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

The key moment was the collapse of the Ukrainian front with the Ilovaisk encirclement and the arrival of Russian tanks in Novoazovsk. The unrecognized republics caught their second wind and strengthened their positions on their territories. The situation was stable, so there was time for politics. In November, presidential and parliamentary elections were held. The separatists’ representatives stressed that this was done in order to legitimize the government among the residents because earlier the authorities “had elected themselves.” After the “referendum” no other elections had been held and all the officials were being appointed from above.

Donetsk, too, has changed in recent months. There are still no crowds in the streets, but there are more cars. When I was here in July the roads were empty. The people expected that the war would rush in here, too, so they left their homes. After their summer vacations many locals returned. Some of them came from Mariupol, at that time defended by the Ukrainians. For many, the reasons were financial. They could no longer afford to live away from home. Others believed that the ceasefire signed on September 5 in Belarus, in Minsk, would bring peace to Donetsk. All in vain. Soon afterwards the separatists resumed fighting for the Donetsk airport. Every day you can hear explosions coming from the city outskirts. Occasionally projectiles hit the city center.

The northern part of Donetsk near the international airport is falling into ruins. The shelling destroys one building after another and each day kills more people. But the ceasefire continues. Residents are afraid that under such conditions they will not survive the winter.

Donetsk generally is a peculiar city. There is a bazaar around the recently renovated, tidy train station. A little further on, towards the center, you can see high-rise buildings. But if you venture a few hundred meters north, you will have the impression that you have found yourself in some provincial town.

I stop at the bazaar that is not far from the airport. The remains of the bus station and the shop that was there are frightening. The building has been patched up with metal plates. There is only the skeleton of a framework left from its western wall and the roof is partly torn off. Walls perforated by shrapnel, piles of rubble.

“No, this is old,” says a young fellow who sells cigarettes. This house was hit four days before my arrival, but for him it’s ancient history. Here every day brings something new. Who is shooting? One of the residents, Ivan, claims it’s one side, and the other side, too. But first he covers himself, saying, “How am I supposed to know?”

Here, on the (pro-)Russian side of the front, everyone, except Ivan, is convinced that Ukrainians are behind the firing, especially the Ukrainian National Guard, so much hated by the Russians. The residents of Cheerful, the village outside the city limits, a few hundred meters from the airport, present a more complex picture of events. They claim that separatists provoke Ukrainian firing by placing tanks and mortars between the residential buildings. Ukrainian artillery responds with heavy shelling.

Projectiles have hit the bazaar, too. They smashed one of the stands and left craters, shrapnel, and shattered windows. Almost all the stalls have been closed. Only a few people are walking around here. They are glad that they can show journalists what they are going through.

“Look what they are doing to us. We want to live normally,” says an elderly woman, crying. Very often tears get mixed with outrage and helplessness. No one knows what to do next, how and where to live. There are more shattered windows, bombed-out houses, wounded, and dead. Maxim was getting some water from a hydrant since water had not been available in the apartments for a long time. A projectile struck the ground and shrapnel hit Maxim in his temple—it has already been patched up—and his hand. His palm is terribly swollen and you can see a large wound.

“It was a piece of glass,” says Maxim.

The lack of water is especially severe during fires.

“The fire department and the emergency medical services should be brought before a tribunal,” claims Irina who lives nearby. During the shelling the neighboring buildings caught fire. One at first, then two more. The firefighters responded that they wouldn’t come because it was a war zone. Irina asked them at least to provide some water for putting the fire out, but they refused that, too.

“When I called the medical emergency number and told them that someone might have been killed, they told me to take the body to some safe location, so they could pick it up,” she continues. “How was I supposed to do it?” She spreads her arms. There is neither water nor electricity, and gas is supplied very rarely. How to survive the coming winter when there is no chance that the heating will be turned on?

Volodymyr, whom I meet at the destroyed bazaar, asks me to write down his brief message to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko:

“May you go through what simple people go through because of you.” And then he invites me to tea and apples. He lives next to the bazaar. His house is full of animals: two dogs, two cats, and a rabbit. Not so long ago his neighbor’s house was hit by a missile. They say it came from the Grad rocket launch system. Volodymyr shows me the shrapnel he has found in his backyard. His son Vitaly doesn’t go to school because the neighborhood schools haven’t opened after the summer vacations, and he has no means to get to the center. Despite this Volodymyr doesn’t want to leave his house because as he says: “It is our land.”

Others say: “We stay because we have no place to go.”

I am sitting with Volodymyr, listening to the accompaniment of artillery shelling. You can hear mortars and their typical “popping,” and less often, rifle fire. I have spent several hours here and have counted at least fifty explosions. Some were close, others farther away.

Almost no one pays any attention to distant explosions. People don’t turn their heads, don’t hide, and don’t blink. For those who have stayed, war is a commonplace.

“Over there is a ‘street of death,’” a pro-Russian insurgent points out. He doesn’t tell me his name, just his age. He is twenty-two. “Go to the very end. Our checkpoint will be there. When someone goes beyond it, ukrops start shooting.”

Ukrop means “dill” in Russian. Today it is a derogatory term for “Ukrainian.” This fellow is almost as old as independent Ukraine, but he says it was the Soviet Union that was the country worth living in.

An elderly woman is walking toward the “street of death.”

“Excuse me. Are they shooting there?” She points in that direction. I reply that they haven’t been shooting. One second afterwards we hear an explosion. The elderly lady decides to walk to her apartment that is located right there.

Back in July, several hundred meters from the “street of death” a missile hit a garage. It destroyed it completely but didn’t explode. Inside I can see the unexploded ordnance sticking from the ground. In the summer a bomb disposal unit arrived to take a look but they decided that there was no danger, and they left. A family lives in the house nearby. They are afraid to touch the shell so it is still there.

Recently the missiles have been falling close to the city center. Serhiy lives several hundred meters from the station. He says that a missile went through the roof and ended up in his apartment. “Usually I come home at five p.m., but this time I had to stay a little longer. It must have been a divine intervention.”

The men from a bomb disposal unit who arrived next morning again claimed that there was no danger. And they walked away, leaving the remains of the missile in his apartment. Now, Serhiy practically lives under the open sky. He is worried that he won’t get any assistance soon. The temperature in Donetsk falls to a few degrees Celsius, and in a day or two it will fall below zero at night. The rain will come, followed by frost that is generally more bitter than in Kiev. During the shelling that destroyed Serhiy’s apartment, the projectiles damaged a few other buildings. One hit a grocery store. Two shop assistants were killed. On that day five people lost their lives.