The dogs were extremely restless when Pavel Kolomoizev arrived at the farm on Sunday. At the entrance, in the mud, a sinkhole awaited him. The mortar shot bulged and broke the metal fence. Inside, the wall of the farmhouse, where farm workers cook, rest and sometimes sleep, is now strewn with holes and chips. The windows no longer have glass. “Fortunately, I didn’t spend that night here,” says Kolomoizev. The 48-year-old worker, with slanted eyes and a black hat pulled down to his eyebrows, spent the day collecting the remaining pieces of projectile, sweeping the glass and covering the large holes with plastic. “When you think it’s finally going to be quiet, that things cool down and we can move on, it starts all over again,” he says as he pours some tea from a thermos into an earthenware mug.
As violence intensifies along the front line in Donbas, where the Ukrainian army and Kremlin-backed pro-Russian separatists have been fighting for eight years, towns like Krasnogorivka, just a few miles from the red light district and the trenches, they suffer from climbing. The fragile ceasefire signed in 2019 (the umpteenth) has been constantly breached and attacks have been a reality since the conflict began, according to the OSCE monitoring mission. But since Thursday, with tensions between Russia and the West soaring and the conflict in eastern Ukraine in the background, the situation is “much worse,” says Vasili Grebinik, a 73-year-old retired miner.
Kiev and the secessionist leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk raised by the Kremlin blame each other for the bombings. Two civilians have died this Monday in two attacks in Novoluhanks, in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. On Sunday, the heads of the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk reported the death of two civilians. They accuse the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of sabotaging critical infrastructure and planning an attack to recapture the entire region. Kiev denies it and assures that everything is being a carefully planned maneuver, a false operation devised by the Kremlin to initiate an intervention in the separatist regions, which the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has recognized this Monday as independent republics, with the argument of protect the population from what his security advisers have called a “Nazi regime.”
To the rhythm of political declarations and the frenzy of diplomatic talks to escalate a crisis that is taking on a major size, the bombings continue to touch the Donbas region. The shells have downed power lines and damaged several pipes in the settlements closest to the line of contact. In Krasnogorivka, a town dedicated to agriculture, they have been without electricity since Sunday. So Víktor, foreman of a nearby kolkhoz (collective farm), and several neighbors try to fix on their own, with the help of a flatbed tractor, the wiring and the transformer that supplies electricity to the area. “We cannot be without light, without a refrigerator, some even without heating,” says Víktor.
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Nothing remains of the wealth that once shone in the Donbas region, an industrial and mining area, an important economic engine in Soviet times. The latest war in Europe, which has already claimed some 14,000 lives on both sides and forced more than a million and a half people to flee their homes, is also bleeding the economy of eastern Ukraine and, in general, of Ukraine. the whole country. The Donbas is scarred by shells and abandoned buildings. Also from vacant crops, says Alexander Vasilievich, who used to work at an agricultural company. “It’s all so bad that it’s hard to tell which shots are new and which are old,” Vasilievich says, shrugging. In the background, a gunshot is heard in the distance. The man doesn’t even flinch.
In the town of Mariinka, the scene of heavy fighting at the beginning of the war and which came under separatist control for a couple of days, Luba Vetrova and a group of friends sit on park benches in the winter sun chatting animatedly. “What can we do, there is no light at home,” says Vetrova, 69. They are all furious. They blame the government for the war and the escalation. They believe that everything would be “better” if the soldiers of the Kiev army left, some even think that several of the shells that fall from time to time are Ukrainian. “By accident or not, all I know is that my roof has been broken four times. Whoever it is, we are here in the middle”, says one of them. Vetrova, who lives on a small pension, misses the times of the Soviet Union, when she went on vacation to the Black Sea or to Baku (Azerbaijan). “Now I haven’t left here for two decades,” she laments.
Tamara Mavrova also has a certain nostalgia. But of the city that she could have been and that she was cut short by the war. “Last year the circus came and we bought tickets for my granddaughter. There were several attacks and they were unable to act, ”she recounts. The 70-year-old woman, who worked in a small business until the war closed it, has been without electricity and water for two days. She has the house littered with candles and lanterns, and the hallway full of water bottles. “At the beginning of the war we went with some relatives to another area. But now we are still older and where are we going to go, ”she laments. She assures that, despite the passing of the years, she cannot get used to the bombardments: “When they arrive I bite my tongue and sit down to wait for them to pass,” she says.
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