The then resplendent new terminal of the Donetsk airport, which was built for Euro 2012, is the most obvious example of what happened in Donbass from the spring of 2014. After almost eight years, the imposing infrastructure remains in ruins. The front line passed right through it and was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between Ukrainian troops and Donbass separatist rebels during the second half of 2014.
“People are tired of the current confrontational situation. They do not trust Kiev, but they are beginning to realize that Moscow does not provide a real solution for the future of Donbass”, says Vladimir Ribachuk, owner of a small electronics business in a Moscow shopping center. He was born in Lugansk 50 years ago, is married and has an 11-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son. Thanks to relatives in the Russian capital, he and his family left Lugansk as soon as the war began, although he travels there from time to time. from time to time
“40% of the Donbass population fled when hostilities broke out. If I hadn’t had a wife and children, maybe I would have stayed to fight », he assures. According to his account, “the youngest went to Russia, to Ukraine and to countries of the European Union, to Germany above all”. “I have my elderly mother and two brothers there. They are fine. I help them to the best of my ability. Those who now live in Donetsk and Luhansk are mostly pensioners, middle-aged people and, during school holidays, children, the grandchildren of those pensioners, “says Ribachuk. He believes that there will be no war because «Kiev will not dare».
Larisa is from Donetsk, she does not want her last name to be known, she is about 40 years old and spends time in Moscow with her sister. She believes that if a war breaks out, “Russia will not let the Kiev troops penetrate Donbass.” She meets Ribachuk, whom she replaces sometimes at the store, when he travels or takes a day off and has just returned from Donetsk after spending the holidays there.
The sale of coal
“It has been a long time since my city was so beautiful with Christmas decorations. People came who no longer live there and there was animation, but it is no longer the city it used to be,” Larisa laments. “Now there is much less population than before, everything is poorer.” She also has her mother there and her older sister. The enclave lives from the sale of coal from the few mines in operation, from metallurgy, a little from the agricultural sector, from the money that relatives send from abroad and from subsidies from Russia.
Various videos on YouTube, from the propaganda broadcast by the Donbass separatist authorities to those offered by channels such as Radio Liberty, show the current Donetsk rebuilt, clean, with beautifully maintained parks and avenues. One of its symbols is the Donbass Arena stadium of the local team, Shakhtar, Shakhtior in Russian (miner).
There he played in the quarterfinals against France, on June 23, 2012, the Spanish team in the European Championship that year, which would end as champions. And also, four days later, against Portugal in the semifinals. The final was played in Kiev against Italy, on July 1, 2012, and La Roja won.
The Donbass Arena was opened in August 2009 as Shakhtar’s stadium and one of the venues for Euro 2012. American singer Beyoncé attended the event to perform. “What those times, my God!” exclaims Larisa in an unstoppable fit of nostalgia. “Now the stadium is a monument. It’s beautiful, but it’s useless », she says. The works cost more than 300 million euros.
The Donbass Arena suffered minor damage during the fight between Kiev and the separatists that have already been repaired. Since 2014, it has not been used for sporting or musical events. Local authorities occasionally use some of its rooms for meetings. The team is now based in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city 300 kilometers further north.
War wounds
To see the wounds of the war, which has caused more than 13,000 deaths, you have to leave Donetsk, for example, “to the northwest, towards the airport, through Stratonávtov Street”, the so-called “road of death”. says Larissa. YouTube is also full of videos of that hellish road, showing destruction and ruin in buildings, electrical wiring towers, walls, bridges, dachas, gas stations and bus stops. The devastation is becoming more apparent as the airport approaches. Next to him runs the “line of contact”, established under the 2015 Minsk agreements. On one side, the Ukrainian soldiers and, on the other, the pro-Russian insurgents. The trickle of dead continues after the failure of the last truce.
Ribachuk says that in Luhansk “there is no shortage of food in the markets. The downside is that ATMs don’t work and hardly anyone uses credit cards. If one day all this ends, I don’t know what we are going to live on because most of the mines are flooded and unusable. Larisa deplores the fact that the curfew is still in force in Donetsk, although during the recent festivities it was temporarily lifted.
Donetsk was the fifth city of Ukraine. It had about 900,000 inhabitants, of which there are now, according to the authorities, about 500,000. Larisa believes that in reality “less than 200,000 live”. The population in all of Donbass once had three million residents, but the census is only now being updated and the figures are misleading. It is also said that 50% are Ukrainian, 45% Russian and the rest Belarusian. But between them there is no ethnic difference, they are all Slavs and they all speak Russian. In eastern Ukraine practically no one speaks Ukrainian. There is also a large displaced population and people from Russia, soldiers, administrative personnel, specialists. But they are generally of Ukrainian origin and many are from Donbass, short for the Don River Coal Basin, a territory that encompasses Donetsk, Lugansk and part of Russia, up to the Sea of Azov.
informative contest
Virtually all Russian television channels, both public and private in the hands of tycoons close to President Vladimir Putin, have been non-stop for almost eight years denigrating the Ukrainian leaders, whom they usually brand as “Nazis”, the Forces Armed Forces of the country and the Ukrainian journalists or politicians who condemn Russia’s “criminal” way of proceeding in Donbass, the separatist east of Ukraine.
As President Vladimir Putin already pointed out in his traditional press conference on December 23, “Ukraine was never a state” and on top of that, in Soviet times, “territories that had historically belonged to Russia were incorporated and they did so without asking no one, without consulting its inhabitants. Putin reiterated that what took place in Ukraine in February 2014 was a “coup d’état”, when after nearly three months of revolt in Kiev’s “Maidan” square, the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, decided to dismiss the then country’s president, Victor Yanukovych.
Moscow’s information war against Kiev is based on these premises. Those in charge of materializing it are prominent presenters and analysts related to the Kremlin such as Dmitri Kisiliov, Vladimir Soloviov, the most recalcitrant, Olga Skabéyeva and her husband Evgueni Popov, the four of the state channel Rossiya-1. But also Margarita Simonián (RT), Andréi Norkin (NTV) or Artiom Sheinin (Piervi Kanal).
They are in charge of throwing into the neighboring country a permanent and overwhelming flow of propaganda, manipulation, half-truths, fallacies and deceit. Almost daily the annexation of Crimea is justified, necessary, according to them, to have saved its inhabitants from the Ukrainian ultras, and they applaud Moscow’s help to the separatists of Donetsk and Lugansk (Donbass), because a war broke out there that has killed more than 13,000 people and continues latently today.
But, for the founder and one of the leaders of the liberal “Yábloko” party, Grigori Yavlinski, the Russian authorities “are leading the situation to a real threat of war with Ukraine, not the hybrid that the Kremlin has waged in Donbass for almost eight years, but a real one. In his opinion, “hate propaganda is increasing and the possibility of an imminent war, even nuclear, is already on the agenda in order to win it.”
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