April 2022

Slaviansk – AFP

Some residents of the Ukrainian Donbass welcome the progress made by the Russian forces towards their region, whether out of identity identification or nostalgia for the Soviet era, or to put an end to the war as soon as possible, but they do not speak out.

Near Lysichank Market, Olina, who asked to be identified by that name for fear of being jailed for her statements, says: “We are Ukrainians administratively, but Donbass is not Ukraine. The Ukrainians are the foreigners, not the Russians.”

The Donbass region is located in eastern Ukraine and covers an area regarding twice the size of Belgium. The Russians confirm that they intend to “liberate” it from the yoke of the “neo-Nazis” who suffer from Russophobia and those who hold power in Kyiv.

This region is at the center of the bloody conflict that has been raging in the country since 2014, when pro-Russian separatists backed by the Kremlin took control of a part of this mineral-rich basin, where the majority of the population is Russian-speaking.

Until now, Kyiv retains control of the eastern part of this region. Its forces have been trying for two weeks to repel the Russian army, which is bombing the area in a concentrated way, and it has made field progress by controlling a number of towns in the area, but it has not established control over any of its major cities.

The residents, who have decided to remain in their lands since the start of the war on February 24, have a strong tendency for the Russians, reinforced by Russian assertions of a “genocide” being prepared in the Donbas for Russian-speaking people, which raises the concerns of the Ukrainian authorities.

“There are people here who are not bothered by the arrival of the Russians, and who are hoping for it,” said Vadim Lyak, the mayor of Slavyansk.

Slaviansk is a strategically important city in the Donbas region that was briefly captured by pro-Russian separatists in 2014.

The mayor explains, “It is not a good time to engage in an argument with these people, noting that they are retired and yearn for the Russian proposal.”

The area was transformed into a graveyard of shattered and abandoned industrial parks, and mining wells into small weekend fishing lakes.

Olina worked for 30 years in the Lyschansk Refinery, and is nostalgic for the period before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Donbass was rich in all the resources of “coal, coal, salt and chemical industries”.

“When the Ukrainians were demonstrating in Maidan Square, we were working,” she says, in a kind of criticism of the pro-EU Ukrainian movement that overthrew the regime in Kyiv in 2014.

She is convinced that the region’s economy will recover following Moscow extends its control over it.

“It will be like before the war, and they will probably restart the refinery I was working in,” she says, raising questions regarding her retirement and who will pay the end of service indemnity: Moscow or Kyiv?