In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  Two months after Sloviansk had been retaken by Ukrainians on July 5, 2014, I returned to the town. Ukrainian soldiers now walked around just as rebel ones had before. In the main square, the statue of Lenin, under which rebel leaders had in spring made fiery if vacuous speeches denouncing the “fascist junta” in Kiev, now sported a Ukrainian flag scarf around its neck. Just as before and during the rebel period, children rode around on ponies and life went on. Ludmila, aged fifty, who was selling pressed-flower pictures in a crafts fair on the square, was worried though. She supported Ukraine, had fled when the rebels controlled the town and now, she said, had her “suitcase ready,” in case they came back, which they daily declared was their aim.

  I went back to find Viktoria. In early summer when fighting had intensified, she and her family had fled to the safety of a nearby monastery in which many had sought shelter. They were away for some six weeks. All the men who had manned the barricade near her apartment had run away and not come back. Many had gone to Russia, she said. Who wanted to risk retribution? On September 8 Amnesty International issued a briefing in which it accused the Ukrainian Aidar volunteer battalion of being “involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.” They were not in Sloviansk and there were no reports of such things happening here, but who would have waited to see?

  In the lobby of the Sloviansk city administration building, there were two transparent boxes for people to drop notes in. Sheets taped on the front declared: “For Citizens’ Letters.” They also gave the phone numbers of the police and the SBU, the Ukrainian intelligence service. Inside the boxes were notes people had written denouncing those who they said had helped the rebels. A policeman at the door said that 80 percent of them were from people who had disputes with their neighbors, and wanted to get them into trouble. This reminded me of something that Charles King, an American academic and historian of the Black Sea, had written about in his history of Odessa. After the Second World War it was politically expedient for the Soviet authorities to declare the port a “Hero City.” From 1941 to 1944 it had been occupied by the Romanians, who were allied with the Nazis. In fact, with some notable exceptions, its inhabitants had not been so heroic. Before the war it was common for people to snitch to the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, about their neighbors, if they had a dispute with them. After the fall of the city, people passed seamlessly to denouncing their neighbors as Jews or communists. Then, with the return of Soviet power, they began accusing them of being collaborators. Presumably they were denouncing one another to the tsar’s secret police before communism too. On the surface all looked calm in Sloviansk. Only a local could feel the nasty undercurrents here.

  Viktoria’s husband was looking for a new job. She still had no work and they still had no money. When the rebels fled, she said, the locals broke into the building that had served as their HQ and took the food they found there, which “they had stolen from the shops.” The SBU had come by to ask questions about who had been helping the rebels and who had given them food on the barricade. She and her husband had been standing outside having a smoke. They said they did not know who had helped the rebels because they had been away. Of course she did know, but “I don’t want problems,” and anyway, “they have left.” I told her about the boxes I had seen in the administration building, and she explained that this was precisely why the SBU men had come calling. It was mostly old women who wrote these letters, when they had had an argument with a neighbor. In this case an old lady who did not like the woman who lived opposite her had denounced her. Had that woman in fact helped the rebels? “We said it was not true,” but she had “given them some borsch…once.” What did she think now the Ukrainians were back? “I am just happy we are home,” but “it makes no difference to me.”

  One year after I first met her, things were looking up. Viktoria’s husband had found a new job. She had also gotten a job in the local kindergarten, but left because she did not like it, and still wanted to be a schoolteacher. Apart from that, they were helping her husband’s parents tend their vegetables in the allotment, and while life was still tough, “at least we have a lot of potatoes to eat, though I don’t know how we will manage in winter. The main thing is that there is no shooting.”

  Lenin surrounded by shell casings in Pervomaysk, in rebel-held territory in Lugansk. March 2015.

  “Are they waiting for us?” It was March 2015, almost a year since the beginning of the war, and I had come to see Pervomaysk in rebel territory, right on the front line. The first person I met was Olga Ischenko, the mayor. She was asking me because when I introduced myself, I had mentioned that three days earlier I had been in Popasnaya, the Ukrainian-held town eight kilometers away. She wanted to know if people there were desperate to be liberated from the rule of Ukrainian “fascists.” Outside the town hall is a statue of Lenin, in front of which have been stacked unexploded artillery shells and the remains of Grad and Smerch missiles fired at Pervomaysk from Popasnaya.

  Before we started talking, I wanted to get a few things straight. How long had she been mayor? Alarmingly, Olga’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. In January, she explained, her husband Evgeny Ischenko, who had been the mayor, was murdered along with three others, so she had taken over after that. “It was necessary to take the position to prevent armed robbery and looting in town.” Her husband was a Cossack leader of men supposed to be part of the armed forces of the Lugansk People’s Republic or LNR, to use its Russian acronym, the second breakaway rebel territory along with the Donetsk People’s Republic.

  The mayor was thirty-seven years old and had two children, one aged nine and another nine months old. She said “nobody knows for sure” who killed her husband, and she was vague about who might have looted the town had she not taken power. When her husband died, Igor Plotnitsky, the LNR leader, blamed Ukrainians, but it was actually widely believed that the murder was an inside job, part of a bloody local power struggle. In December 2014, when Ukrainian missiles hit a building in town, the angry Evgeny, shouting on camera—you can find this easily on YouTube—denounced Plotnitsky for having signed what was then the first Minsk ceasefire with the Ukrainian side on September 5. In fact this was negotiated with Russia, but for form’s sake Plotnitsky had to sign for the LNR. Still, Evegny railed: “You fucking vilely sign this agreement? We will turn all our weapons around…against you!” Pushing rubble away from the head of a woman whose body had been crushed under a piece of concrete, he shouted: “Sign your fucking peace agreement on the corpse of this woman!”

  Now there was a lull in the fighting, following the signing in Minsk of the second ceasefire agreement, which officially began on February 15. This made it easier to travel about and to get to Pervomaysk from Donetsk, since the road between them led through Debaltseve, which had fallen to the rebels two days after the ceasefire began. Both towns were badly damaged.

  In 2011 there were estimated to be just under 39,000 people in Pervomaysk. According to Olga, during the worst of the fighting the population dropped to 8,000, but now it had risen to 18,000. It was a figure that strained credibility. Since no one here believed that the ceasefire was much more than a lull, it seemed to me that far fewer had returned. “We are going to take our land back,” said Olga, by which she meant at the very least the whole of Lugansk oblast, including neighboring Popasnaya. In the future, she said, the LNR should become a republic within Russia.

  In a nearby housing project, I saw a block that had been completely burned out. Some apartments had gaping holes where they had taken direct hits. There was damage everywhere. The glass from most windows was gone, but they were either boarded up or patched with plastic sheeting. On one street, the corner of a building had come down. Oddly, bottles of shampoo remained on the shelf in what was once a bathroom, which was now part of the rubble beneath it. There were few people on the streets, even though it was quiet, spring had begun and that day the sun was being eclipsed by the moon. />
  A smart woman strolled by with her glossy black Labrador, trailed by four friendly strays who had joined them for their walk. Natalya Sokolik was a forty-one-year-old doctor. She talked about three waves of fighting, the last one ending with the February ceasefire. She reckoned that out of 200 local doctors, only twenty-five were left. In her block, which had been home to up to 250 people, she thought there might be thirty or forty now, though some had trickled back recently. After the first ceasefire in September, some returned “even with kids,” but this time no one had risked coming back with children in case they had to leave all over again. Yesterday, she said cheerfully, “I got my first pay for eight months!” It was about $120. Today there were virtually no jobs here, and while there was food in the few shops that were open, basics were expensive and cash hard to get hold of.

  Money was a serious issue. The rebel-held east had been excised from Ukraine’s financial and banking system. ATMs were just dead black screens, banks were closed and those who did work and who managed to get paid now received their pay in cash. A large proportion of those who had stayed in the rebel-held east were pensioners, but every week it was becoming harder and harder for them to collect their pensions. Officially you had to travel to government-controlled regions and register as a refugee there. That was beyond the means of many. It was taking up to two months even to get the Ukrainian permission necessary to travel to government territory and back. That was one reason why the other side of the front line was increasingly being referred to as “Ukraine,” as though it had already become the foreign country that rebel leaders said they wanted it to be.

  About the future, Nataliya was circumspect, choosing her words carefully. No one knows what it will hold, and she could see I was being escorted by a man in uniform, who had been detailed to show me around by the mayor. “Let’s see…” she said, “but according to the opinion of people here, they would not like to be part of Ukraine again after everything they have experienced.” At a small corner shop, close by a flat that had taken a direct hit, we met Larisa Kovalova, aged sixty-five, a retired physics teacher. She reminisced about good times in the past when she could afford to go on vacation in Crimea and the Caucasus. Now, she said, hardly anyone remained where she lived, except for some other old people. Most of the others had gone to Russia, but they had left dogs, cats and chickens and someone had to look after them.

  Soon we came across a group of old ladies chatting in the sun. They showed me the cellar under their block where they had been sheltering when there was shelling. They had been given some onions as part of a package of humanitarian aid and had planted some in the courtyard. Their spring bulbs were peeking into life. The women pointed out where two of their number had been killed as they ran for the shelter. A few minutes’ drive away was a nuclear bunker from the 1960s, complete with pictures of mushroom clouds and instructions, beautifully preserved in historical aspic, about what to do in case of a nuclear attack. About forty-two people were sleeping here, but when things were bad, up to 200 crammed in. Now some did not want to leave because they were still scared, and some were staying because their homes had been badly damaged.

  Alona Petrova, aged sixteen, sat on her bed with her boyfriend Rovshan Gladkikh, aged twenty. They met in the bunker and theirs was a wartime romance. They wanted to get married. Alona said that after the war she wanted to study, and Rovshan said he wanted to become a miner like his father. This is mining country, and a few miles away is the town of Stakhanov, named after the champion miner of Soviet legend who worked here. Rovshan said his shell-shocked mother, who had survived a shelling incident, was too scared to go home. His eleven-year-old sister Sabrina watched TV. “We want independence,” he said, when I asked him about the future. “How can we live with them if they are killing people?”

  Even when peace returns to Pervomaysk, a thick seam of bitterness has been laid down now. It was a dilapidated, rust-belt sort of place before the war and it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine it ever flourishing again. As in the former Yugoslavia, buildings can be rebuilt, as they were in the devastated eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, for example, but if there is no work and no reason to return, then places like this will shrivel and die. The same goes for Popasnaya on the Ukrainian side.

  When Gnome drove us there in his armored car, he insisted we put on our flak jackets for the last stretch of the road. (Gnome is his nom de guerre, and he asked that his real name not be used.) Then he stepped hard on the accelerator and we hurtled down the last few kilometers of straight and exposed road. He kept glancing to his right, over the fields. A few days before, he said, one of his tires had been shot out by a sniper from the rebel side.

  Gnome was a paramedic and member of Hospitallers, a volunteer group, who draw their name and inspiration from the Knights Hospitaller order founded in 1099 at the time of the Crusades. They were doctors and medics who had established a system for frontline medical evacuations to slash the number of Ukrainian soldiers dying, not because their injuries could not be treated, but because they could not be transported to proper medical care quick enough.

  In Popasnaya, which the rebels held and then lost in July 2014, things were as quiet as in Pervomaysk. In its hospital I met Dr. Alexander Kovalchuk, who used to work there. Now he is the head of the surgical unit in Popasnaya. In 2011 it was estimated that there were 22,000 people here, but now he said there might be just 5,000. About 70 percent of the hospital medical staff had either remained or returned. Unlike in Pervomaysk, staff were being paid and the banking system was working here.

  Many of those who remained in Pervomaysk voted for Russki Mir or “Russian World,” said Kovalchuk, using an expression favored by Russian nationalists, and referring to the rebel anti-Ukrainian referendums of May 2014. Now they had “tasted it,” he said, many regretted it. Because the mobile phone system still worked he talked to friends and family there and they were “really fed up.” But here in Popasnaya, he conceded, there were people, especially “simple people,” as opposed to the middle class, who supported the rebels, though there were also pro-Ukrainians remaining in Pervomaysk. The war would “last long,” he thought, but for now “we are not talking about taking back those territories, though we would like to reunite with our friends and relatives.”

  In a ward I met Alexander, aged fifty-two. He had stomach ulcers. He said he had not left Popasnaya because he had to look after his parents, who were too old to go. His apartment had been damaged and he could not live in it. “I don’t know who shelled it,” he said, “but it obviously came from Pervomaysk. We are fed up with everyone and everything. We want a united Ukraine, but the rebels and the Ukrainians need to talk.” A man in the next bed, who did not want to give his name, said, “Ukraine wants peace,” but added that he thought its leaders did not.

  The center of Popasnaya had been damaged, though not as extensively as Pervomaysk. Bundles of clothes lay on the rubble of a block whose top-corner apartment had been eviscerated by a missile. A man died during the attack. Oleg, aged fifty, said he was collecting what remained from the apartment for his ex-wife and son, who had moved to Kharkiv. “She phoned me and asked me to get everything that is left.” He was stuffing it all in his car. In a grocery shop Oxana, aged forty-one, said that her son, who was twenty-one, had gone to Russia. “Thank goodness he did not join the rebels.” Half of her friends had gone to Russia, and the sympathies of those that remained were divided. “I supported this country from the beginning,” she said, but many did not. “To be honest,” the town was “divided.” Many who had supported the rebels had changed their minds, none the least because “it is very bad there in Pervomaysk.”

  On the way out of town there is a big Ukrainian checkpoint and military position at the crossroads in the district of Cheryomushki. In Popasnaya they said that the Ukrainians had been firing at them from here. The rebel lines were more than a kilometer away. The crossroads is close to an area of low-rise apartment blocks, just like the ones in Popasnaya. Many were da
maged and had holes in the roofs from shelling. The Ukrainians claimed the rebels and their Russian backers were trying to hit the checkpoint. I wanted to talk to someone but couldn’t see anyone at all. Suddenly, in the distance, I spotted a woman and ran to catch up with her. Ludmila, aged sixty-three, was walking home with a shopping bag. I asked her if anyone else was here, living in these hundreds of apartments. In her block, she said, “there is a woman on the first floor and me.” She had seen light in two windows in other blocks recently. She had lived in the basement for two weeks when shelling was bad. The electricity and gas had been cut off, but now they had been restored, though the running water had not. She told me that she had a daughter-in-law and grandchildren who were living somewhere safe and they had asked her to come, but so far she had refused. “I lost my husband when I was thirty-five,” she said, and a few years ago her only son had died of lung cancer, so she had thought to herself that if she was killed “and buried between them, it would make no difference.”

  Civilians were suffering, as they do in all wars, but in this one older people were suffering the most. The morale of soldiers on both sides was high, and their leaders were thinking and talking of eventual victory rather than a peaceful end to the war. The rebels could not survive without Russian military support, but with it the Ukrainians could not defeat them. The war was thus both one between Russia and Ukraine and at the same time contained elements of civil war in the east. Many pro-Ukrainians tried to deny this because it complicated their simple picture of Russian aggression and terrorists, but for anyone who had been on both sides of the line, it was evident. That was not to deny Russian involvement though, and, as Valentin Fedichev, a proud Ukrainian army colonel who briefed me, said, even in a nightmare “we never thought we could be attacked by Russia.” He was an Afghan war veteran and, as he pointed out, an ethnic Russian. What Vladimir Putin had done, he said, was to commit an act of “geopolitical treachery” against Ukraine. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do next.