Pryvilya. Next to the school of Pryvilya, a tiny town in the Lugansk oblast, a sculpture celebrates the fallen of the Second World War. It represents a soldier, in the left hand he holds a helmet and in the right one a red flag. On the platform that supports it a star, also red, and the hammer and sickle. There are flowers on the black marble of the last tombstone, daisies, and flowers in bloom in front, red tulips. Blossomed in a spring that seems to have no place in the passing days of the war in Ukraine. A little further on a school, a large three-storey building that gathered the children and young people of the whole area. In front of the entrance, the swings and slides of the little ones, the gymnastic equipment of the middle students and the two deep craters of the bombs that hit it last week, missing it. It was the third attempt to hit the roof three days ago, destroying the classrooms in the right wing. On the wall of a classroom on the first floor there is a photograph of a teacher and the six pupils of the elementary class, in the adjacent classroom – the botany class – a Ukrainian flag forms a ribbon on the wall behind the desk. A soldier approaches, walking along the street that leads to the school, with his rifle on his shoulder and his gait hesitant. “Spring is beautiful here, isn’t it?” he says showing the fields around before introducing himself. His name is Roman, he is 56 years old, he arrived in Pryvilia from Starosambirshchyna, in the Lviv region, forty days ago. He spent the last twenty in the military post not far from there. He has a four-year-old daughter and granddaughter in Italy. The last time he traveled out of Ukraine was a year ago to join them in Rome, where they live. He doesn’t know when he will be able to do it next time, “I don’t know if there will be a next time.” As the good-natured expression on his face says so, he tries to hold back the emotion, which he must consider unsuitable for a soldier in war, but he fails because emotions rebel against behavior, just like spring rebels against war. “I’ll stay as long as it’s needed, until we get back the last centimeter of earth” he pronounces this sentence and recomposes the edges that are expected of those who fight, here we, the enemy over there: “The invader is in that direction and not c ‘is a deadline if not that of victory ». It says everything that, in the paradigm of a conflict, is required of a soldier: “The Americans and Europeans will send the weapons we need, only in this way will we repel the enemy, we will not give even an inch in exchange for a phantom victory, peace. it will not arrive as long as only one Russian half is still on Ukrainian soil ».
Then keep walking, show the bomb craters, the school rubble. This is how the script of the chance meeting of a Ukrainian soldier with the press could end, but Roman is both a simple soldier and a simple citizen who wants to talk because, he says, “it is not easy for someone from Lviv to understand the people here, let alone fight ». He goes on to tell about the countries under Russian attack in which the army was welcomed, about the time when they were leaving their positions, the citizens asked them not to leave fearing that they were withdrawing. And then he reveals himself: the hardest thing of the weeks in Donbass, he says, was to enter the villages where the army is not welcomed at all «there are places where people don’t want us. They say when we enter we bring war. That’s exactly what they say: we don’t want you because you brought this war. It hurts”. It hurts. He expresses it with the spontaneity of a child. But he is a soldier and the army, he says, can do little about this, because people here believe in Russian propaganda “they feed on their television channels, their media, they believe the messages that come from Moscow, even on this war”. Then he hesitates, and admits “perhaps we have done little, the rest of us, to inform them, explain our positions, perhaps we should have changed the way we communicate with those who live in the East.” Those who live in the East, the Donbass. The place where the separatists decided they felt like a nation eight years ago.
It was spring then too, in 2014, the provinces of the East proclaimed themselves independent from Ukraine, starting a war against Kiev. A few months earlier, the Maidan revolt had led to the fall of the government of Viktor Yanukovych, the man of the Kremlin in Ukraine, who in this area in both the 2004 and 2010 elections had gained full support. After his government fell, the Russians, far from willing to cede influence over what they considered a province of the Empire, occupied Crimea and later supported the separatists. The initial aspiration was to establish Novorossiya, a state comprising the six southeastern regions of Ukraine, which was soon abandoned. The people’s republics would have contented themselves with being separated from Ukraine but thorn in their side. Since then, those who lived together, the Ukrainians who felt Ukrainians and the Ukrainians who felt Russian, have fought with the force of arms and the force of propaganda.
That 2014 was followed by the failed agreements, the increasingly numerous trenches, the number of deaths that increased as the world paid less and less attention to the Donbass war. Wrong, because history continues to move, albeit slowly, even when no one observes its steps. Those of the Kremlin, rewound the thread and observed today, it was clear they would bring here. Where identities live side by side, near and far away.
The first sign that Kremlin policy would lead to the recognition of separatist republics came from the 2019 decrees by which Russia granted Russian citizenship to Russian-speaking Ukrainians in separatist republics and territories under Ukrainian control. Almost a million were distributed, that is a third of the population of the “republics”, an initiative that foreshadowed the desire for permanent control of Moscow and which helped, not that it was needed, even in terms of consensus: in the Russian parliamentary elections in 2021 the residents of the separatist republics were transported by bus to the polling stations. The shadow of the Kremlin also came with the control of dissent: activists are attacked, arrested, locked up without trial and made to disappear, conversations and phone calls are monitored by the secret police, there is no freedom of the press. How it came to control the language: The status of official language for Ukrainian was abolished and schools stopped teaching the Ukrainian language and history. Education is inspired by the military-patriotic model in the wake of the Russian educational model. Economically it is no better, the region that was once the industrial heart of the Soviet Union has become a divided and impoverished land, whose economy relied – even after 1991 – on the Russian market. At least until 2014, when the war destroyed what remained of the industrial base in the area. Today the Donbass is the object of the second phase of the Russian offensive, if Putin manages to conquer this piece of territory, he will use it as a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea and – if he also continues in the other quadrants of the offensive – in the others. Russian-speaking cities such as Kherson and even Odessa.
Outside the geopolitical schemes of the maps, here remains the domino effect of the conflict. An impoverished territory that will be increasingly poor.
Roman looks at the school, the craters, the wooden houses along the road. He and his fellow soldiers ask the civilians to leave, but they – he says – do not leave. Roman and him tell people that their life is in danger. Those who support the Russians do not believe it, and are waiting for the army that he considers his friend. The others say they have nothing to lose “they don’t go away because they think there’s nothing for them over there, that they don’t even speak their language over there.” And when he says “over there”, the people of Donbass, even those who do not support the separatists, mean the West and, for the whole, Ukraine. Then they don’t go away and try to survive in the foggy border where friends and enemies look alike, fight and live side by side, as in the last eight years, under the crossfire of artillery, dividing the suffocating space of shelters. anti-aircraft.
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