russia’s larger drones, missiles, or bombs, such as those that killed at least 30 passengers in a bus in Kramatorsk on October 8.
The route is key to Ukraine’s fortress belt cities of Donetsk, in the country’s east. The Russians have sometimes approached within a few miles of the road connecting Slovyansk to Kramatorsk, and during the interval between my two trips there in August and September that stretch of road was lined with barbed wire, trenches and minefields on its eastward-facing direction.
The route is the vital lifeline for military and civilian supplies.
I joined drivers hurtling along the road, mostly single lanes in each direction, at more than 100 mph to elude Russian drones.
On one of those trips, near Slovyansk, the soldier steering our four-wheel-drive vehicle spotted the distinctive outlines of two Shahed drones, above and to our right, drifting toward the road.
We knew the fishing nets were no shield against them, but with wildly-racing traffic behind us and hemmed in by the netting draped all the way to the ground, we had no choice but to drive on, eyes anxiously fixed upon the devices lurking above.
One of the Shaheds plunged toward the road but missed whatever its target was and exploded in a field of sunflowers.
Then its companion curved towards the road we were, effectively, trapped on.
Ukrainian air defenses, with large-caliber machine guns mounted on pickup trucks concealed in the fields near the road, opened up on it. We watched, mesmerized, as the drone continued its turn toward our portion of Route E-40.
Then the machine gun found its target and the drone, still hundreds of feet above the ground, exploded and descended vertically in a spectacular fireball while we shouted in exhilaration and relief.
In a few moments we passed the field, made tinder-dry by baking summer temperatures, set ablaze by the drone’s flaming remnants.
Russia’s aerial terror attacks against Kyiv’s civilian population understandably claim the headlines at the moment, marked by ever-rising death tolls in Kyiv and other cities. But that has obscured the humiliating setbacks suffered by the Kremlin’s forces on the battlefields.
Nowhere are the battles fiercer and more vital than in Donetsk. Capturing the area has become an obsession for Vladimir Putin.
He has publicly promised to take all of the Donetsk region each year since his 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine, and every failure has left him more embittered.
Putin again announced the region would be in his hands by the end of this year, and 2026 has seen his generals lose huge amounts of men and materiel in failed attempts to encircle the fortress belt. Ukraine’s army says Russian losses in dead and wounded are anything from 1,000 to 2,000 daily. Many die here in northwestern Donbas.
For the people of Ukraine, the seemingly endless war has been a brutal and sobering experience after years of listening to Western rhetoric about a Europe “whole and free.” Perhaps Route E-40 was once supposed to emphasize how Europe, stitched together by history and highways, could collectively travel towards a brighter future.
But it has become yet another symbol of shattered blissful post-Cold War dreams of a conflict-free Europe that were revealed to be cruel illusions.
Route E-40 now winds through a still-peaceful, civilized European Union and then onwards to the barbarity and death around Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
A lieutenant with the nom de guerre “Jackson” from Ukraine’s Lyut (Fury) Brigade fighting in Kostyantynivka said: “We know we have to remain here as long as possible. The Russians massively outnumber us, and their commanders don’t care how many of them die. They may eventually take Kostyantynivka – but not anytime soon.”
And he reflected that if Ukraine’s defenders were overwhelmed and the Russians controlled this part of the E-40, it would not end there. Inevitably, the imperialist urge would lead them westward along Europe’s great road towards the continent’s democracies and all the way back to the English Channel.
Askold Krushelnycky is a freelance journalist who has written about Russia’s war on Ukraine for The Independent, The Sunday Times, The Times, and other publications. He is the author of An Orange Revolution.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
