The war about which they forgot

Of course, there was not a single day of the truce.

Every morning, as before, the inhabitants of Donetsk and other cities of Donbass wake up to the sounds of volleys of heavy artillery. True, they begin to shoot a little later than before a truce, and not so intense.

In front of me at a table in the Kiev cafe, Tanya is sitting. She just arrived from Donetsk for several days, take a breath. Tanya is a native Donetsk. When the Maidan began, she helped organize a medical service at the Donetsk "pro -Ukrainian" rallies, and when the war began, she took up volunteer work: it delivers food to those who were left without money and shelter in bombed areas.

Tanya says that the other day the Deenarovites captured a girl who allegedly installed on the buildings of the beacons-markers for the Ukrainian military, so that they were directed to them “grades”.

“I immediately wrote to people from the ATO command: where to get your beacons, I will install it for free,” says Tanya. - And they answered me: there are no beacons. It is expensive for Ukraine ...

So what should we do now? Do you really have to establish life inside the DPR?

Since June, Tanya had been waiting for Donetsk to be “released”. Every day she walked around her area, watched how militants of the DPR behave, and reported everything to the ATO headquarters. From a public activist became a kind of partisan. When the armed resistance reached the apotheosis at the end of the summer, she was sure that the Ukrainian army was about to enter the city and the horror in which Donetsk lives. The “humanitarian convoy”, with which regular Russian troops entered the Donbass quietly, changed his plans abruptly. After the Minsk negotiations and the signing of the law on the special status of Donbass for all of Ukraine, peace came. But for the Donbass - no.

- So what should we do now? And what to do refugees who hoped to return home by autumn? - Tanya asks me. I just spread my hands. - Do you really have to establish life inside the DPR? ..

Adoed buses from Mariupol, Berdyansk, Dnepropetrovsk go to Donetsk and other cities of the eastern region: people who escaped from houses in the summer come back. Some of them could not find a job to feed their family, some are tired of living among the naked walls of summer camps, where they place refugees. Someone just bored around the house ... And winter ahead.

As soon as the first train came to Lugansk, he was met by the LPR militants and immediately arrested several “dangerous” ones.

In some cities, recently “repelled” by the Ukrainian army, the power of “Novorossiya” returned. Zhdanovka, a small city between Gorlovka and Enakiev, for the second time headed the leadership of the DPR. A black-blue-red flag was immediately hung over the city council building, and the woman who had previously fed the National Guard was arrested.

Trains began to go to Lugansk. This has not happened since June: the city was heavily bombed, and now there is little from it. As soon as the first train came to Lugansk, he was met by LPR militants and several people who were considered “dangerous” were arrested immediately.

- We saw the fighters of the National Guard serving in the ATO zone. They are already going crazy with the cold, they begin to drink a lot, ”says Donetsk volunteer Marina. “We are crazy too.” The shots do not stop, the guys from the DPR are beast ...

I ask Marina if she can get used to life under the rule of the DPR.

“We got used to this thought back in July,” she says, sighing tiredly. - We already realized that we were thrown, and we only hope for ourselves.

How many people do you think we will miss this winter?

Schools and kindergartens in Donetsk never opened. The university, where representatives of the DPR tried to shift the leadership, announced that he was not going to obey the “republic” and will be transferred to a safe city. Some educational institutions seem to accept documents from applicants, but the number of these applicants can be counted on the fingers. The hospitals work, but there are few doctors left, the ambulance does not have time for all challenges. The treasury of both areas is still blocked, state employees are forced to travel to neighboring regions. But people are already used to this. They are not used to the fact that the cold began, and the issue with heating has not yet been resolved.

“If now we are engaged in the purchase of drugs and food for the Donetsk residents, then soon we will have to do“ bourgeois ”and warm clothes,” says Marina. - Here we think, where will we get coal ... What do you think, how many people we will miss this winter?

The inhabitants of the Donbass were suddenly alone with this strange, otherworldly world with inverted values, where a careless step could lead to torture, where a mine can burst underfoot, where at any moment it may turn out that there is nothing to buy bread, where there is no culture, but there is only tense, pitch silence.

Donbass did not turn into a gray zone, no. Donbass became a black field on which nothing grows. It is impossible to engage in life on such a field, but you can only engage in war. And, despite this strange, conditional truce, which closed their eyes to Ukrainians and the whole world, the war in the other world continues.