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

Must protests for justice bring foreign invasion, stupefying propaganda, and squalid murder in the name of maintaining the wealth of a few? This is the essence of Russian foreign policy: enforcing the principle that public efforts to change politics for the better must bring war and “normalization”—to use the term made notorious after the Red Army and its Warsaw Pact allies put down the Prague Spring in 1968.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev promised “fraternal assistance” to any Eastern European country that seemed to depart from the official line. To Soviet citizens Brezhnev proposed “really existing socialism,” the notion that despite the dreariness of life nothing better was possible. For KGB men educated in the 1970s such as Vladimir Putin, instability and change were the enemies more than any particular idea. Working in the 1980s in East Germany, he could delude himself that the status quo was durable—though by then East German stability depended upon Western economies. It would not occur to him that Brezhnev’s bet on energy exports and foreign intervention was a mistake; once in power Putin would repeat it. Eastern European dissidents drew a different lesson from the wreckage of 1968: the importance of truth as the foundation of a life in “dignity”—a term that Ukrainians applied to their revolution in 2014. Why did so few people who identify with the left not see the Ukrainian revolution as such and not condemn the counterrevolutionary Russian invasion accordingly? Part of the answer is that many in the West who remember 1968 recall Paris and not Prague, and so they forget the reactionary militarism of the Brezhnev doctrine.

There was no Orwell of the Ukrainian revolution, but readers of Paweł Pieniążek will get something like the everyday grit and political insight of Homage to Catalonia . Pieniążek risked his life to see what he saw, as did other brave and talented Western journalists. Along the way, perhaps, he benefited from the seemingly innocuous nature of his work. Because separatists believed that only television coverage mattered, they kept asking where his cameraman was. Perhaps because he was filing for print Pieniążek found it easier to extend conversations and move from one side of the lines to the other. After he spent days with a separatist, the two men realized they had both been on the Maidan on the same day, the one beating and the other getting beaten. It says something about Pieniążek’s tact that he kept the relationship going. Pieniążek takes no stands and strikes no poses but modestly exemplifies the old dissident ideal of seeking after small truths, at risk to oneself, in a world of big lies.

OCTOBER 2014, in the vicinity of the Donetsk airport. Artem lives less than a kilometer away. The village is totally devastated. You can hardly find even a few houses without shrapnel holes. Rockets are sticking out of the ground, and the asphalt around is completely furrowed from explosions. There are practically no people here, but there are many dogs that suddenly became homeless. Ironically, the village is called Vesele, which means “cheerful.”

The destruction is a result of more than a month of fighting for the Donetsk airport, controlled by the Ukrainian forces. The separatists want to retake it. Both sides are shooting at each other. Every now and then sounds of explosions alternate with the noise of rifles. Those residents who have decided to stay hardly even pay any attention.

“Oh, a rifle,” Artem announces impassively.

Not even for one moment does he lift up his bent neck. He is moving forward to show us “an interesting hole” created by one of the rockets. The hole is like any other hole. During the months spent in Donbas I saw a lot of them.

“Look inside.”

It is narrow, but at least a meter deep. Apparently the explosion was terribly loud and damaged a few buildings. The rockets keep going off around us, near and far away. Finally, one can hear a whoosh.

“Oh, now you can see,” Artem nods in the direction of the sound. In a split second we hear a roaring explosion. He didn’t even budge, but a photographer standing next to him cringed.

“Don’t be afraid, sir. It’s far away,” Artem laughs.

By now, Artem knows which whooshes should be feared. He regarded this one as innocuous. After all, you can’t do much when you hear a whoosh, because the rocket is already too close to its target.

A few hundred meters away a girl who was walking home was not so lucky. She died instantly, killed by shrapnel. She lies on the sidewalk, covered with a sheet. After a while an elderly woman lifts the sheet up.

“Oh, my God! Nastia!,” she begins to sob. It is her granddaughter.

Two meters from the girl I can see a bloodstain, some broken eggs, and a flat hat. Two pieces of shrapnel hit the man right in a lung. His relatives hid him in a shack. He is breathing, his entire shirt is covered with blood and he lies in a pool of blood. You can hardly expect an ambulance here because paramedics are afraid to come to neighborhoods under fire. Finally, two private cars show up. The wounded man is loaded into one of them. This is the only way to get him to the hospital on time.

I have never thought I would find myself in a war. Even less so that it would be Ukraine. Nevertheless, war has come here. And in an instant, full speed ahead.

According to the official data, by early October 2014 more than thirty-five hundred people had died in the Ukrainian conflict. Unofficial statistics are much higher, and as the conflict continued estimates later reached ten thousand. There is no indication that the conflict will end soon.

It all began in March. Initially, it looked like the usual sort of protests. However, with the passing of time, they turned more and more violent. In only a month and a half people were reaching for firearms. Armed units showed up, the first clashes took place. In May the fighting erupted for real.

I arrived for the first time in Donbas in April 2014, when the conflict was already going on. Although I have been going to Ukraine since 2008, only now for the first time did I experience its eastern part. I had known it before from articles, news reports, and essays. Since April I have traveled all over.

What did I want to see there? Initially, everything indicated that it would be a grotesque and more brutal copy of the protests on the Maidan in Kiev. However, when in April I came to Slovyansk, it turned out that what came into play were not only protests, or even machine guns, but also armored vehicles.

I realize that a report from an ongoing war is a risky business. Especially because I wrote this in a hurry and its ending is just my prediction of future events and may turn out to be wrong.

This book is not meant to be a detailed chronology of the war or a geopolitical analysis. Mainly, I try to present events that I have witnessed myself, my impressions, and impressions of the people on both sides of the conflict, even if in the future they will turn out to be illusory.

ALTHOUGH UKRAINE HAS always been troubled by internal conflicts, it was Yanukovych who brought the country to the verge of real disintegration. First of all, he and his entourage relinquished their monopoly over violence.

In Ukraine hiring protesters is a common practice. Occasionally, one can spot the same person on opposite sides of the barricades—the authorities’ and the opposition’s. That’s why people can hardly believe that it is even possible for there to be a protest that doesn’t have some interested person behind it.

The first protests in Donetsk begin quite innocuously. On March 1, 2014, during a demonstration in Lenin Square, the few thousand people gathered there declare a vote of no confidence against the regional authorities. The demonstrators choose a previously unknown resident of Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev, as the “people’s governor.” Additionally, he proclaims himself leader of the Donbas People’s Militia. “I will stay with you till the end,” he says, right after he has introduced himself to a cheering crowd waving Russian flags. He moves from his biography to his political program. He is well known within the milieu of pro-Russian groups that organize protests in Donetsk (Russian Bloc, Donetsk Republic, and Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine), but for the last six years he has been a student and running his own business. “I am married, I have three children, and I am 30. I have three university degrees: in history, law and public administration. I had no intention of going into politics before this ‘wonderful’ crisis started. I just wanted to live in peace, be a breadwinner and feed my children. But the new situation didn’t let me stay impartial, my conscience didn’t allow it.” “Hero!” shouts the crowd. Gubarev explains to them that something like southeastern Ukraine doesn’t exist. There is only Novorossiya. “In reality it is a Russian land and Ukraine has never existed,” he declares. “Yeeesss!” chants the crowd. He names the politicians who are close to his heart: the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko; Nursultan Nazarbayev from Kazakhstan; the deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez; the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro; and finally, Vladimir Putin. After the last name is mentioned the crowd is screaming with all its might: “Yeeesss!” When the authorities are “elected,” the crowd walks from Lenin Square to the Regional Administration Building. After several speeches the Ukrainian flag is replaced by the Russian flag. The building itself cannot be taken because riot police are blocking its entrance and all the windows are barred. The demonstrators are furious and smash the glass.