The warm spring air enters eastern Ukraine. Roads are lined with red tulips and people are reopening their summer kitchens, small buildings outside traditional homes used to insulate the heat and smells of cooking during the hotter months.
It was in the summer kitchen with a wooden frame of his elderly mother Lyudmila, 69, that he talked to his brother Victor, 72, who was from Vitya in the eastern city of Lisichansk last week. Despite almost constant bombardment by Russian troops just a few kilometers away, they had remained in their family home since the invasion of Ukraine in late February.
“My brother and I talked,” said Ludmila, who asked CNN to use only her own name for privacy reasons. “Suddenly Cities began to fall one by one.” The windows were blown out of the frames. “Everything was cracking.”
She remembered the initial shock and confusion. “We are standing there – my brother was baptized and I am shouting. I turned away from him to look at the house, then another explosion erupted and I was trapped under the rubble.
Ludmila went blind for a moment. Blood was pouring from her face and from wounds on her arms and legs, but she was alive. She felt the touch of a neighbor who pulled her to safety in her basement. Her 96-year-old mother, unfortunately, remained unharmed.
“I ask, ‘How is my brother, how is Vitya?’ And the neighbor hides his eyes and says, ‘It’s all right.’
“I told him, ‘Vova, I don’t believe it. If he was okay, he would come and see us. “
“He says, ‘It’s all right, sit down, sit down,’ and he leaves. And his wife is sitting next to me and saying, “Crazy, he doesn’t know how to tell you.” Vitya is dead.
“That’s it. And my brother would have turned 73 on May 6. And that was all.
Death and loss are far from the only injuries in this Russian-speaking region. For many, the war overturned all other contact with Russia. According to a survey last year by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 43% of Ukrainians report having relatives in Russia.
Even in the Russian-speaking East, this camaraderie has waned since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for separatist movements. With this war, the history of pain has come to the fore: millions have died of starvation and forced Soviet collectivization, and attempts for decades to erase Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language.
It is difficult to contact anyone if they believe the propaganda of Russian President Vladimir Putin – that the military is conducting a small and targeted operation that avoids civilian casualties. It may be even harder to understand each other if you do not believe that your neighbors, brothers and friends have been killed.
Ludmila’s son, as well as her sister and her sister’s family, all live in Russia.
“My granddaughter got into a fight with my own sister’s granddaughter,” Ludmila explained. She said, “What are you making up?” You shoot yourself and lie “, adding that” many people “in Russia do not believe what is really happening in her country.
“This is Putin’s policy. Zombies,” Ludmila said.
Whether Russia can conquer the entire Donbass – the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk – is an unanswered question after the unconvincing performance of its military in the first months of the war.
Read the whole story here.
Add Comment