Behind the walls of the Lesnaya Dacha shrine lie the graves of nearly 400 people, all civilians, killed in the battle for the city of Severodonetsk in Ukraine’s Lugansk province last year. The silence of this burial forest is broken by the roar of constant explosions coming from behind the hill on which lies the sister city of Lisichansk, which borders the stagnant front. And in this cemetery there is no floral wreath in the colors of the Russian flag, unlike other cemeteries located on the road from Russia’s Belgorod region to this area. There, a few bouquets of flowers with the tricolor bid farewell to the neighbors who served in their offensive against Ukraine.
Most of the Lugansk region was taken from Ukraine in the Donbas war of 2014 and 2015, although Russia’s on-paper annexation last year is not even recognized by the Kremlin’s partners, with the exception of Syria and North Korea. , like China and India, calling for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. This explains why the destruction occurs suddenly just before reaching the border with the next Ukrainian region, Kharkiv. There, the lush forests are followed by a field blackened by ash and thousands of trunks uprooted during the battle in February 2022, and a line of destroyed houses and factories await the entrance to Severodonetsk, where not a soul is seen on the streets, surrounded by rubble.
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“The city was wonderful, now there is practically no life left. Only older and disabled people. That’s all,” laments Andrei, a 64-year-old man who lost a leg in the fighting for Severodonetsk from March to June last year. “I helped with the bombings and transported bread and medicine on my bike. I was wounded and the Russians took me to Lugansk, where they amputated my leg,” he explains at his small stall in the central market, where he sells electronic cigarettes.
Dozens of people stroll through the central market in Severodonetsk on October 31. Javier G. Cuesta
Part of Andrei’s family, including his granddaughter, now lives in Germany and he doesn’t think they will ever return. “It’s a shame. “Well, I imagine that everyone chooses their own fate,” he sighs bitterly. Before the war, more than 105,000 people lived in Severodonetsk, although during the battle about 8,000 remained, “those who could not escape,” the mantra that everyone repeats, and currently there are 32,000, according to the Kremlin-imposed administration in the city.
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Except for the center, where there is some life, the rest of the city is empty. Its hrushchevka, the traditional five-story Soviet prefabricated blocks that populated all the cities of the USSR, are destroyed and many of them mined, and when darkness falls and curfew begins, only three or four lights illuminate the dozens of windows.
“It’s like a circus. Leave the central streets. “Everything is great in them, but beyond that everything is destroyed, broken,” Andréi regrets, although his arrows also reach Kiev and Europe. “They ruined everything for us Russian-speaking people. I understand Ukrainian, I write Ukrainian, but I don’t force myself to speak Ukrainian. I love the language, it’s beautiful, but there’s no need to come here and force someone to speak it,” emphasizes the man, who misses the Soviet era when there was still a thriving chemical industry. “Europe will have a hard time without Russia, the Americans are deceiving you. “Spain may not suffer from winter, but the rest does,” warns Andréi, after complaining that the city is not expected to have heating “for the second winter in a row.”
Ubiquitous military presence
Nobody speaks Ukrainian in public. The environment is not conducive to this. The Russian military is omnipresent and a member of the local administration takes note of those interviewed.
The battle for Severedonetsk between Russia and Ukraine – which defended the square – began in March 2022. “A Ukrainian tank shot at my house, that disturbed it,” says 25-year-old Vladimir, visibly moved. He decided to stay in Severodonetsk, although his family has been living in Portugal for seven years. He also admits that many of his acquaintances fought for Ukraine. “When we speak, we do not do so from a political point of view, but from person to person. Very little depends on the common people,” he says, after admitting that this war has meant a break with many of his people.
Vladimir works in the repair sector, the only sector that keeps the population of Luhansk active. The Kremlin has invested heavily in the conquered territories in order to win the support of those who remain there. The new roads in the region are one of the biggest representatives of this policy, the impact of which is multiplied since one of the main complaints of the population is that Kiev has stopped investing in the region over the last three decades.
“Nothing was repaired for 30 years. No kindergartens, no schools. The house I live in was built in 1980 and never renovated. The pipes are rotten, everything is rotten,” says Svetlana, 58, at her market stall. Working at her side is 68-year-old Liudmila, who trusts in Russia’s promises: “President Vladimir Putin told us that the city will be better than it was.” However, he admits that it is still too early to say that Russian support and that the deficits are enormous, in addition to the lack of medicines, “there is no work.” If so, people will return.”
59-year-old Oleg lives in poor conditions in one of the destroyed Khrushchevka houses. “Those who could go went. Those who didn’t did so hid in the cellars,” says this lonely man. He returned home after the battle without any relatives. A completely destroyed block was found there with the remains of a Ukrainian tank under one of its arches. After trying to spend a night at home, he moved downstairs. “My house was on the eighth floor, but it was impossible to live there. When it rained there would be floods, something would break at night, it was scary,” he remembers. A few neighbors also live there “without water, electricity or heating”.
The remains of a Ukrainian tank lie under the arch of a destroyed building in an outskirts of the city of Severodonetsk last Tuesday. Javier G. Cuesta
More than half of the city is not welcome
Severodonetsk is governed by Russian-imposed authority. Mayor Nikolai Morgunov was a member of fugitive former President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions until he switched to the Russian separatist side in May 2014. At that time he was mayor of Brianka, a city where one of the most violent pro-Russian battalions, the USSR Brianka, operated. Several of its members reported in Russia that numerous tortures and murders were committed among the population there.
“The first members of the administration [rusa] When they joined in July last year, the situation was appalling. “The city was 80% destroyed (…) there was no water, electricity or gas,” says Morgunow in the town hall, where traces of shrapnel and bullet holes can still be seen. “In addition, there were still unburied bodies of civilians lying on the streets, and there were about 250 graves in the yards, people could not bury their own,” he added.
Morgunov emphasizes that the Ukrainian armed forces blocked the streets with destroyed cars, mined numerous buildings and “tried” to intimidate the population into leaving the city because of the impending battle between their homes. According to his calculations, 92 out of 100 residents have fled, although he doesn’t want everyone to return.
“There are people who deliberately left Severodonetsk and went to Ukraine. Will we wait for them? No. The people who live here today, who have returned, are the ones who have the right to build their future,” warns Morgunov, adding: “Everyone had the opportunity to return, everyone had the opportunity not to leave this country.” “Some were afraid, some were convinced, some gave in.” Morgunov, who accuses the former Ukrainian mayor of personally planting an anti-tank mine in his office, estimates that more than 1,000 civilians were killed in the fighting.
2014, damn date
The eight years since the Donbas war have profoundly changed the political situation in the region: hundreds of thousands of pro-Ukrainian people left their homes to go to Europe or the west of the country. A large part of the remaining population, in turn, has been waiting all these years for annexation by Russia in order to escape its legal limbo. Furthermore, despite previous tensions with Moscow – including the gas crises of 2009 and 2010 and the poisoning of pro-European leader Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 – they often see the 2014 Maidan protests as the origins of the war.
The city of Lugansk (population about 430,000, according to Russian authorities), very far from the front, could pass for a normal city except for a few small details, such as the huge loudspeakers of its anti-aircraft alarms. There is a lot of life in the regional capital and, in contrast to Severodonetsk, many children play in the parks.
For its residents, the fateful date is June 2, 2014, when a Ukrainian Air Force plane bombed Central Park, killing eight civilians. “It was difficult to understand that the device showed not the Russian flag, but the Ukrainian flag. “We consider this day to be the beginning of Ukraine’s war against peaceful Donbas,” said Nikolai, 60, who owns a hunting weapons store with his wife Tatiana, 52, who was also injured by a projectile in another stroke.
History is important for both sides of the war. Although this pair has referred to the separatist region as a “banana republic” in recent years, they emphasize that, unlike the “Maidan coup,” local militias “only” took over the local headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in 2014. , and they point out that the invasion of the Russian military into Donbass in April this year, the skirmishes and the battle for Donetsk airport in May were something “distant” for them. In addition, few recognize the face of a statue erected in the center of Lugansk in honor of “the volunteers.” The soldier hugged by a girl is none other than Dmitri Utkin, the main commander of the Wagner mercenary company until he died in an unexplained plane accident this summer along with rebel Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Some of today’s soldiers were still children in 2014 and their childhood was shaped by war. Yevgenia is a Russian volunteer who weaves camouflage nets for the army, which she considers “humanitarian aid.” It shows two soldiers enjoying their free time in Lugansk.
“Every man has to defend his homeland,” says Andréi, 22 years old and a soldier since he was 19, when he joined the self-proclaimed republic. The fighter attributes his decision to July 26, 2014, when the attack on the airport next to which they lived began on his grandfather’s birthday. “There were no soldiers in our city and they shot at the kindergarten. “Why?” he emphasizes.
“Many people in Lugansk have forgotten the war because it is far away now,” he admits. “Everyone wants to live, everyone is afraid,” he says, an opinion shared by his 34-year-old partner. “Ukraine as such did not exist. Read the story. That was Kievan Rus, history repeats itself,” adds the soldier, also called Andréi, before looking pessimistically into the future. “What’s next? ‘Europe against us?’
The conversation is limited to knowing their motives: Russian law punishes any dissemination of information that could reveal military secrets with prison, and their work is, as they say, limited to “survival and following orders.”
Between Lugansk and Severodonetsk lies an oasis of peace, Shastia, a small town where the fighting was short-lived. There, in a small square where a crater can still be seen, two women are walking with their children. “There is no reason to choose between living in Russia or Ukraine. The most important thing for me is that there is silence, that my children don’t hear shots, bombings and so on; Let my children learn,” says Julia, 34 years old and a resident of Kramatorsk (a Ukrainian-controlled city of Donetsk), who is waiting in that city with her family to return home.
“We haven’t unpacked (…) I want peace, I’m tired of this. This is not my house, we left everything behind,” he adds. Both she and her friend Yelena, 37 years old and mother of three, have Russian passports. “You have to feed the children, you have to live. You can’t get a job anywhere with a Ukrainian passport,” says Yulia.
Residents of Luhansk province often complain that they receive almost no humanitarian assistance. “They promised us mountains of gold, but we got 500 rubles (about five euros) a month, excuse me?” Oleg laments in the ruins of Severodonetsk, where he dreams of getting new boots and a cell phone to get back in touch with his acquaintances, also on the Ukrainian side.
One of the places where humanitarian assistance is provided is the Lesnaya Dacha sanctuary. Yevgeny took some resources there. “They need medicine and building materials to cover the windows,” he explains, before noting that we Russians “fight for our own language, for our language.”
The church survived the bombings unscathed, although some icons in its collection have shrapnel holes in them. “There is always a reason for war,” says his former superior, Liubov Alekseyevna, 68, who directly blames Ukraine for provoking the conflict “by closing its churches.” “We always walk with God and we always conquer with God,” he says quietly as artillery explosions echo in the distance. Over there, behind the fences of the hermitage, rises the Kreuzwald, in which lie hundreds of innocent “martyrs,” as he calls them, of this war.
The nun Liubov Alekseyevna shows the icons from the Lesnaya Dacha sanctuary in Severodonetsk. Javier G. Cuesta
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