Next day I come back to pick up my press accreditation. I get it right away. It is pretty and laminated. In May it would have been printed on a piece of paper.
“Oh, this looks so much better than the previous one,” I say to Klavdia.
“Well, we’re developing.”
8. WAR COMES TO DONETSK
MARINKA WAS SHELLED on July 11. Next day I go there by car with two Western journalists and a fixer from Donetsk who works for them as an interpreter and assistant. There is hardly a single living soul. You can see that out of ten thousand residents of the city not even one in twenty is left. No one has been shooting since yesterday yet the streets are deserted. Driving through the entire city we can count the pedestrians on the fingers of both hands. More often but still rarely you can spot a car packed to the roof. People try to take as much as they can because when they come back to their apartments, the apartments may no longer be there or they will have been plundered.
We stop at a building hit by a projectile. The apartments on the ground and first floors are missing their walls. They have turned into ruins. A garage a few meters away is full of shrapnel. A retired man, Garik, is standing in front of the building. He claims to be the last resident of Marinka. He keeps watch and protects the building from thieves. First and foremost, however, he emphasizes that this is “his land” and he is not going to abandon it. He lives in the building. Why was Marinka shelled? Garik thinks that for Kiev its residents are expendable because they champion the Donetsk People’s Republic.
“During the May referendum we all voted for it,” he admits.
A dozen meters away from where we left Garik we meet a patrol of “volunteers.” One of them signals with a hand gesture that we should approach them. We walk slowly because we don’t know what to expect.
“Journalists? You think we are the ones who are shooting?” asks one of them. He shows us shells stuck in the ground. He hands me a few pieces of metal and says: “It is a Grad. Take it as a souvenir.”
The Grad is a rocket launcher placed on a truck. Developed in the 1960s it can launch forty rockets simultaneously. They hit one by one, every fraction of a second, and when you listen to them falling you may have the impression that it is hailing.
We approach another projectile and suddenly we hear an explosion. The shelling has begun again. The rockets hit the ground a few kilometers from where we are standing. We follow the “volunteers” to one of the basements. It’s very low so we crouch until the shooting ends. After a dozen minutes we run to the car and drive away. Several meters further on the car breaks down. We can’t move and in the distance we hear more explosions. The fixer starts poking around under the hood. We are having bad luck as in a second-rate comedy. In the end the engine starts up and off we go. We return to Donetsk.
Today the rockets didn’t fall on Marinka but on Petrovska, the most western suburb of Donetsk.
In the evenings the Donetsk People’s Republic organizes a cultural program for its residents. Perhaps it is an attempt to relax a very tense atmosphere. For tonight they’ve announced waltzes. The event has started late. A few dozen people have shown up. “We are sorry that some people can’t come because they are fighting,” explains Klavdia, Press Bureau Secretary of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The dancing lasts two, three hours. After that they have organized, among other things, a concert of several unknown bands that play uplifting music but the turnout is a disaster. Eventually, the cultural program is abandoned.
Next day I decided to visit Marinka again. “It’s quiet. Today no one is shooting,” a woman in uniform tells us when we enter the city. She is the first uniformed female militant I have ever seen. She’s dressed like anybody else. She has sunglasses and a rifle. She claims that she must be very famous because everyone passing by takes her picture. You don’t see armed female militants very often. The Ukrainian side is no different. Women usually stay in the bases, work in the kitchens, supervise gifts from the residents, provide medical services, and so on.
I ask the taxi driver if he would mind going to the area that was bombed a day earlier. He says “no” and once again I end up in the shelled housing project. Today I can spend more time here and I hope that new shooting will not ruin my plans. Some local people, collaborating with the separatists, want to show us the destruction. I can finally take a look at the building in which I was hiding a day ago. It’s damaged, too. It must have been hit two days ago. There are holes in the walls, demolished and incinerated rooms, and shattered windows. You can see burned cars in the garages.
The Statistical Office of the Marinka Region took an almost perfect hit. In one of the central rooms you can see a shell casing. The wall panels are ripped off. By the window there is something wrapped in a lace curtain.
“He must have come to the window when the shelling started. Maybe he wanted to see what was going on,” says one of the guides and points his finger at the curtain. He grabs a stick and lifts the curtain part way off the cadaver. I see a stiff hand. There are no traces of the head. “We don’t know what to do with him, so we didn’t take him out,” explains one of the locals.
We leave the Statistical Office and after a moment we hear explosions again. We separate and run in different directions. Two journalists and I rush into a basement. There we meet two elderly men who apparently have stayed in their apartments. They don’t look agitated. They have a bottle of vodka with them. When the shelling stops I tell them they can go out.
“We’re staying. We prefer to drink here,” replies one of them. It turned out they were right. After a few minutes the firing started again. First, we hear the explosions in the distance, but after a while much closer. They sound different. It sounds to us like tank fire. Later on, the separatists would claim that they also saw the tanks.
We were in the middle of the housing project. We were to head for the separatists’ checkpoint where we had met the female militant. There is a shelter there and in it are my cab driver and my photographer. I run as fast as I can. Although my bulletproof vest is quite light, running is not easy. We keep close to the walls and trees as much as possible, so we can hide from the shells if we have to. The fire comes from the south so we cling to the walls facing north.
Suddenly I notice a man sitting on a bench. He may be over forty. He is slouching with his legs crossed. He appears to be relaxing. We stop and I look at him, perplexed.
“Sir? Why aren’t you running away or hiding?”
“I was baptized,” he responds, looking at me almost contemptuously.
I would like to talk to him more but thanks to the sounds of the consecutive exploding shells I change my mind.
We run onto the main road and here the problems begin. There is no place to hide and we have two kilometers more ahead of us. We take a break at a small shop. Then we move on. We try to walk under the trees to be less visible.
We reach the separatists’ checkpoint. They take us to the bomb shelter. You can’t see it from the road and you have to walk between some hangars. The bunker was built in Soviet times. This space, with at least four compartments, covers dozens of square meters. The separatists turned two compartments into bedrooms with cots and mattresses on the floor. Another compartment is a pantry with a fridge and the largest serves as a dining room. You can see a long table with two benches. Everywhere there are vests, a few weapons, and cardboard boxes, most likely with food in them. There is no electricity, but they have a battery-operated lamp. The light is dim but at least you can see what’s on the table: canned food, bread, cookies, water, tea, and so on. As they say, the table is ruled by communism—you can take what you want. And they invite us to dine.