[LINK] "In Ukraine crisis, the family feud that is divided Donetsk"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC's Nahlah Ayed writes from the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, interviewing one pro-Russian and one pro-Ukrainian about their views on national identity and their city's future.

When university student Alexander Gnezdelov joined the masked men taking over the state government building in Donetsk earlier this month, he believed it was for a good cause.

The building has since become a second home for Gnezdelov, and a last stand for dozens of others who dream of a self-determining Donetsk.

[. . .]

"We didn't have democracy here in Ukraine," he says. "The politics is just about some criminal oligarchs, fighting each other for power.

"We cannot tolerate Kiev anymore. We cannot tolerate all the corruption."

Gnezdelov, who says he is the only English speaker in the building, has become the de facto foreign press spokesman for the group.

He defies the menacing images of the pro-Russian masked men wielding guns or baseball bats who have come to represent his side of Donetsk's divide, and he makes the point that it is not imperative that Donetsk join Russia, as long as it becomes independent of Ukraine.

And:

Take Olesya Bobrus, a bright multilingual woman who has just returned to Donetsk from intensive language training in London to look for a job.

She is proudly Ukrainian (recently, she says, much more so) and literally wears it on her sleeve. Both she and her mother put on traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirts for church on Easter Sunday.

"Now I want to learn my history more," she says. "I want my children to speak Ukrainian.

"I don't want to live in another country," meaning Russia, she says. "I want to live in Ukraine, because I was born here."

And yet as a product of a region where most people speak Russian — and as the granddaughter of an ethnic Russian who is still very proud of his roots — Bobrus is keenly aware that she lives with the kind of nuances that the rest of the world often fails to understand.

"I speak Russian," she says. "A lot of people say 'I don't want my children to watch movies in Ukrainian language.' But in my opinion, we have to know our native language, but we also have a right to speak, think and write in Russian if we want."

Bobrus also believes that Vladimir Putin's Russia is trying to destabilize Ukraine, which is what has led to the family feud among the people of this region.

"Many of my friends think they want to be separate" from Ukraine, she explains. "We are trying just not to speak about it when we spend time together."