The Press in Ukraine | On the border of war

(Hnutove, Ukraine) Nadia Rudyik walks to her shed, her back bent. She bends down, opens a hatch, points to the tiny underground shelter where she hides during the bombardments. The gesture seems to exhaust him. She is only 61 years old, but seems to be much older. “Eight years of being scared makes you age faster,” she says.

M^me Rudyik lives in the small village of Hnutove, in the Donbass region, three or four kilometers from the territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists who launched an armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine. A few times a year, the Ukrainian authorities report the firing of mortars, artillery and grenades there. Residents say they hear gunshots ringing in the dark every night.

“Every house has a shelter. A year ago the separatists were shooting through here, and all the windows were shattered. Volunteers helped us buy more,” says the sixty-year-old.

Her husband died a few years ago. Her daughter also died. She only has a 35-year-old son left, who has a heart problem and lives in town, closer to the hospital. She lives alone, in her small house with a rickety door. And she is afraid.

However, there was no question of going to live with his relatives further from the front. “I am disabled, I do not want to disturb”, she drops.

She does not want to see her village integrated into Russia, which she has already visited and describes as a “poor country”. She has only one wish: that the clashes stop.

“I hope there won’t be any more deaths and that we can sleep without hearing gunshots,” she said.

Sporadic shooting

A ceasefire agreement is officially in effect, but it is not uniformly respected. The observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recorded 213 violations of the agreement, including 46 explosions, in the Donbass region alone, between last Friday and Sunday.

The situation is even more tense since Russia has massed nearly 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. In mid-January, the Russian Defense Ministry released images of armored vehicles en route to an exercise site, Rostov-on-Don, 170 kilometers from Hnutove. Moscow is asking for a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO and demands that the military alliance stop expanding towards its borders.

To reach Hnutove, today you have to pass a Ukrainian army checkpoint, which blocks the road to the border area. When passing from The Press, Ukrainian soldiers were flying a small surveillance drone, their position covered by a tank.

In the fields and along the main road leading to the village, posters recall the presence of potentially deadly unexploded projectiles. Teams of deminers come frequently to clean up the scene, but citizens have been warned that it will take years to cover the entire territory of their locality. A bombed house, where a man died a few years ago, remains abandoned in the heart of the village.

The belligerents confront each other in the midst of civilian populations. On both sides of the front line, residents have seen their lives turned upside down by eight years of crisis.

“My wife was there when a projectile exploded on our land. When we talk about it, she trembles,” says 80-year-old Viktor Gryzenko. It was around 2015. The hole in his lawn was two meters deep: he even took a picture of himself standing at the bottom. The earth had been thrown 200 meters around. A piece of his fence had glided to the corner grocery store.

His neighbor Vitaliy Sushko saw his outdoor toilet pulverized by the explosion that day. He had just left the house 15 minutes earlier with his two children. He thanks heaven for this chance.

“It’s strange, I’m happy to live every day. It’s like a fresh start. It changes a lot of things,” he said. He has dotted his house with pious images and now attends a church, convinced that he was close to death.

Mr Sushko says he and his neighbors feel little challenged by the bickering between Ukrainian and Russian leaders. “People here are very tired. They don’t think about Ukraine or Russia, they’ve had enough of the war,” explains the worker who has just landed a job in a steelworks in the region.

Back when Russia invaded the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and the pro-Russian rebellion broke out in the Donbass, a referendum was held in the village of Hnutove. Citizens were asked whether they preferred to be part of Ukraine or Russia.

Mykola Serchuk, who describes himself as the village elder, says he was pressured intensely to give his vote to the pro-Russian camp. “They kept coming back and saying we were going to get a lot of money. I had to sign,” he says.

“We lived happily”

All other residents interviewed by The Press deny that there was pressure. The village never came under rebel control, but the Ukrainian government is not unanimous either. Residents say a villager who went fishing and a hiker with binoculars were accused of spying on Ukrainian forces. The soldiers reportedly broke into some houses to flush out separatists.

“We lived happily in this village, but when the war started, life stopped. The young people have left, there are only the old ones left”, complains Lubov Zibultska, a resident met while she was walking with her husband. The lady refuses to have her face photographed.

She blames the Euromaidan movement, the name given to the series of protests that led to the departure of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow, in 2014.

“It was Ukraine that started the war after Euromaidan,” she claims. She claims that the capture of Crimea by the Russian army was not a pretext for war, since this territory once belonged to Russia. “It’s not OUR territory”, insists the lady.

She gets very agitated when Canada is mentioned. “Canada supported Euromaidan and then the war started. So I’m really not happy with Canada! “, she ignites. She claims that US allies are “preparing everything for a war with Russia”, a “brother” country to the Ukrainian people.

She is aware that life was sometimes difficult under the former pro-Russian president, but she still misses that time.

“With Yanukovych, she said, we didn’t have war. »