[LINK] "The Donbass War. Assessing the Aftermath"

[rfmcdonald]

Meduza features Pavel Kanygin's assessment of the catastrophic situation in the Donbas separatist republics in eastern Ukraine. I'm left wondering about the viability of these territories absent the sort of substantial external support that is just not going to come from anyone.

In terms of prosperity and the quality of life, prewar Donbass was essentially on par with Kiev – significantly surpassing other Ukrainian and most Russian regions. Donetsk had one of the three biggest airports in all of Ukraine. Skyscrapers of glass and concrete housed the offices of international companies working directly in the region (rather than remotely through offices in the capital). The city was home to many expats. Local trams and buses offered wireless Internet, even beating the Moscow Metro by a few years.

In 2012, the city hosted the European Championship for football. Looking at Donetsk today, it seems impossible to believe that this was all in the recent past.

In the span of a few summer months in 2014, the financial and industrial capital of eastern Ukraine was transformed into a ghost town. The empty central streets conveyed only military trucks and desperate taxi-drivers with reporters in tow. To the north, to the west, and even in the center of the city, shells exploded every day. Several neighborhoods were destroyed entirely – down to their very foundations. Throughout the province, dozens of towns and villages were burned, annihilated.

Many Donetsk residents – service companies, bureaucrats, foreigners, local hipsters, and intelligentsia – were already leaving by the summer of 2014. And yet the overall population of the provincial center dropped very little; people from the devastated surrounding areas were drawn into Donetsk. Now they make up the new face of the city.

The war has come and gone, leaving behind poverty and pain. The buses and trams have been stripped of their wifi routers. High-voltage cables smashed in the shelling have been sold for scrap. Half-empty shelves in the stores have become customary. The city’s Petrovsky district still has many living in the bomb shelter of the local mine, fearing renewed artillery strikes. The nearby municipal psychiatric hospital has become home to fighters for the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Already last winter, I joined volunteers taking food and medicine to the neighborhood, where typhoid plagued people crowded in basements. What goes on now in Petrovsky and other areas around Donetsk is virtually unknown. This fall, DPR authorities banned volunteers from bringing in medicine and equated NGO activity with espionage.