Paweł Pieniążek - Greetings from Novorossiya - Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine

On April 13 Afghanistan war veteran Vyacheslav Ponomarev informed the people who gathered on October Revolution Square that Slovyansk mayor Neli Shtepa had fled. That is why he decided to make the city his responsibility and proclaimed himself the “people’s mayor.” Soon it is clear that Shtepa didn’t go too far. She was arrested by the new “authorities.” Ponomarev claims there was no arrest, and that he simply offered Shtepa his “protection.” On April 15 the Ukrainian government initiated proceedings against Mayor Shtepa for supporting the separatists during their first attacks on the state buildings. Supposedly, the separatists stole twenty automatic rifles and four hundred pistols from the police station. At that time Shtepa was arguing that it had been local “volunteers” who did the raid.

“These are not some newcomers from Western Ukraine, but our own Donetsk boys,” she was telling the crowd gathered in front of the police station. She was also in support of the referendum on the independence of the two Donbas republics.

In an interview for Rossiyskaya Gazieta meaningfully entitled “Obama, you should shut up,” Ponomarev explained Shtepa’s arrest in his characteristic style. “We decided to protect her, so she wouldn’t be kidnapped. However, her house is outside the city and we can’t leave our people there. So it was simpler to bring her here. She has good conditions—a toilet and shower. A hairdresser visits her and she is fed by her family. She has warm clothing. Everything is OK.” The problem with Ponomarev’s hospitality is that you can’t decline these “good conditions.” Even to take a short walk.

With time, the number of such “guests” will grow. A week after Shtepa’s arrest a journalist from Vice News , Simon Ostrovsky, was detained.

“This is not journalism,” Ponomarev was scolding Ostrovsky’s colleagues, when at the press conference they asked him about his whereabouts. Ponomarev’s press secretary, Stella Khorosheva, accused Ostrovsky of spying for Right Sector. In the interview mentioned above, Ponomarev explained the case more bluntly: “We need hostages. We need a bargaining card, you understand.” Ostrovsky was released after four days. A day earlier the US State Department asked Russia to pressure the separatists and help free an American citizen. However, there was no information on whether the journalist was swapped with somebody or released without a “trade.”

In the course of many interviews the Vice News reporter affirmed that he had been beaten, his eyes covered and his hands tied. Later on, he was able to move freely in the areas where he was held. He seems to have seen other detainees there. Some were released quickly, others had to stay longer. Ostrovsky spent only four days at Ponomarev’s, but there were people who stayed there for several weeks. Unfortunately, they couldn’t count on such attention from the foreign journalists. The priority for these journalists was Ostrovsky. About the others only individual persons were sporadically asking timid questions.

The number of arrested quickly reached double digits. At the end of April the Ukrainian side issued a statement that in Slovyansk itself there were about forty hostages. At the press conferences, the “people’s mayor” replied that they had quite a lot of hostages. Ponomarev regularly “invited” journalists, either for a short talk or for hours. Occasionally, they were searched. Their equipment was returned, but bulletproof vests and helmets—not always. In the majority of cases it was all about threats. After one conversation of this kind, an American journalist left at once and she wanted never to come back to the city. “I am persona non grata there,” she wrote from Kiev on Facebook.

On April 21 the media received information that three foreign journalists from Italy and Belarus were detained in Slovyansk. Although they were soon released, the authorities in Slovyansk decided to grab the opportunity.

“Give us your passports. We have to register you, so we will know that you have really been here. Otherwise, we won’t be able to help if somebody disappears,” says Khorosheva to a group of journalists. You can’t attend a press conference without registration, so you lose the only chance to talk to the self-proclaimed authorities.

As it very soon turned out, this was not about security. “We will check what you publish. We are observing the foreign media and we have come to the conclusion that many of you are lying. We are warning you. Those who will keep doing this will be forced to leave the city. That’s why we have written down your information and we will check up on you,” announces city counselor Viera Kubrechenko. Then she picked up a box and walked around the room to collect money from the journalists for the families of victims fighting the “Kiev junta.”

“You are supporting the fascists,” she growled at the Western journalists who refused to contribute. Only the Russians dropped money in the box.

“We have martial law and conditions are harsh,” explains Khorosheva. This argument justifies all the restrictions and repressions. That’s why the curfew from midnight to six in the morning was imposed. Anyone who is in the streets at this time can be detained. The new authorities thus gain a few hours to act with impunity, without film and photo cameras.

“We are expecting an attack,” warns Ponomarev. Actually, he does this every day. “According to our intelligence, today it is even more probable,” he reassures us.

The theater director Pavel Yurov and his colleague Denys Hryshchuk ended up in the Slovyansk cellars, too. On April 25 they came to Slovyansk for just a few hours. They had return tickets for Donetsk. Supposedly, the militants found Ukrainian national symbols in their belongings, so Pavel’s and Denys’s plans got a bit complicated. Instead of going home in the evening, they stayed till June. Letters from Ukrainian and Russian cultural figures didn’t help. When I asked Ponomarev what happened to them, he assured me that everything was fine and that he would provide more information after contacting their parents. Yurov’s relatives got in touch with the self-proclaimed mayor several times but didn’t find out anything from him: neither where Pavel and Denys were held, nor why they had been detained, nor when they would be released.

The hostages’ relatives had good reasons to be afraid. Right after “people’s authorities” appeared in Slovyansk and nearby Horlivka, a local politician from the Batkivshchyna Party, Volodymyr Rybak, went missing. On April 22 his tortured body was found in the river northeast from Slovyansk. His stomach was ripped open. The body of the second person found next to him could not be identified. Witnesses claim that they were tortured in the occupied Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) building in Slovyansk.

The SSU officers tried to detain a suspect in Rybak’s murder case. They went to Horlivka, but it was they who were detained. A group of armed men grabbed their weapons and took them to Slovyansk. Soon after their pictures were published. They are sitting tied to chairs without their pants. Their eyes are covered with bloody bandages. Their passports, IDs, badges, a pistol, and other documents are displayed on the desk. Ponomarev announced that he was ready to swap them for the “people’s governor” of the Donetsk region, Pavel Gubarev, who at night on March 6 was detained in his apartment by the special SSU unit Alfa.

As luck would have it, at the same time the pictures of the tortured officers appeared on the internet, a press conference was going on with the arrested observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) military mission. They had better luck.