by Francesco Battistini
At what point is the advance and destruction. There is only one refuge from the bombs: the mines. Before the invasion, few areas in the world were so infested with mines and war remnants. Now the area the Russians are focusing on is Hell
Cellars are not enough. Neither does the sewage system. Just outside Soledar, at 11 Oktyabrskaya Street, there is a narrow corridor carved into the rock that leads much further down. The salt mine has always been our salvation, says the village chief. He saved from the Nazi years, he saved in this eightyear war in the Donbass and even now, when the Russian mortar shells go off, Soledar’s 10,000 residents know what to do: throw themselves into the bowels of the old mine, 300 meters below where no thermobaric Putin can get there. Blessed Pit: At the entrance is also a lucky imp, made of salt, and in good times of peace he was licked before lowering himself.
There is not much more to protect in the Donbass. Instead of controlling it and liberating it completely, as they reiterated on Saturday, the Russians are carefully dedicating themselves to its destruction. They move the Wagner mercenaries out of Syria and Libya. They are deporting more than 400,000 people: in order to leave, Putin had given the Donbass brothers 700,000 passports last fall, practically one per family, but apparently he had to convince them in other ways.
The corridor
The advance seems to be progressing, and the Ukrainians themselves admit that the enemy managed to create a small corridor between Donetsk and Crimea. Mayor Ihor Terekhov says 44 heavy artillery shelling and 140 rockets were fired in Kharkiv in a single day. 1,143 buildings were destroyed: Miraculously, the Soviet skyscraper Derjprom remained standing, a piece of nostalgia that the Putin generals had no desire for. Ploshcha Krasna, Chernihiv’s Red Square, doesn’t seem to have been accorded the same esteem, which isn’t so named to pay homage to the heart of Moscow (in Old Slavic, this meant Beautiful Square), and now, the Ukrainian government says it is Center of a completely destroyed city. Even Izyum, the sweet city of raisins and strawberries, is said to have been razed: its 50,000 residents, who once opened the Donbass Gate on the road to Donetsk and Lugansk, have mostly fled, not having time to close the door conclude.
the mines
If you break it, you have to pay. And love. It was not until 2019, almost a century ago, that the English NGO Halo Trust certified that few areas in the world were as polluted by mines and war remnants as Donbass: We must wait until 2080, they said at the time, to recapture everything. A group of Austrian economists also calculates the cost of the destruction: almost $22 billion would have been needed to rebuild the region, 16 percent of Ukraine’s preinvasion gross domestic product.
The richest man
Today? The whole Donec Basin is a concentrate of steaming industrial giants and mines under the house. But no one knows what smoke will rise after the war. The richest man in the region and Ukraine, Rinat Ahkmetov, Shaktar’s football patron, saw his personal fortune halved in a month: Donetsk was his city, and Ahkmetov funded its jewels, the Donbass Arena and the shiny, brand new Russianstyle railway station. .. Another question: What will become of the great raw material coal? In Donetsk, the black mineral has always been a pride and the fury of war has even wiped out the terikony, simple and romantic slag heaps in the middle of the city, a tourist attraction that changed color depending on the time and season. The industry in crisis: Even before the invasion, coal with a high sulfur content was being mined, had to be mixed with the Russian coal and was a byproduct.
The cradle
The Donbass, which Putin wants very much, not only wants the treasure of Moscowlinked steel mills and oligarchs. It is also the cradle of a proRussian Orthodox Church, from which the Ukrainian Church broke away. where armed secession is also played on the language, because nobody here has ever wanted to give up Russian (even if nobody wants to be under Putin now). There is no time or energy left for indignation when visiting the Poltava Museum when the captions, speaking of Peter the Great, carefully avoid mentioning Russia.
The refrigerator
It’s always been a complicated relationship, the one with the Great Mother. 50 kilometers from the border, on the huge Kharkiv Square, said to be the second largest after Tiananmen Square, friends from Moscow were amazed by the gigantic granite monument to the five Soviet heroes, depicted when they went into battle with a basket full of guns? The Kharkivi laughed at it, the five men carrying a refrigerator called it.
But those were different times, and other weapons were used then: those of irony.
March 27, 2022 (Change March 27, 2022 | 09:00)
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