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

“I have come to get my press accreditation,” I say to a guard.

“OK, call them so they confirm it.”

“From my phone?”

“Sure!”

I call Klavdia. I pass my phone to the guard and she explains something.

“You may go. Fifth floor.”

“Am I supposed to go there alone?” I am surprised, but this thought I don’t say out loud. Press accreditation appeared for the first time during the referendum. The procedure was similar, but my entire time in the building I was under the careful scrutiny of the “owners.” In May when I was coming in with a group of journalists, a guard said: “If we notice that you are recording something or taking photos, we will confiscate your equipment.” Now nobody cares. Previously, the building looked like it had been struck by a tornado. Everything was scattered and destroyed. Now, on the floors where the journalists hang out, everything is relatively neat and tidy.

My instincts tell me to go left, toward the staircase, but someone is following me.

“Hey, young man, where are you going? Please use the elevator,” says one of the guards.

“It’s functioning?” I can’t hide my astonishment.

A uniformed man nods. I walk toward the elevator.

On the fifth floor I enter the press bureau. I meet Klavdia there. She takes my information. “Oh, Poland doesn’t support us. I won’t issue accreditation,” Klavdia jokes, with a smile on her face. When she has all she needs, she leaves the room to print our accreditations. She is away for a very long time.

There are two more employees of the press corps and one Western journalist in the room. He is reading a separatist newspaper. I can only see the other side of the paper. The correct name of the region is given in large print: “SOUTH EAST—NO. NOVOROSSIYA—YES.” The press employee sitting next to me stares at his computer screen the entire time. He is browsing Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and he is playing some version of Bubble Shooter. The other press employee is fooling around with his video camera. After a while a stringer shows up. He is a freelance journalist working for Russia Today . He is Ukrainian but he supports the separatists and knows them all. He sits back in the armchair and starts talking, breaking the grim atmosphere. He and the fellow playing on the computer chat about their vacations. The stringer has been to Egypt. The computer guy takes his eyes from the screen from time to time, as if he were doing something important. The Western journalist will occasionally throw a glance at them, and the “cameraman” is not interested in the conversation at all. That’s why the stringer turns to me.

“When I am on vacation I am embarrassed to admit that I am Russian,” he says, unexpectedly, to my astonishment. He continues talking about an article in the Egyptian press that explained why Russians were the worst tourists: because they abuse alcohol.

“It’s true! Russians buy everything in Duty Free . They drink all the way to Egypt, then on the bus, and finally they have to be dragged to the hotel because they can’t walk on their own.” He laughs his head off. Then he says that drunk Russian tourists behave really badly. They provoke fights, they insult other people, and they are very loud. According to him, no tourists from other countries behave like them.

“That’s why, when they ask me where I come from, I say I am Ukrainian. And then all of them say OK.” He gives a thumbs up.

The computer guy has probably never been to Egypt, so he changes the subject to Israel. Stringer has been there, too, so now they can exchange opinions. They describe Israel in superlatives. Everything there is great, beautiful, and delicious. It is easy to get a good job and have a better life. After I heard talk about the shame of being Russian, I thought nothing else would surprise me. And suddenly I hear about an Israeli model for Donbas. I have heard about Transnistria, Abkhazia, Ossetia, but Israel?

“They don’t have any natural resources, but they have good brains. That’s their wealth. We can do the same in Donbas,” proudly claims the computer guy. Stringer nods in agreement, but I am not sure if he believes that it is possible. How would they do it? Who will pay for it? Russia? Russia was to turn Crimea into another Singapore, but it has changed its mind for now. If Russian financial aid hasn’t reached Crimea, it is even more certain it won’t end up in Donbas. Meanwhile huge sums of money should be invested in the region to rebuild buildings that have been destroyed, streets damaged by tanks, and bridges that have been blown up. The list is very long. In the beginning of September the Ukrainian government estimated that eight billion dollars were needed. This amount increases every day.

In the end Klavdia comes back and says that the Central Department Store has been blown up and everyone has to get there fast, so today accreditations will not be issued. Supposedly, the CDS was blown up by Ukrainian nationalists. What for? Nobody knows.

Next day I come back to pick up my press accreditation. I get it right away. It is pretty and laminated. In May it would have been printed on a piece of paper.

“Oh, this looks so much better than the previous one,” I say to Klavdia.

“Well, we’re developing.”

MARINKA WAS SHELLED on July 11. Next day I go there by car with two Western journalists and a fixer from Donetsk who works for them as an interpreter and assistant. There is hardly a single living soul. You can see that out of ten thousand residents of the city not even one in twenty is left. No one has been shooting since yesterday yet the streets are deserted. Driving through the entire city we can count the pedestrians on the fingers of both hands. More often but still rarely you can spot a car packed to the roof. People try to take as much as they can because when they come back to their apartments, the apartments may no longer be there or they will have been plundered.

We stop at a building hit by a projectile. The apartments on the ground and first floors are missing their walls. They have turned into ruins. A garage a few meters away is full of shrapnel. A retired man, Garik, is standing in front of the building. He claims to be the last resident of Marinka. He keeps watch and protects the building from thieves. First and foremost, however, he emphasizes that this is “his land” and he is not going to abandon it. He lives in the building. Why was Marinka shelled? Garik thinks that for Kiev its residents are expendable because they champion the Donetsk People’s Republic.

“During the May referendum we all voted for it,” he admits.

A dozen meters away from where we left Garik we meet a patrol of “volunteers.” One of them signals with a hand gesture that we should approach them. We walk slowly because we don’t know what to expect.

“Journalists? You think we are the ones who are shooting?” asks one of them. He shows us shells stuck in the ground. He hands me a few pieces of metal and says: “It is a Grad. Take it as a souvenir.”

The Grad is a rocket launcher placed on a truck. Developed in the 1960s it can launch forty rockets simultaneously. They hit one by one, every fraction of a second, and when you listen to them falling you may have the impression that it is hailing.

We approach another projectile and suddenly we hear an explosion. The shelling has begun again. The rockets hit the ground a few kilometers from where we are standing. We follow the “volunteers” to one of the basements. It’s very low so we crouch until the shooting ends. After a dozen minutes we run to the car and drive away. Several meters further on the car breaks down. We can’t move and in the distance we hear more explosions. The fixer starts poking around under the hood. We are having bad luck as in a second-rate comedy. In the end the engine starts up and off we go. We return to Donetsk.