In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  As we talked, a giant Ukrainian flag was passed over people’s heads and the crowd chanted “Slava Ukraini!,” “Glory to Ukraine!,” and “We will not give up Donbass!” Oleh Lyashko, the leader of a small nationalist party, said that Ukraine faced “the choice of shame or war and I am for war.” One man held a handmade poster with a picture of a baby wearing a vyshyvanka, a shirt decorated with traditional Ukrainian embroidery patterns. Underneath, the man had written: “Uncle Putin, why are you so grumpy?” Behind the stage stood several lines of riot policemen. In between the police and the back of the stage was a small playground in which mothers and small children swung happily on gondola swings.

  A few days later Olena came to collect me. She had a small Ukrainian flag on the dashboard of her car, which was surprising, as the war was already beginning and showing public support for Ukraine in Donetsk seemed a dangerous thing to do. Olena is an artist but made her living as an interior designer. Her brother, with whom she and her husband, Artyom, aged forty-two, shared an office, ran an advertising and web design company. While we talked Artyom browsed through designer teapots online. He had four shops in town called “Cozy Home,” selling upmarket goods for the home to Donetsk’s small but until then growing middle class.

  On the walls of the office were several of Olena’s canvases including some of busty, headless women adorned with old election catchphrases of former president Yanukovych—“prosperity” and “stability.” They also featured skulls, hearts and broken hearts. She said that the women represented her view that in Ukraine only 10 to 15 percent of people actually think, while the rest “just exist.” Then she added that maybe this was the same in the rest of the world.

  Olena and Artyom had been active supporters of the small pro-Maidan movement in Donetsk. They had come to its rallies and done shifts at the protests to keep it going. Olena’s particular contribution was to paint a picture at the demonstration camp while people watched her. Like in Kiev, some of the anti-Yanukovych protesters stayed after he had fled, wanting to keep going until the presidential election, which was scheduled for May 25. It was not to be. On March 1 a small group of fifty to a hundred people, recalled Olena, came to clear them out. “They had strange flags, including Russian imperial ones.” They were well organized and several had walkie-talkies, while others had clubs studded with nails. They shouted “Banderovtsi!” at the Maidan protesters and “Berkut,” the name of the Ukrainian riot police, many of whom had just returned home from Kiev as heroes to anti-Maidan easterners. Olena complained to some police who were sitting in their car watching what was going on, but it rapidly became clear that they would do nothing. So, the leader of the Donetsk Maidan group made a decision. “We had better go, or we will all be killed.”

  Olena Yemchenko, artist. Donetsk, April 2014.

  In her office Olena had photos from exhibitions she had organized. She complained of Ukraine’s endemic corruption. She and her colleagues had been awarded a grant from the Ministry of Culture in 2013 for an exhibition, but most of the money never arrived because it was stolen. She described how she got around this problem. She had a wealthy client who had prospered in the last few years. “My task is to take his money and use it wisely,” and in this, she laughed, there was “no dilemma.” That meant she used some of the money to live off, but the rest was to plug the hole left by the theft of money she was supposed to have gotten from the state to fund the exhibitions. In that way she was part of a chain laundering money, but in her case the cash went back to where it was supposed to have gone in the first place. “For my whole life,” she said, “people have been robbing us.”

  A few days later, Olena called. The window of her car with the flag had been smashed. A friend had told her that from now on, the only place for Ukrainian flags to be flown in Donetsk “was on tanks.”

  A month later I asked Artyom what he had been doing. The answer was that he had been exploring the possibility of moving to Kiev or the west or emigrating. “If I come back in a year,” I asked, “what do you reckon the chances of you still being here are?” Without hesitation he answered: “Fifty-fifty.” A year later they had fled to Dnipropetrovsk, another big eastern industrial city, but one which remained firmly in Ukrainian hands.

  As a politically active couple, Olena and Artyom were on one of Donetsk’s local election commissions. This meant they were supposed to help organize and supervise the May 25 presidential election in one central Donetsk district. Artyom was the secretary of his commission and, as the election approached, he began calling its members and found half were refusing to take part because it was too dangerous. The leadership of the DNR had declared that no election could take place there because it was no longer part of Ukraine. Thugs began barging into offices involved in organizing the poll and closing them down. The parties appointed new people to replace those who refused to work, but this did not help because the new people also did not want to come. As the situation deteriorated, Artyom and his colleagues decided to carry on in secret and determined that, come what may, it was important to open their polling station so that it could be registered as having opened, even if only a handful of people actually dared to vote. With checkpoints surrounding the city it was impossible to drive the ballots in, so just before the poll they were flown into the airport, which a few days later was to close, as fighting erupted around it. As the vehicle with the ballots drove from the airport, however, it was stopped by rebels and the man in charge was kidnapped and held for a few days. Thus, the election in the city, and indeed in the rest of the rebel-held territory, could not take place.

  At about the same time, Olena and Artyom needed to get a new marriage certificate. They wanted to send their younger son, then aged eleven, to a summer camp in Israel and to stay with relatives there. As they had married just before the end of the Soviet Union, their original marriage certificate was a Soviet one but a Ukrainian version was a required part of the paperwork. By now the office which issued the documents had been taken over by the rebels. Eventually they did manage to get the paperwork together. Meanwhile, they wondered what to do. All of their lives were in Donetsk, but now they could see the power of the Ukrainian police, the security services and the legal authorities evaporating. As business dried up, Artyom moved his stock into a secure warehouse and began to close his shops. His ten staff accused him of treachery, but he said, “I did not want to pay tax to the DNR and so I decided not to.” In summer they closed their office, and Olena’s brother Anton left with his children for Kharkiv. The situation in the city was getting worse, as certain areas, especially but not only near the airport, were being shelled. The Ukrainians in the airport tried to hit the rebels who in turn were attempting to dislodge them.

  Anton sought a way to extract his valuable printing machines from the city, but tragedy struck. His father-in-law was a miner in Makiivka, the neighboring town to Donetsk. Because of the war, his mine closed and he fell into a deep depression. He was taken to the hospital for an assessment, and there committed suicide by jumping out of the window from a high floor. Then, when Anton was at home in Donetsk, a young man smashed his car into Anton’s parked one. He came downstairs and the man apologized and said he would give him some money—it was better not to get the police involved, he said—but that as he did not have it on him, Anton should come with him to get it. He got in the man’s car, and as soon as they left another car arrived and Anton was kidnapped. He had been set up. The kidnappers were Chechens whom the family believe were Kadyrovtsy, which is to say armed men sent by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, to fight for the rebels. It rapidly became clear that they had been tipped off that, as Anton was trying to get his printing presses out, he must have enough money to do so. Anton’s wife used her contacts and managed to get her husband freed after a few days without paying a ransom. The presses were extracted from Donetsk and sent across the front line on the payment of a $1,000 bribe to a DNR official. Anton had been roughed up but not badly beaten. When he was released, one of the
kidnappers took his shoes.

  At the beginning of July, Olena and Artyom were in Kiev. They had gone to collect their son, who had just come home from Israel. Simon, their older son, aged nineteen, stayed with his grandparents in Donetsk because he had a university exam to take. At exactly this moment Sloviansk, which had been under rebel control since April, fell to Ukrainian forces. A column of armed rebels evacuated the town and retreated to Donetsk. As that happened, Olena and Artyom were on the train on the way back from Kiev and Simon’s grandmother called them to warn them that the city was full of armed men, that it was dangerous and they should not come home. So, they got off in Dnipropetrovsk, because the grandmother had a distant relative there whom she phoned and asked to look after them. They arrived at his apartment at two o’clock in the morning and found he had been celebrating his birthday, and there were dishes of party food still on the table. They stayed with him a few days and then he sent them to his dacha, or country house, about thirty kilometers away.

  Olena said she decided to treat these days as a kind of summer holiday, but it was hard there because, until Anton brought them their car from Donetsk, it was difficult to move about and even the nearest shop was thirty minutes’ walk away. Originally they also had only the clothes they had taken to Kiev. By August it was clear they were not going home. They began looking for an apartment to rent in Dnipropetrovsk. Simon applied to transfer to the city’s university and they got their younger son into a good school. Meanwhile, all of their family and all of their friends were pouring out of Donetsk and going to Kiev. After the fall of Sloviansk, Russia sent troops to stem the Ukrainian advance, which they did, but Olena and Artyom met people who were amazed they had decided to stay in Dnipropetrovsk. Artyom recalled: “Everyone was waiting for Russian troops here. It did not mean they wanted that, but they expected it. They said: ‘Why did you come here? They will come here too.’ ”

  Olena managed to get some of her paintings out of Donetsk but said she did not regret the rest. “They are from a different stage of my life, when I had different goals.”

  In the meantime their home in Donetsk is empty. They asked a neighbor to keep an eye on it, but then she left. They were living on savings, but Artyom had up to $100,000 worth of Cozy Home stock stuck in the warehouse in Donetsk. Life was in limbo. They have family in Germany and there was a possibility that they could go there, so Olena and Artyom were spending much of their time studying German. They said that being part of a small, liberal and opposition-minded circle in Donetsk, they were already increasingly unhappy before the war but now, said Artyom, one thing was for sure: “We will never go back to Donetsk.”

  Whatever happens, the fate of the city and the region without such creative people, without modern-minded pro-Europeans and entrepreneurs, will be all the poorer. Some even say that in this way Donetsk is reverting to type. It is becoming again what it originally was: a small, rough-and-ready and violent place.

  The little town of Sloviansk was under rebel control from April 12 to July 5, 2014. In that period it became their bastion, and effective control was wielded by Igor Girkin, who used the nom de guerre Strelkov, or “Shooter.” By his own admission he was a former Russian intelligence agent. To what extent he was an active asset of Russia’s security services was, and is, much debated. Given his statements, though, it was clear that he was a true believer in the cause of re-creating an imperial Russia. By contrast, and by her own admission, Viktoria Demidchenko, who was twenty-seven when he took over, didn’t much care who ran the town, but just wanted a better life. Between pro-Ukrainians who had either fled or were keeping very quiet, vocal pro-Russians or those opposed to the post-Maidan government but not necessarily anti-Ukrainian, Viktoria was typical of many, especially in that first part of the war, when loyalties were ambiguous and had not crystallized into hate.

  Viktoria Demidchenko. Sloviansk, September 2014.

  She lives on the ground floor of a classic run-down, five-story block on the edge of town that people had begun moving into in 1971. When I first met her she served strawberry tea. In the corridor she has wallpaper depicting a New York street scene with yellow cabs. Just below the kitchen window are flowerbeds, carefully maintained by the inhabitants of the block, and in front of them is a place for children to play. During the period the rebels were here, if the mothers heard any fighting they popped their heads out of the windows and yelled at their kids to come in.

  Viktoria’s fridge is decorated with magnets of places she or friends and family have been, which are mostly, but not only, in Ukraine. In 2008 Viktoria went for six weeks to Germany to pick strawberries near Cologne with a group from her college, organized by one of her teachers. She was paid €5 an hour, earned €1,500 and bought a laptop. She has a husband and a daughter, aged two and a half. Before having her child, Viktoria could not get a proper job. She had studied at the nearby teacher training college, but the problem was that you had to pay a bribe to get a teacher’s job and she did not have that money. When the fighting began, the furniture factory where her husband worked shut, and he was not getting paid. As elsewhere in Ukraine before the war, the problem was less one of unemployment and rather one of low pay. She explained to me in minute detail exactly how much she had to pay for gas, for electricity, for water and for her contribution to the apartment block charges. The sums were tiny, but the reality was that she and her husband now had less than €15 left.

  As we drank the strawberry tea, Viktoria asked me what life was like in Britain. Did we, for example, have to bribe someone to get a job? Did we have to pay a bribe to get into university? The conversation moved on to Rinat Akhmetov. I said that I often passed One Hyde Park, the luxury London block where he had bought two flats and where his wife and children lived. The Guardian reported that according to Land Registry documents in April 2011, he had paid £136.4 million for the properties and was expected to spend another £60 million to get his 2,300 square meters the way he wanted them. Viktoria’s flat was about 30 square meters. As to the future of Sloviansk, she said: “It does not matter if I live in Russia or Ukraine. All I want is a good salary. Now I can’t even afford a new pair of shoes. I don’t want to be anxious about money for bread.” What concerned her most right now, apart from the risk of fighting, was that she had heard that the meager state maternity leave pay she got was about to end (which it duly did) because Ukraine was bankrupt.

  Another time, when some of her friends came over, we went for a walk in the nearby allotments, which many in the apartments had, and in which some neighbors were tending their vegetables. Viktoria’s parents-in-law had an allotment here. We looked at where some sort of missile had made a hole clean through the trunk of a tree by the fire station. By the line of old car tires with which the rebels had blocked the road, there was a big flower bed with two life-size, painted plaster models of children. One was a girl in a yellow dress with a blue collar and belt—that is to say, in the Ukrainian national colors—who was watering the plants with a red watering can. The other was a blond boy in a red shirt reading a book, who, according to Viktoria and local lore, was supposed to be young Lenin. Between them was a giant red toadstool with white spots. A few paces away was a building the local rebels were using as their HQ.

  At their barricade here, close to the entrance to the allotments, the men had made themselves a comfortable shelter with a table and chairs. A few of them had guns, but many did not. On the table was a vase of flowers. As we sat there, a couple came by walking their dachshund, who was called Rich. They had come to drop off some picnic plates and napkins. These were added to the other supplies, including cigarettes, biscuits and salads that the residents of the blocks of apartments on the other side of the tree-lined street had brought them. Suddenly a car drove up and three local men got out with musical instruments. They were touring the barricades. They began to sing. A line from one song from the Second World War went: “Under Balkan stars I will dream of my Smolensk!” A line from another, from the Afghan war, was: �
��Under the stars of Jalalabad, we cursed our damned war…”

  Then something happened. All the men jumped up, got into their cars and roared off. Two suspicious men had been spotted on a nearby roof. Everyone seemed to believe that the town had been infiltrated by snipers (some of them women) and other evildoers from Right Sector, one of the post-Maidan nationalist volunteer militias. Indeed many believed that the town was surrounded by Right Sector men pretending to be soldiers, an idea encouraged by the fact that, thanks to the chaotic situation then prevailing in the Ukrainian military and in the newly created National Guard, men from the latter were on checkpoints outside town, in black uniforms with no insignia, because, as one explained, they had not been made yet. Ten minutes later the men from the barricade were back. The two men had been sent from the municipality to repair something.

  The local commander was called Yevgeniy. He was thirty-five years old and before the war had a small delivery-van business. He did not want to give his surname. “What do they want?” he raged. “We were peaceful people until they,” by which he meant Ukrainian forces, “came here.” A friend of his, in fact the godfather of his child, he said, had been mobilized into the National Guard on the other side, “and they tell them it’s only terrorists here!” The men at the barricade nodded. This was a common theme at the bottom of the rebel pecking order. They were just ordinary folk who, appalled by the fall of Viktor Yanukovych, and convinced by the Russian media and the high profile of small groups like Right Sector on the other side that this was somehow a rerun of the Second World War and they were about to be overrun by the (new) Nazis. Yanukovych had not done anything for them, and like most politicians was considered a son of a bitch, but at least, as he was from around these parts, they could consider him their son of a bitch. Still, opinion polls had consistently shown that the majority did not want to become part of Russia, but now, as drama engulfed Ukraine, many like Viktoria were just fed up and desperate. And so, with the close ties of language, family and business, and in places like Donetsk with its particularly marked Soviet demographic legacy, it was only logical that people might look to Russia rather than the West and an EU which is distant—in a way which it is not if you live in, say, Lviv.