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

“I’ll try again,” says Gubarev, a little unnerved.

Nothing happens. Borodai’s cell is silent. Gubarev has not tried again. This just confirms how insignificant he is in the Donetsk People’s Republic, and that for a long time the reins have been held by someone else.

In the background you can hear explosions. It is artillery. According to separatist sources, insurgents in the Luhansk region have begun a counterattack, and they are trying to crush the Ukrainian forces. “They have been shooting since this morning. Fighting must be very heavy,” says Oxana who lives near the crash site.

The bodies that were scattered in the fields were picked up after three days. The corpses were to be examined by experts from Donetsk. Who are those experts? Do they know what they are doing? No one knows.

According to the Ukrainians, the separatists are taking the bodies to Russia. At least some of them, those that might prove that the airplane was shot down. The bodies found near the fuselage disappeared on the first night. Initially, nobody knew what happened to the black boxes, either. The separatist “authorities” were not sure whether they had them. One day they said “yes,” next day they said “no.” Only on the fourth day after the crash were the black boxes handed over to a delegation from Malaysian Airlines.

During the day the crash site is guarded by a group of separatists. Their commander is called “Grim.” A photo of him with a toy monkey went around the world. He has a badge in the colors of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic that says on it “General Prosecutor’s Office.” Yet he doesn’t want to give his full name. He fired in the air, twice. First, when the OSCE mission tried to reach the crash site. Next day, in the same fashion, he decided to convince the journalists to move away. It was very effective.

When the OSCE mission tried to get to the site for the second time, they were accompanied by several other vehicles. In them there were about thirty armed men with badges of the delegalized police unit Berkut, and several dozen separatists from Slovyansk. They were from the closest entourage of Igor Girkin, the “military commander” of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Among them I noticed a former spokesperson of the “greens.” And a “local reporter,” as he called himself in April. Now he was in uniform and he had a rifle in his hand. As I was told by one of the Russian journalists, this person introduced himself as Girkin’s former spokesperson. It was Girkin who exercised full control over the separatist-held areas in the Donetsk region. It looked as though he had the final say about anything connected to the crash.

Almost immediately the separatists started to blame the Ukrainians for downing the Boeing. They instantly presented varied theories about why it was the Ukrainians’ fault. First, it was Gubarev’s hypothesis that the jetliner was shot down while still in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Others speculated that it was downed by a Ukrainian SU-27 fighter. Later, they surmised that Ukrainians wanted to hit a plane with Putin aboard but they mixed up the airplanes.

Of course, all the “Donetsk Republic” leaders maintain that they are not equipped with BUK missiles. They don’t accept the fact that previously they wrote and said something different.

Girkin’s version of events was the most startling. In an interview published on the separatist website Russian Spring he claimed that “most of the corpses weren’t fresh” and that the bodies were “drained of blood.” Therefore, he suggested, it was a medical plane.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, moreover, casually stated that if the jetliner crashed on Ukrainian territory it is the Ukrainians’ fault, regardless of who was shooting at the plane.

The interview Alexander Khodakovsky, the commander of the Ukrainian-Russian battalion Vostok, gave to Reuters was just a formality. He confirmed that the separatists were equipped with the BUK missile system. The quantity of evidence was large enough to state this conclusively. Khodakovsky admits that the system was not seized from the Ukrainian army, but that it arrived from the Luhansk region under the separatists’ banners. It is probable that it came from Russia. According to him, after the plane went down, the BUK disappeared from that location in order not to leave any evidence. Despite this, Khodakovsky blames Ukraine for this tragedy because it provoked this whole situation. Its planes were presumed to be flying over these areas. After the interview was published, the Vostok commander tried to explain that he hadn’t said anything of the kind. By that very fact he was caught red-handed. Reuters released the recorded interview in which his very words could be heard.

As I mentioned before, the bodies were collected only on the third day after the airplane was downed. You could smell their odor. It is not clear why this took so long. On the one hand, it might have been because of the investigation, but on the other, how can you explain that the bodies near the cockpit fragments were gone the next day? In addition, someone was going through the passengers’ luggage. On the third day a broken computer and two bottles of Duty Free alcohol were placed on the pile of suitcases. Supposedly, this was to confirm that nothing had been robbed. However, if you consider that only a small portion of the crash site seemed to be protected, this was very unlikely.

The bodies were packed into bags and laid alongside the road. Then they were placed in refrigerator trucks and taken away. Where to? There was contradictory information. Some claimed that the bodies were in the Donetsk morgue and were later sent elsewhere. The journalists who arrived in Donetsk to check this out were arrested.

In the end it turned out that a train with almost two hundred bodies was at Torez station—a locomotive, four refrigerator cars, and a service wagon. At first, no one was sure it was the right train. Neither the railroad engineer nor other people who entered the train were willing to talk. The train station employees were more inclined to make statements, but they didn’t know much.

“When I showed up at work at seven, the train was already loaded and running,” says Veronika, who works at the station. The train’s destination was not known until the last minute. “We are still waiting for instructions,” she added helplessly.

When I started walking around the train I noticed that one door was not closed completely and a little crack was left open. It was covered with flies and you could smell the awful odor of decomposing bodies. Fresh stains, like ones I had seen at the station, were visible under a few wagon doors.

People living nearby saw at least three trucks with bodies that arrived at midnight. Loading began right away. There is a lot of sand on the parking lot where the trucks had been standing. It smells bad, too.

In the end the train went to Kharkiv, and then the bodies were transported further.

For many Ukrainians it was a breakthrough moment in the conflict.

“I hope that those in the West will finally wake up and take appropriate action,” says Vladimir from Dnipropetrovsk, who serves in the Ukrainian army. He was not isolated in his hope. But it turned out to be in vain. The Ukrainian war came back on track. It has become a problem that will be settled between Ukraine and Russia.

IT IS SEPTEMBER 6, late evening. The eastern outskirts of Mariupol are being shelled. I found myself in this city with three other journalists. We had been sitting in a seaside restaurant when suddenly we heard explosions. The recently arrived reporter and cameraman from one of the TV stations had endured similar conditions several times earlier. They rented a car, so it was easier for all of us to get to the event site rapidly. The third among my companions was a print journalist. He had spent more time in Donbas than anybody else. It was not our first trip together. We decided to go, but we had to stop by the hotel to pick up our helmets and bulletproof vests.