It was my great-great-grandfather who built our house in Donetsk. She had been in my family for 130 years,” breathes Roman (we use an assumed first name for security purposes). In the summer of 2014, after militias supported financially and militarily by Russia had taken control of certain sectors of Donbass, a region in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists came to seek the keys to its House. Then they took those of his car, and his bar.
” I could not do anything. In the previous months, the man in his twenties had taken under his wing part of the local resistance opposing those he calls “terrorists”. These men, in the pay of the Kremlin, who were gradually eating away at the territory of the city of Donetsk. “At our first meeting, we were expecting a few dozen people. But there were thousands. It was amazing,” says Roman.
Today, the man who still keeps his refugee card in his pocket has taken up arms again, alongside thousands of other civilians determined to confront the Russian invader. And again, with that national pride tattooed on my heart. “I don’t have time to talk to you anymore. I’m busy stopping the Russians. »
A region with a Russian-speaking majority, the Donbass is no less profoundly Ukrainian, noted The duty during his stay there last week. Power pylons painted blue and yellow — the colors of the Ukrainian flag — dominate the landscape. Fences sporting the national colors overhang the bridges. And visitors are greeted at the entrance to towns by huge blue and yellow letters forming the names of the towns.
Well treated
Daryna Safryhina, who lives in the city of Lysychansk, Luhansk region, gave an annoyed sigh when The duty asked her last week if Russian-speaking Ukrainians, like her, are persecuted — as Vladimir Putin claims. ” Not at all. We live very well here, ”replied the 28-year-old young woman.
A pretext that was also brandished in 2014 to justify the takeover of the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk by pro-Russian separatists who made them people’s republics. The scars of this conflict, which took the lives of more than 14,000 Ukrainians, were still visible in the Donbass even before Vladimir Putin poured out his hatred on Ukraine again last Thursday.
On the road on the outskirts of Sloviansk, in the Donetsk region, a former psychiatric hospital – requisitioned in 2014 by pro-Russian separatists, who had made it one of their headquarters – still sits on the area below, despite its facade gutted by bombs and artillery fire.
A lasting reminder of this conflict which had already made, before Thursday, more than 1.8 million displaced people (having found refuge elsewhere in Ukraine) and more than 1 million refugees (having found asylum in neighboring countries).
Displaced persons camp
Ludmyla Bobova is among those who fled territories in 2014 that fell under the control of pro-Russian separatists — and where the Russian government has since distributed more than 600,000 Russian passports to residents who were previously Ukrainians. “With my husband and my mother, I took the last train that left Luhansk [avant que le territoire ne soit coupé du reste de l’Ukraine] “, she says. “We fled to save our lives. »
A flight that led her to Kharkiv, the country’s second city, in northeastern Ukraine and a few tens of kilometers from Russia. There, the lady found refuge in a hastily built camp on suburban land adjacent to a police academy. A stopover which was supposed to be temporary, but which has been stretching out ever since.
“I know I will never go back home,” she blurted out when met in Kharkiv last week. In the months following the 2014 war, some 400 Ukrainians had found refuge in this camp made up of containers converted into accommodation. About 176 people were still there before the Russian invasion launched last Thursday. On Monday, the city that hosts them was bombarded by Russian troops.
“There are 37 children who were born here, indicated to the Homework camp manager Artur Statsenko. In all, more than 1,500 Ukrainians passed through these containers donated by Germany. On the walls of his office are posted plans for a housing complex whose construction was to begin shortly. The project aims to provide more dignified accommodation for these exiled people in their own country.
“It’s the biggest dream of the people who live here, to be able to live in real homes,” noted Ludmyla Bobova. With the fighting raging in Kharkiv for several days, however, nothing is more uncertain. Just like the whole future of this country which, at every moment, stakes its freedom.
But as in 2014, Vladimir Putin is causing the opposite effect to that sought by reinvigorating national pride in this country which he considers illegitimate. “In 2014, we did not really know, in Kharkiv, if we were pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian”, underlines Michaël, owner of a bar of the municipality which had been the target of an explosion in 2014 when the separatists pro-Russians were advancing in the city.
“But we are even more patriotic today. We speak Russian, but we have a Ukrainian heart. We know today that Kharkiv is pro-Ukraine. »
With Vitalii Ovcharenko and Max Krizhanivsky
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.